"A million lights they flicker there,

"A million hearts beat quicker there,"

-- and they call it Two-Time Square, "the double cross roads of the world." Here is the locale, motif, and gospel of "42nd Street," intense, jazz-maddened moving picture of backstage life, now at the Metropolitan Theatre. The show is another "Broadway Melody" without as many song hits, perhaps, but certainly with better acting, ballet, and fiercer tempo.

A strange fact is that Hollywood producers have never seemed to understand why a hit was a hit. After the enormous reception accorded "Broadway Melody" producers shrewdly decided to reduce their allotments to song writers and corner the market in tap dancers and kick-in-the-pants comedians. The resultant decline in business almost sufficed to wreck America's greatest infant industry. Counter to this, however, "42nd Street" has at least one good song and a brilliant orchestra to play it.

The plot is simply the story of the production of a musical comedy. Warner Baxter plays the imperious theatrical producer with a fiery zest which again prompts the Playgoer to express the hope that some day, somehow, by accident perhaps, Warner Brothers will give him a real part. Ruby Keeler is the "green kid out of the chorus" who is selected to play the lead when the star breaks her ankle the night before opening. Bobe Daniels was the star and quite a satisfactory one, too, right up to the last. At this point, ha, ha, that is, were you ever told 1. That the show must go on 2. Laugh, you clown, though your heart is breaking 3. I guess you got me, kid, but good luck and God bless you (coughs gently, dies)? It just seems that no motion picture director can ever pass by a chance to introduce one of these three themes. Bobe and Ruby have a little scene that sort of embodies all three. A really good censor would have cut it out and left in a few more of Una Merkel's giggle wise-cracks. (Yes, I understand; if he were that good he wouldn't be a censor).

Having listened all week to lectures on Money and Banking by Professor J. H. Williams (himself one of the leading Thespians of the Economics Department) it was a bit of a surprise to see some two hundred cash customers waiting for seats in the Metropolitan lobby. Let us grant the truth of the lyric that "without a song a man's no good nohow" and say that those people were waiting to hear a song, "42nd Street." They had heard it, perhaps, as the Playgoer did, over the radio the night before. Even in the stage show, the best sequence was some hotcha dance routine by three white-draped cuties impelled by the tune "That Sentimental Gen'lman From Georgia" . . . and you can keep right on playing it, right on playing boy.

The last scene is on the square referred to in the first paragraph. Girls are dancing, beauticians patting cheeks, and scorned lovers are shooting to kill on "naughty, haughty, bawdy, gaudy, forty second street." Whoopee!