42nd Street (Film)

Plaza Theatre, 128 S Palm Canyon Dr, Palm Springs. June 21st. 42nd Street — the 1933 Warner Bros. film that is simultaneously a Depression-era backstage musical and the movie that defined what the film-musical could be — projected at the Plaza Theatre in Palm Springs, which is the venue built for this exact kind of presentation.

42nd Street is the film that coined the phrase "you're going out a youngster, but you've got to come back a star," delivered it like it was written to be delivered by Dick Powell's face at Warner Bros. in 1933, and launched Ruby Keeler's film career simultaneously. The Busby Berkeley choreography is the other thing — the overhead shots, the geometry, the scale of the numbers that no theater stage could produce. On screen, at full size, in a room with real acoustics, this is the film that created the vocabulary.

Tickets at ticketmaster.com. June 21st. The Plaza Theatre is a 1936 Spanish Colonial Revival movie house that has been showing films to Palm Springs audiences for ninety years. Seeing a film from 1933 in a theater from 1936 is the version of cinema history that Palm Springs makes available. Come for the songs. Stay for the Keeler.