A little more than halfway through the classic Hollywood musical 42nd Street (1933), Mohandas K. Gandhi makes a quick cameo appearance. That is, I think it’s Gandhi, or rather an actor playing him. 
I don’t know who else a middle-aged white man, made swarthy by make-up, wearing big round eyeglasses on his nose and only a wee loincloth on his person, could be trying to portray. The Gandhi figure springs up—suddenly, incongruously, inexplicably—at the tail end of a song-and-dance number in which stage star Dorothy Brook (Bebe Daniels) vamps a quartet of college boys, goading them on and then batting them away, all to the tune of “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me.” The Gandhi fellow passes across the screen for probably less than a minute, but that’s long enough for the wily coot to steal the girl from four strapping, bright-eyed lads. “You’re getting to be a habit with me,” he croons to Dorothy in a comical, quasi-British voice as the two of them, arm in arm, exit stage-right.
Maybe, I fancied for a short while, this bit of business exists in the film to make an oblique pun on the word “habit”—that being another term for garment, as with a “nun’s habit.” The old Mahatma ambles forth in his meager dhoti, an iconic habit if ever there was one, and it strikes a jarring contrast to the star’s lavish gown and especially to ensemble worn by her suitors: Each boy sports a shirt with big collar points that spread out over a tight sweater, which he has tucked into a pair of baggy, bellowing trousers that rise well above his navel. It’s what the well-dressed freshman was wearing in 1933, and yet our heroine chooses the underdressed man instead. Funny stuff! But no, that theory is too clever by half. The appearance of the little brown freedom fighter at that moment of that scene, in a movie otherwise devoted to the romance and frivolity of old Broadway, is just as weirdly random as it seems.
I treasure such oddities. They are the stray shards left by another civilization, lying in wait for a cultural archeologist to brush the dust off of them and to reveal their secrets.
My wife and I watched 42nd Street a few nights ago. I’d placed the film on our Netflix queue because my wife recently saw a production of the 1980 theatrical version of the story (which, like Mel Brooks’s The Producers, inverted the usual process of traveling from stage to screen) and because I remember being charmed by the original Busby Berkeley extravaganza when I saw it at a revival-house showing back in my college years. Seeing it again, I registered some disappointment. Ruby Keeler as Peggy, the archetypal ingénue who gets a break and becomes a star, certainly shines—all too briefly—and the “42nd Street” showstopper retains its hummable, haunting lilt and its cynical bite. (“Come and meet those dancing feet … Where the underworld can meet the elite … Naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty, Forty-Second Street!” Never did Broadway more purely distill the roguish myth that it has long crafted for itself.) But the musical numbers are too few in number, and most of them come in a poorly paced rush at the end of the movie, which concerns itself far too much with an incoherent backstage melodrama that revolves around Dorothy, her goggle-eyed sugar-daddy, and her mealy-mouthed boyfriend. Dorothy’s blink-and-you-miss-it turn with Gandhi, however, sticks in my mind as a peculiar grace note.
What is he doing there? I don’t have time to play cultural archeologist (and in any case I’m a little out of practice with my brushwork), but I’ll dash off a couple of thoughts.
First, at a fairly mundane level, this glimpse of Gandhi reflects the cultural function that Broadway musicals served back in their early heyday—a function different from the one that they serve now. “Pretty Lady,” the play-within-a-movie wherein Gandhi makes his appearance, has the look of a topical variety show, a common format in the first third of the 20th century. In an age before television, audiences went to the theater to see comedy and musical comment inspired by the figures who graced yesterday’s newspaper or last week’s newsreel. Musicals, in many cases, were closer in spirit and purpose to Saturday Night Live or The Daily Show than to Cats, Les Misérables, and other bloated soap operas that set up long-term housekeeping on 42nd Street in our own day. And Gandhi, at least since his amply filmed trip to London in 1931, had become a fixture in Western popular imagery, right up there with Charles Lindbergh, Thomas Edison, and Mickey Mouse.
Second, Gandhi loomed as a provocation to the Western popular mind, and particularly to the segment of it that Broadway aimed to colonize. Broadway served as a vanguard force in the routing of a Victorian-era “producer” culture, with its emphasis on self-restraint and puritan morality, by a modern “consumer” culture that embraced fun, parties, dancing, singing, women smoking cigarettes, men driving fast cars, personal satisfaction, more singing and dancing, and “following your dream.” Musicals were pageants of desire—gorgeous displays of wine (well, of spirit, anyway), women, and song. Counterpose all of that to the literally threadbare quality of Gandhi, to his rejection of European “progress” in favor of Indian asceticism, to his campaign to hunger-strike the mighty British Lion into submission. (Gandhi was the ultimate passive-aggressive genius; he shrank from violence but not from power.) Not the sort of thing that “Sexy ladies from the Eighties/Who are indiscreet” would want to make a habit of. Better to make a joke of it.
The joking, it seems, was contagious. An actual Broadway show from 1933, As Thousands Cheer (play by Moss Hart, music and lyrics by Irving Berlin), included a number called “Gandhi Goes on a Hunger Strike.” Again, topical humor—although I guess you really had to be there. A whole book could be written about how American culture “received” and represented Gandhi over the years, from the nervous jesting of the 1930s to his adoption by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s to the rendition of him as a homespun imp of goodwill in the 1982 biopic that won an Oscar and also a wide, welcoming audience.
The book (which may already exist, for all I know) would of course focus centrally on the matter of race. Aside from a big black maid who hovers more or less helpfully around the Dorothy Brook character, and assorted minstrel figures in the “42nd Street” spectacular, Gandhi possesses the only supposedly nonwhite face in 42nd Street. He also possesses a strange force of attraction—witness his very presence in the movie; witness his triumph in romantic combat. This wasn’t an attraction that white audiences of the 1930s could admit to, so the filmmakers were keen to assure everyone that this “Gandhi” was white underneath and that he was a figure of comedy. That way, and only that way, audiences could begin to absorb this perversely compelling brown man into their consciousness.
