by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched Doll Face, the next-to-last of the five films in 20th
Century-Fox’s boxed set of Carmen Miranda, which begins with her greatest film
— The Gang’s All Here, featuring
the marriage made in movie heaven of Miranda’s larger-than-life talents and
Busby Berkeley’s demented imagination) and has worked its way downhill from
there with Greenwich Village (a
nice musical that could have been better if the two satirical sketches the
Revuers, authentic Village stars that included Judy Holliday, Betty Comden and
Adolph Green, had been included in the final cut) and Something for
the Boys (an O.K. musical based on a Cole
Porter stage hit — though with all but one of Porter’s songs replaced with new
ones by Jimmy McHugh) and this one, which reunited Something for the
Boys director Lewis Seiler with three of
his cast members from that film: Miranda, Vivian Blaine and Perry Como. But Doll
Face was relegated to the slate of “B”
movie producer Bryan Foy (one of the Seven Little You-Know-Whats), who like
Seiler was a refugee from Warner Bros., and — worst of all — the budget was
shrunk so much the movie was in black-and-white. What’s more, by the time Doll
Face was made Fox had lost so much faith in
Miranda’s appeal — they basically treated her as a novelty act that had been
left on the shelves past its sell-by date — they billed her fourth, after Blaine, Dennis O’Keefe and Como.
The most
interesting name on the credits of Doll Face is the writer of the original play on which it was
based, Louise Hovick. Never heard of her? That’s only because she became
considerably better known as Gypsy Rose Lee, and like Maybeth “Doll Face”
Carroll, the character Vivian Blaine plays here, she was a stripper with
intellectual pretensions. Among those was a belief that she could be a writer,
an ambition she fulfilled with a novel called The G-String Murders (filmed in 1943 as Lady of Burlesque with Barbara Stanwyck and Michael O’Shea; the movie
isn’t much but Stanwyck is at her hard-bitten best and it’s probably the best
movie ever made about burlesque during the Production Code era) and a play
called The Naked Genius, on which
Doll Face was based and from
which it was adapted by Harold Buchman and Leonard Praskins. The film opens in
a theatre where legendary Broadway producer Flo Hartman (Reed Hadley) — and no,
you don’t need two guesses to figure out what real Boy Named Flo who produced famous Broadway shows
he’s based on — auditioning various performers for his latest production and
insisting that anyone who appears in a Flo Hartman show must have “class.”
After he rejects a two-man dance duo (who looked pretty good to me!) he hears
Maybeth Carroll sing, is suitably impressed and is about to hire her when, in
the middle of her song, one of his assistants recognizes her as the notorious
“Doll Face” Carroll who’s currently appearing at the Gayety burlesque theatre
run by her manager and boyfriend, Michael Hannigan (Dennis O’Keefe in a part
that would have worked better for William Bendix, who had the analogous role in
Greenwich Village). Hartman tells
Hannigan, who brought Carroll to her audition and gave her a light kick in the
ass before she started singing (a good-luck superstition between them), that he
won’t hire a performer with so little class. While he’s shopping at a cigar
counter, Hannigan notices that the clerk is giving away copies of a book called
The Stars Reveal by author
Frederick Manly Gerard (billed here as Michael Dunne but later known as Stephen
Dunne). Judging from the cover design it looks like a science-fiction book, but
the bits of its prose we hear make it seem like a self-consciously “intellectual”
novel about ordinary people in grim situations.
Hannigan hits on the idea of
having “Doll Face” write an autobiography, Genius de Milo, and having Gerard ghost it for her — and he
converts her proletarian background as a plumber’s daughter in Brooklyn to an
upper-class heiress who got bored with life among the 1 percent and thereby
chose a sleazy theatrical career. That could have made an interesting movie — sort of like the Jessie
Matthews vehicle It’s Love Again,
where she was an aspiring entertainer being passed off as an heiress (this was
during the time when Matthews was making a specialty of movies in which she had
to pull off a difficult impersonation to achieve stardom — in Evergreen she had to pretend to be her own mother and in First
a Girl, the second of the three versions of
Victor/Victoria, she had to
pretend to be a man) — but instead Gypsy Rose Lee and her adapters pursued a
more normal romantic triangle as Doll Face starts falling for the writer, and
he with her, while her understudy Frankie Porter (Martha Stewart — decidedly not the same one!) pursues her previously unrequited
interest in Harrigan and the ludicrously named crooner with the burlesque show,
Nicky Ricci (Perry Como) — c’mon, guys, couldn’t you have come up with a more
credible name for an Italian than that? — pursues Frankie without success until Harrigan tells him that the
way to win a woman’s heart is to beat her up, or at least threaten to. It’s a
piece of advice that seems to have been taken to heart by at least one current
(or recent) football star, but elsewhere in the modern world is considered
nastily and vilely sexist. In this movie, however, it works, and Como — who
acts with about the same (lack of) emotion as he sang (though he’s helped that
with the exception of a swing novelty called “Hubba-Hubba-Hubba, Dig You
Later,” on which the other Martha Stewart totally outsings him, the songs — by
Jimmy McHugh again — achieve a level of professional blandness that quite
matches Como’s singing of them) — has that sort of deer-in-the-headlights look
we got used to during the George W. Bush presidency when he realizes that by
threatening physical violence on Frankie he has in fact won her heart. The
movie ends with a big show that Flo Hartman (ya remember Flo Hartman?) is producing with the cast of Hannigan’s burlesque
show, based on Doll Face Carroll’s best-selling book — only Hannigan, furious
at having apparently lost the battle for Doll Face’s affections to her
amanuensis, gets an injunction forbidding her from performing in it. Eventually
he relents and lets her go on, and she relents and ends up back in Hannigan’s arms at the fade-out.
As for
Carmen Miranda, not only is she billed fourth, she’s saddled with the character
name “Chita Chula” (apparently the writers weren’t any better at coming up with
names for Latinas than they were for Italians) and she doesn’t get to sing
until the very last reel, when she suddenly turns up in a low-rent version of
one of her famous numbers called “Chico Chico (From Puerto Rico)” that looks
like a scene from a color film watched on a black-and-white TV. Charles noted
that in the decade since the great 1930’s musicals from Warner Bros., MGM and
RKO Hollywood filmmakers seem to have forgotten the art of making a visually
stunning and beautiful musical in black-and-white — there’s nothing here like
the dramatic high-contrast photography (usually by Sol Polito) of the Busby
Berkeley numbers at Warners or the glowing, burnished look of the
Astaire-Rogers films from RKO — but despite the presence of an excellent
cinematographer (Joseph LaShelle) the overall approach to this one seems to
have been more to get rid of a few contractual obligations as quickly and
cheaply as possible. One wishes that, even if they weren’t going to pay for color
for the entire film, they’d at least used it for Carmen Miranda’s number! It
turns out that Miranda filmed another song for the movie, a 1930 work by
comedienne Elsie Janis and Jack King called “True to the Navy,” but it had been
written for Clara Bow to sing in the revue musical Paramount on
Parade and Paramount, which still owned the
publishing rights, forbade Fox from using it in Doll Face. Indeed, I suspect that the ukase from Paramount’s legal department may have come down
before the number was actually finished, because the number as it stands — the
outtake is included as a bonus item on the DVD — is merely a master shot,
without close-ups. Doll Face is
an O.K. movie, nothing special — and, like Something for the Boys, disappointing in the gap between what it could have
been and what it is; certainly the plot (which in some ways anticipates Garson
Kanin’s play Born Yesterday,
premiered on stage in 1946 and filmed in 1950 with its original Broadway star,
Judy Holliday) had far more interesting comedic possibilities than Gypsy Rose
Lee and her adapters gave it!
