by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I
ran Charles and I another double-bill from archive.org which attempts to
reproduce what you might have seen at a cheap movie house in the mid-1940’s, including an
excellent Warner Bros. cartoon called Claws for Alarm, in which the odd (to say the least!) couple
of Porky Pig and Sylvester the Cat hole up in a haunted hotel called the Dry
Gulch Inn and are menaced by a giant spider, phantom cats and such an overall
air of silhouetted stylization we almost expect it to be called The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari: The Cartoon Version. It also included a reasonably amusing Robert Benchley short called How
to Be a Detective (the funniest
gag was when Benchley instructs a police sketch artist to do a drawing showing
a combination of facial features that supposedly mark someone as a criminal —
and of course the resulting sketch looks like Benchley); it wasn’t as good as Home
Movies, the Benchley
short on the previous episode, but it was still fun. The “features” were the
1943 film Lady of Burlesque, produced by Hunt Stromberg after he left MGM and became an independent
producer releasing through United Artists; and Mr. Wong in Chinatown, third in a series of six second-iteration
Monogram “B” films featuring a Chinese super-detective obviously inspired (to
put it politely) by Charlie Chan and played by Boris Karloff, who like Chan
series star Warner Oland had played Dr. Fu Manchu (making Charlie Chan at
the Opera, in which
Oland starred as Chan and Karloff had a featured role as a red-herring suspect,
a “doubles” movie).
Lady of Burlesque has long been a quirky favorite of mine — it’s not a great film but it
has the greatest actress of all time, Barbara Stanwyck (that’s my opinion,
based both on her intense emotionalism and her incredible range as a performer,
encompassing melodrama, soap opera, romantic comedy, screwball comedy, musicals
and film noir — no other
actress of the classic era played so many different types of parts and only
one, Meryl Streep, has since), starring in an oddball script by James Gunn based
on a novel by Gypsy Rose Lee called The G-String Murders — which would have been a better title for
the film given that G-strings are actually the murder weapon the killer uses to
strangle two of the strippers who perform at the Opera House, which at the turn
of the previous century used to be just that. Only the neighborhood
deteriorated and so did the theatre’s offerings, until in the film’s 1943
presence it was a burlesque house operated by producer S. B. Foss (J. Edward
Bromberg), who comes off as considerably nicer and more fatherly than most
burlesque producers, either in other movies or in real life. Naturally Gunn and
director William A. Wellman had a big problem getting a movie about burlesque,
in which the lead character is a stripper (in the book the lead was actually called Gypsy Rose Lee, but for the film she became
“Dixie Daisy,” t/n Deborah Hoople, and is played by Stanwyck in her best
hard-bitten manner.
She gets to sing a song called “Take It Off the E-String
(And Play It on the G-String),” and the voice — Stanwyck’s own (she’d
previously sung in the 1932 film The Purchase Price and the 1941 comedy Ball of Fire, in which she’d done the swing hit “Drum
Boogie” with Gene Krupa and his band — and done it at least as well as Irene
Daye, Krupa’s singer when he made the original record two years earlier) — is a
bit nasal and a bit flat, but works superbly as belonging to the kind of person
we’re told she’s playing. The part doesn’t offer her that much depth — she’s basically shown in the
first half of the movie doing her act and fending off the romantic advances of
the show’s leading comic, Biff Brannigan (Michael O’Shea, who also played Jack
London in Stromberg’s biopic of the author), while in the second act, after the
murders start happening, she’s the implacable voice of vengeance, determined
not only to find out who the killer is but nail him herself. Naturally she’s
getting no support from the official police, represented by Inspector Harrigan
(Charles Dingle), the sort of movie law-enforcement person whose whole approach
is to browbeat all the potential suspects until one of them gives up and
confesses.
Though it’s not one of Stanwyck’s great movies — it’s not Ladies
of Leisure, Ladies They Talk About, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Ball of Fire,
The Lady Eve, Double Indemnity or The Strange Love of Martha Ivers — it’s solidly entertaining and director
Wellman gets the seedy atmosphere of the theatre just right. (It’s possible the
graininess of the prints of this public-domain film adds to the overall
tackiness of the surroundings.) Where the film falls short of what it could
have been is that there isn’t much depth to the characterizations, and Michael
O’Shea is so insufferable we have a hard time reading Stanwyck finally yielding
to his advances as a happy ending. According to imdb.com, Gypsy Rose Lee based
the character on her friend, comedian “Rags” Ragland — and judging from what
I’ve seen from Ragland’s MGM films (he was well on his way to a major career as
a character comedian in supporting roles when he died suddenly in 1945,
breaking the heart of his former vaudeville partner Red Skelton) Lady of
Burlesque would have
been a better film if they could have borrowed Ragland from MGM to play the
role. For all his zaniness, Ragland also had a streak of pathos which this part
could have used; O’Shea, one of those odd actors who tried to fill James
Cagney’s shoes and failed miserably (when I watched him as Jack London I was
wishing Hunt Stromberg’s budget could have stretched for Cagney in the role!),
is just offensive. There are some interesting supporting characters, including
Princess Nirvena (Stephanie Batchelor), a burlesque performer who poses as a
Continental royal and blackmails Foss into giving her a job because years
before they had an affair; she’s the second victim, after Lolita LaVerne
(Victoria Faust).
It’s not a particularly impressive mystery because there
aren’t that many suspects — Lolita’s estranged husband, a gangster who
roughs up one of the girls while a performance is going on (and Brannigan and
his comic partners have to speak their lines louder to try to drown out the
violence!), and the quirky character who turns out to be the killer [spoiler
alert!]: “Stacchi”
Stacciaro (Frank Conroy), the theatre’s prop man, who worked there when it
still presented grand opera, was himself a star baritone who lost his voice,
had been married to one of the other singers (Brannigan finds the key clue in
an old Police Gazette that has a photo of her in what passed for undress in the 1890’s) and
was determined to close down the burlesque house when he discovered that his
granddaughter was working as one of the strippers. First he arranged for a
police raid — and incidentally cut the cord to the special phone line Foss had
installed so the people he’d bribed at the police department could warn him in
advance when their fellow officers were about to stage a raid — and then he
starts knocking off the strippers. He thinks he’s accomplished his aim when
Foss decides that protecting the lives of his performers is more important than
trying to stay open, but Dixie — in the sort of intense emotional moment that
Stanwyck played so superlatively well but of which she gets only one in this
film — pleads with him and her fellow strippers to keep it open, reasoning that
if they shut down the theatre because of the murders, the killer will win. Of
course, it’s also part of her plot to trap the killer into attacking her and
thereby revealing himself.
Lady of Burlesque isn’t a great movie but it is solidly entertaining (despite Michael
O’Shea’s insufferability as the leading man), and Stanwyck is oddly moving
during her big speech in which, as part of her plea to keep the theatre open,
she tells her fellow strippers that she came to New York hoping to land a job in
a Broadway show and leave burlesque behind her, but now she’s not so sure
because she feels a sense of community with her fellow performers. One imdb.com
reviewer pleaded with Hollywood not to do a remake of Lady of Burlesque — he was already incensed enough by the
remake of Stanwyck’s Christmas in Connecticut with Dyan Cannon (fourth of Cary Grant’s
five wives) starring and Arnold Schwarzenegger directing — but a modern-dress
version might not actually be a bad idea, especially given that what pass for “strip
clubs” nowadays are considerably sleazier than the rather decorous Production
Code version of classic burlesque we get here!
