The Powers Girl (Charles R. Rogers Productions, United Artists, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I showed Charles a complete movie on YouTube last night: The Powers Girl, a 1943 United Artists release from Charles R. Rogers Productions. Rogers was the man J. Cheever Cowdin’s hedge fund had put in charge of Universal after they acquired the studio from the Laemmles, and as soon as he took over he announced that Universal would stop making horror films and concentrate on screwball comedies and musicals. Rogers’ formula gave the studio Deanna Durbin, one of the biggest stars of the late 1930’s who’s virtually forgotten today because she kept her sanity, retired early and didn’t have the public meltdowns and crises of her good friend Judy Garland (she and Shirley Temple are my two main exhibits for my contention that the only way a child star can have a sane adulthood is to get out of the business not long after puberty), but virtually all his other films in those genre were flops. Rogers got an independent production deal at United Artists after he was fired from Universal, and he tried to reproduce the Durbin formula with a young singer named Jane Powell (who became a star, but only after she escaped Rogers’ clutches and signed with MGM, where Durbin’s former producer Joe Pasternack guided her career).

The Powers Girl was based on the life and career of John Robert Powers, one of the first super-agents who specialized in representing models, and its ostensible source was a memoir Powers wrote called Hello, Beautiful. Alas, Rogers put four writers on the project – Malvin Wald and William A. Pierce are credited with “adaptation” and Eddie Moran and Harry Segall with the actual screenplay – and this comes off as a movie that attempted to prove my general field theory of cinema that the quality of a film is inversely proportional to its number of writers. The writing committee on The Powers Girl came up with an unpleasant tale of two sisters, Ellen (Anne Shirley) and Kay (Carole Landis) Evans. Kay is a small-town girl who works as the choir director for a midwestern high school in a community that’s hosting a state fair that opens the film and is its most spectacular segment. A poster for the fair announces an appearance by Benny Goodman “rain or shine,” and just as the Goodman band starts to play (a snippet of his theme song, “Let’s Dance,” and a killer version of Mary Lou Williams’ “Roll ’Em”) the skies open in a spectacular downpour. Goodman and his musicians are protected by being under a band shell, but the audience isn’t – and a lot of frantic jitterbuggers on the improvised dance floor try to hold their footing. Kay Evans loses hers and does a spectacular slide off the floor, and she’s witnessed by Jerry Hendricks (George Murphy, top-billed), photographer for Today & Tomorrow magazine, who asks her to do the slide again so he can shoot it.

He does, the picture ends up on the cover of Today & Tomorrow, and Kay is fired from her teaching gig by a typically old and clueless school board. Kay makes her way to New York City, where her hard-edged sister Ellen tells her that since Hendricks never got Kay to sign a release allowing her photo to be used, they can sue the magazine. Only Ellen is talked out of it when Hendricks, posing as a vice-president of the magazine. Promises her an introduction to John Robert Powers if Ellen can get Kay to sign the release. Of course Hendricks doesn’t know Powers any more than he’s a vice-president, but through sheer persistence and obnixousness he manages to bluff his way into seeing the Great Man. Actually Hendricks wants Powers to tell Ellen that she doesn’t have a chance of becoming a Powers model so she’ll marry him and give up her career, but Powers decides that he’s taken with her after all and puts her through the various courses of the John Robert Powers School. Meanwhile Jerry starts dating Kay, and the writers carefully build up the suspense as to which of the two sisters are going to get stuck with this horrible creep at the end. As if that weren’t enough, Jerry has also peiitioned the U.S. Army Signal Corps to be enlisted as a war photographer to go on bombing raids and take pictures of the crews in combat, which had me hoping that he’d go so he’d get killed by enemy fire. “Right now I’m rooting for the Axis,” my husband Charles seconded. In the end Jerry gets his commission and also gets Kay, while Ellen’s fate remains unclear: she’s introduced as 1943’s number one Powers girl and offered a job with a cosmetics company, only the CEO is a lecherous old fool whose interest in Ellen is in a considerably lower part of her anatomy than her face. The writers seem undecided whether she’s going to end up as a Powers model or move to the country home of Jerry’s parents (Harry Shannon and Helen MacKellar) to look after them while Jerry is away. Frankly, I was hoping for a scene in which Ellen would accept the cosmetics-model job, the lecherous CEO would make a pass at her, and she would virtuously turn him down for both modeling and hanky-panky, but if you think writers working for Charles R. Rogers would be allowed to give a female character that much agency and independence, think again.

When I looked up The Powers Girl on imdb.com the review that came up, signed “kidboots,” said that Benny Goodman was the only reason to watch this film – which is pretty much troe: besides that spectacular opening sequence we get to see him rehearse a small band in the song “I Know That You Know,” and towards the end he’s on a bandstand playing “One O’Clock Jump” and a song called “The Lady Who Didn’t Believe in Love,” The last was a real surprise because the singer is Peggy Lee, who was Benny Goodman’s band vocalist at the time, and though she’s not credited she’s clearly recognizable, both physically and vocally. I had always though the only film of Lee singing with Goodman during her tenure as his band singer was “Why Don’t You Do Right?” from the film Stage Door Canteen, and I was really startled to see another one even though it’s hardly as good a song as the Joe McCoy blues classic. There are also a couple of numbers from Dennis Day, a regular on Jack Benny’s radio program (which is mentioned in his credit) and the man who probably did more than anyone else to kill off the Irish tenor as a vocal type, as well as a big dance number featuring the Powers Girl finalists alternating with a troupe of chorus boys who came in from heaven knows where. This is accompanied by a big sweet band featuring an extended solo by a clarinetist who clearly is not Benny Goodman. Frankly, I was hoping for a scene in which Ellen would accept the cosmetics-model job, the lecherous CEO would make a pass at her, and she would virtuously turn him down for both modeling and hanky-panky, but if you think writers working for Charles R. Rogers would be allowed to give a female character that much agency and independence, think again.

Charles said he thought the film would have been better if it had been more of a full-fledged musical; certainly 1940’s audiences would have been surprised and probably disappointed that George Murphy didn’t have a featured dance number, since that had been his chief claim to fame in his earlier days at MGM. (MGM tried to build up Murphy as their rival to Fred Astaire at RKO; then, when Astaire’s RKO contract ran out, MGM signed him, co-starred him with Murphy and the spectacular female dancer Eleanor Powell in Broadway Melody of 1940, and decided that with Astaire under contract they didn’t need Murphy any more.) Charles was hostile to Murphy because he was a Republican U.S. Senator from California from 1964 to 1970, but whether you cared about Murphy’s politics or not, his obnoxious, unscrupulous and thoroughly disgusting character is reason enough to hate him in this film (and he didn’t have the level of success Ronald Reagan had either as a movie star or a politician). Quite a few of the talents behind the camera on The Powers Girl had made much better movies elsewhere: the director was Norman Z. McLeod, whose most famous credits are the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business and Horse Feathers (and oh how we wish for some of the Marxes’ anarchic energy to crash into this film!), and the cinematographer is Stanley Cortez, fresh off of shooting Orson Welles’ masterpiece The Magnificent Ambersons – and though there are a few intriguing half-lit shots in this movie, for the most part this is a major comedown (and nine years later Cortez returned to the same subject for a film called Models, Inc.).