🎀 📹 diary of a lady moviegoer

beware, film buffs from hell! I am reviewing 4 recent watches.

With Pauline Kael & Parker Tyler gone, I suppose it is up to *me* to become Ms. Movie Reviews!

🎀 Lady of Burlesque (1943) 🎀

I seldom demand raunchiness from my glamorous films of the Forties, but if a picture claims to adapt a bawdy 1940’s pulp novel by Gypsy Rose Lee AND somehow fails to tantalize or thrill, I ought to be vocal about my disappointment. Though ‘Lady of Burlesque’ revolves around a series of showgirl murders in which the killer’s weapon is a slinky G-string, it is unfortunate that there is no flamboyant, honky-tonk atmosphere to match the source material’s piquancy. Majorly set at ‘The Old Opera House’ where lewd ladies sport pompous names like ‘Lolita La Verne’, dressing room dramas among the dames are so criminally sanitized (and *so* laughably tame) that their wisecracks and scandals fall painfully flat.

It does not help that performances come across as amateur-ish either, to the point I would speculate that Paramount merely casted hopefuls without a screen test first. Not even Barbara Stanwyck with her customary tough-as-nails demeanor and husky-voiced lesbian allure was allowed to add some of her own sass to enliven the film’s humdrum tone. ‘Lady of Burlesque’ purports to be a hardboiled exposé of the glittering seediness behind the curtains of vaudeville, but I can think of at least ten different movies that *do* deliver in their backstage sleaze (see: the much more obscene “Violated” from 1953).

RATING —> 2/5, which is DEPRESSING considering Ms. Stanwyck and I are literally related.

🎀 What A Way To Go! (1964) 🎀

For a film packed with glossy parodies of old Hollywood tropes + KING Gene Kelly swooning as a pink-loving clown, I found “What A Way To Go!” (1964) overwhelmingly ordinary. The plot of a down-on-her-luck bride struggling to decipher *how come* all of her husbands always die sounds all the more promising with the suave, all-star male cast. It is a shame, then, that the pitch-black comedy script with screwball strokes to it reduces dreamy Don Juans like Paul Newman or Dean Martin into oozing as much virility as cardboard cutouts. Their unnervingly cartoonish performances only accentuate the daunting 111-minutes length, and how awkwardly unfunny the whole charade is.

I do not discredit the impressive range of Shirley MacLaine in the least (she is adorable in 1955’s “Artists and Models”), but her comedienne charms & overly cute complexion *do* strike me as so devoid of glamour that I could never become one of her devotees. And because I mainly watch movies to worship the stars in them, not even the rooms of this Twentieth-Century Fox production that were dripping in pink (ones I shall forever regard as the most *me* of sceneries I have ever seen) could reconcile my spiritual need for a mythical, larger-than-life protagonist. In fact, I dreaded watching Ms. MacLaine’s widow-witch change expensive costumes in the blink of an eye in what purports to be the highlight of the picture, a fashion montage (unwisely regarded as ‘utmost camp’.) I can applaud the stupendousness of Edith Head’s feminine confections and the overall elaborate production design, but a piffle with a budget *as* lavish as this one should have been shelved the day Marilyn Monroe died (the role was originally written for her).

RATING —> 2/5, praying my friends who love this film won’t hate me for this!

🎀 A Butterfly In The Night (1977) 🎀

Nemesis to the film censorship boards of midsixties Argentina, the somewhat avant-garde director and gallant actor Armando Bó shot like a thousand erotic movies with his buxom partner and bombshell-of-a-muse Isabel Sarli. Their sensual approach consecrated the duo as a pair of outlaw lovers pioneering sex across South American cinemas. Their sumptuous collaborations range from hazy, nymphomania-fueled melodramas like “Fuego” (1969) that see Sarli committing adultery with her wrinkled masochistic maid, to wanton, experimental reveries like “Fiebre” (1971) that explore woman-animal love in a literal sense (the film mostly shows Isabel masturbating to the thought of her own horse).

From this legendary realm, the luxurious and virtually unknown “Una Mariposa En La Noche” (1977) emerged. In it, Sarli plays a prostitute in the neon-soaked streets of Paris whose surroundings get a swift revamp after crossing paths with an affluent farmer from her own land. Though it appears to lack a cohesive timeline, the picture serves as a glorious immortalization of one of the couple’s last lustful encounters preceding Bó’s death (the director plays opposite to his real-life lover). Watching the movie at midnight, I could not help but get carried away by the sexploitation’s searing visuals lulling me to an unconscious state. The film emits a glamorous lasciviousness that only vintage Argentinian adult movies have to offer, and it helps that the material is marvelously surreal yet utterly unaware of it.

RATING —> 4.5/5 which I admit is an exaggeration from my part.

🎀 French Cancan (1955) 🎀

An extraordinary banquet of pastel café-concerts & Cinderella coquettes, Jean Renoir’s artistically triumphant “French Cancan” (1955) chronicles the backstage melodramas of an unscrupulous impresario putting on a show. With his career at stakes, this nonchalant ladies’ man threatens to commit suicide unless opening night at the Moulin Rouge —where he plans to rebrand the old-fashioned ‘cancan’— hints at long-run success. The camera’s intimate involvement with the audition and rehearsal processes evokes the old Hollywood genre of the backstage musical, but its French sensibility beautifully subverts this cinematic cliché (a personal favorite, btw) to construct a rather moving, deep-layered tale…

In spite of his dizzyingly pink sets exploding with joie de vivre, Renoir cleverly refuses to sugarcoat his tableau of late 19th-century showbiz. First, he rejects truisms about how women of the theatre think or behave, which results in Mexico’s #1 mythical movie star María Felix getting to play a belly dancer turned lavishly-gowned dame turned spitfire mistress turned protofeminist friend — as with every other character, she transcends categorization. Renoir also scoffs at forced romances between personalities as erratic as those in vaudeville, yet his directorial approach is *brilliant* and sensical enough to not let the story’s realism compromise the passionately artificial look of the picture (Parisian bakeries and food markets had never looked as fairy-tale-esque). I would argue that in this balance lies the movie’s greatest strength; its striking Technicolor should also serve as a lesson to those naturalism-obsessed.

RATING —> 5/5, though I should note this is my second viewing of it! (first time was when I was eighteen 💝)

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