OVP: Lady of Burlesque (1943)

Film: Lady of Burlesque (1943)

Stars: Barbara Stanwyck, Michael O'Shea, J. Edward Bromberg, Iris Adrian, Victoria Faust, Stephanie Bachelor, Frank Conroy

Director: William A. Wellman

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Trying to understand the concept of celebrity of eras you didn't live through is occasionally difficult to achieve.  Obviously for the past 150 years or so actors have been a mainstay of celebrity gossip (and before that, royalty & the nobility took that position), with the advent of magazines & a widely-read newspaper industry (and later, tabloid journalism, television, & the internet) it wasn't just status or ability that made people famous-sometimes they just happened to be famous-for-being-famous.  This didn't start with Kim Kardashian & Paris Hilton.  Brenda Frazier, Doris Duke, & the Gabor Sisters all became national obsessions for a time through their tragic glamour (and extensive love lives).  But one figure I can't quite get a handle on is Gypsy Rose Lee.  Obviously most well-known today for the Stephen Sondheim-penned musical Gypsy, Lee led a provocative, and frequently public, life as a well-known exotic dancer, and at one point a mystery novelist.  The first of her books was The G-String Murders, about a group of strippers being offed by a mysterious serial killer.  Though shocking for the time, the novel was optioned by United Artists, renamed Lady of Burlesque, and is our film today.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Dixie Daisy (Stanwyck), a headliner at a burlesque theater, though most of the film focuses less on the on-stage performances & more about what's happening offstage, namely catfights between the women & suddenly a series of shocking & grizzly murders of the dancers, one of whom is found with her g-string tied around her neck.  Everyone is a suspect, including Dixie, who is being courted throughout the film by mid-level comic Biff (O'Shea).  As the film goes on, we find out that one of the stagehands (Conroy), driven mad by being demeaned by the dancers (and angry that the opera house he once worked out is now a house of ill-repute) was the killer & nearly offs Dixie before Biff & her friends save her.  At the end, Dixie, despite claiming she'd never marry a comic, runs off to elope with Biff, the day saved.

The movie is oddly-paced, and is probably only interesting if you're a big Stanwyck fan or are interested in curiosities.  Made in the post-Code era, the film gets around the bulk of the more scandalous aspects of the picture (one of the women does, in fact, get strangled with her g-string), by largely implying things while Stanwyck's Dixie remains pretty upright.  Clearly she's not meant to be an innocent lamb, but she's still sturdy Barbara Stanwyck, as American as the red-white-and-blue.  This causes confusion though as the movie is less interested in seeing these women as more than caricatures, and the two murdered women are the ones that the script most heavily implies "have it coming."  Combined with a left field twist on the murder (where we find out after-the-fact that the murderer was the grandfather of one of the victims, whom he was ashamed was involved in burlesque), and it just feels too dated for my tastes.

The film's Oscar nomination is uninspired.  The film has musical connections (Stanwyck even "sings" on screen several times), but the score isn't particularly noteworthy or impressive, and I dare you to hum even one line of it five minutes after seeing the picture.  In the 1940's, the Best Score category was a smorgasbord, with virtually every studio getting multiple nominations (this was something we only saw in the music categories), sometimes 20 films in one lineup, which is why something like Lady of Burlesque, an otherwise forgettable picture, gets its due.