La dama de Panamá

Dance-hall girl Lucille Ball helps roll Allan Lane. When he sobers up, she has a choice: jail, or accompany him to his place in the middle of Ecuador to be his housekeeper. She chooses the second.

And that's quite literally what she is, and no more. In fact, she's the head housekeeper since she has Steffi Duna helping her out, when Miss Duna isn't trying to poison her in a fit of jealousy over Lane. This is the peak of the Production Code Era, or the nadir depending on your viewpoint, and this remake of a decidedly pre-code movie has been carefully denuded of anything that might offend Joe Breen.

What makes this movie interesting -- besides the fact that Miss Ball's character is named 'Lucy' -- is that this might be the first film noir. That's a risky statement to make, because defining film noir is so difficult that even Eddie Muller, who should know, says that it's an attitude. But by the time people noticed the genre, a film noir movie had certain things that marked it: it was a crime picture, told in flashback with a magical realism attitude, set in a corrupt world, and the camerawork was derived from German Expressionism, with a lot of shadows. There was often a femme fatale and a clock.

This movie meets most of those criteria, particularly the camerawork. J. Roy Hunt isn't a name to conjure with, but he was a solid professional in charge of the camera on some fine A Pictures for Paramount in the silent era. He moved to RKO in 1929, and handled the camera for many of their important pictures, but after 1938 the prestigious movies went to other cinematographers.... not that RKO was producing many of those. Still, his lighting added a lot to many movies that might otherwise be forgotten. He was the credited DP on more than 200 movies through 1952 and died twenty years later at the age of 88. In this movie there are plenty of shadows.

The other key person here is the director, Jack Hively. In 1939 Hively directed five movies. Other years he was an editor. The flashback structure of this movie undoubtedly made it tricky to shoot, and someone with an editorial background must have seemed a natural choice for this B movie.

It certainly wasn't considered an important movie at the time, and the issue of whether it was a film noir is a murky one; over in Japan, Ozu had directed DRAGNET GIRL in 1933, and it looks like a film noir to me, Other sources credit 1942 as the year noir began, with THE MALTESE FALCON and THIS GUN FOR HIRE considered key. I'm confounded by a philosophical question: can a movie be a genre movie if it's the first one? Does the leader make a movement, or followers?

Whichever side of the question you come down on, this is a minor picture competently produced, even if the interesting stuff had been largely eviscerated. That, to me, is the heart of film noir: with the Production Code in force, the audience had to look into their own assumptions of how the world really worked to understand what the people on the screen were talking about and doing. They had to look into the shadows, and there are plenty of them here.

1940's The Stranger on the Third Floor is usually cited as Hollywood's earliest example of true noir style, but here's a movie from a year earlier that also incorporates a guilt-ridden protagonist with a past, first-person narration, and a flashback structure. Both were probably inspired by the French film Pepe le Moko (1938), but since this is a remake of a 1931 film called Panama Flo, who knows whether they weren't all present in that version as well? In any case, it's quite a decent little B that gives Lucy one of her toughest and most downbeat dramatic parts, on a par with Dance Girl Dance; if you only know her for her later comedy days, it's well worth seeing these early roles to see the kind of realistic blue-collar gal in the Ginger Rogers mode which she played very well.

Unusual role for Lucille Ball as a down and out showgirl in Panama whose no-good fiancé involves her in illegal nefarious deeds. She winds up abandoned and has to escape into the jungles of Ecuador with a dangerously roguish oil prospector (Allan Lane)who graciously allows her to "shack-up" with him in a very compromising manner, even though he has a sultry native "housekeeper" who attempts to do her in by poisoning. The boyfriend eventually shows up to "rescue" her in his plane but only intends to murder her at the behest of his gun smuggling friends. This film definitely holds the interest with Ball and Lane carrying it with their downbeat nearly noir characters and situation. Stick around till the end, as you will care whether these two appealing people can make a go of things or no.

Most of her admirers do not realize that for many years prior to her TV career, Lucille Ball was a very competent, dishy, and prolific motion picture actress. This particular opus, though both sordid and incredible, does present Miss Ball, with billing over the title, in an undoubtedly bizarre concoction, that has, for whatever reason, been strangely overlooked for many years. Most interesting perhaps is that her character's name is "Lucy,"(the first time Miss Ball ever portrayed a character with that name--though this particular 'Lucy' has nothing in common with Mrs. Ricardo.)

Essentially it is celluloid pulp fiction detailing the romantic and criminal mis-adventures of a New York show girl reduced to dancing in the floor show of a Panamanian dive. While thus employed, she is innocently implicated in the robbery of a drunken oil prospector, who only drops jail charges, if she will agree to become his live in--"housekeeper." Enter true love here.

The illicit and licentious angles of the story, with its strong intimations of prostitution at the dive, and free-love at the prospector's camp, (with a interloper-native girl named "Cheema" no less), are unmistakably suggested, through "Sadie Thompson" style dialogue and atmosphere. For example, one of the "B girls", named Pearl, decked in cheap jewelry over a flowered frock, achieves unparalleled camp value with her lowered eyelids, hands on the hips swagger as she moves in for the kill--greeting her would be conquest with the highly original, "Hello handsome."

RKO's technical accoutrements, as would be expected, are A-1, though this is clearly a second feature. Miss Ball plays a decent and attractive doll, who retains her virtue, despite being forced to tramp the streets or the pampas, as the case would have it, (perhaps owing to her lack of education--she proudly mis-pronounces "petroleum" as "petoleum" !

Though much of the dialogue is painfully stereotypical, (Cheema witnessing a murder, declaims in threateningly thick accents with finger pointed accusingly, "Cheema tell tribe!" the story manages to engage by sheer force of its outrageous plot. Even better, is Evelyn Brent, as the madame "Lenore" (with a trollopish wardrobe that anticipates Carol Burnett as "Eunice") who gets such enunciate such subtleties as "...Be nice to Mr. McTeague Lucy or I'll fire you!"

With such dialogue as this it would appear the script is written by and for idiots, but, lo and behold, it's by Michael Kanin who later penned Katherine Hepburn's "Woman of the Year," (surely Mr. Kanin your tongue was firmly in your cheek?)

Despite her perpetually impecunious state,Miss Ball's character somehow manages a nifty array of outfits, that includes a white sharkskin suit, and a wool blazer, skirt, grosgain pumps, and trilby hat ensemble, that, assuredly would have been the envy of most Gotham girls that were "down and out" in 1939.

Yes, Miss Ball is plenty attractive here, though to witness her at the peak of her pulchritude, check out "Beauty for the Asking" also from 1939.

All in all though, with its blend of simmering sin, and triumphant virtue, as laid out in both the South American and Manhattan jungles, "Panama Lady" is really rather fun as an outrageous camp fest. Enjoy.

I meant Le Jour Se Leve probably influenced this, not Pepe le

Moko. If you really want to see this movie

it's on a Turner laserdisc.