Hollywood en folie

For those who enjoy plenty of upbeat "40's Hollywood glamour" atmosphere, good musical numbers, and seeing dozens of stars of the mid 1940's, "Variety Girl" is a pleasant time-passer.

Another reviewer here left a very good review, but got their people badly mixed-up in their final paragraph. It is not Mary Hatcher, but the manically energetic Olga San Juan, in fur coat and sunglasses, who tries hard to get the attention of a famous director in the Brown Derby restaurant. The director is not Cecil B. DeMille, but Mitchell Leisen.

Mary Hatcher was gorgeous, a very good actress, and had a lovely voice which could range from Swing to operatic. Perhaps she didn't go far in movies because she looked and sang like the twin sister of Kathryn Grayson, a major star at the time, and Hollywood didn't need two almost identical beauties with operatic voices.

There's plenty of stars in this homage to Variety clubs international but precious little entertainment. A poor script and shoddy production values make this movie look as though it was shot over weekends on whatever sets happened to be available. Painful to sit through at times with dated comedy routines that were probably not very funny even at the time. Of the performers Pearl Bailey does a not bad musical number, and Bing Crosby and Bob Hope come the closest to being funny.

... and that's as flimsy an excuse for a parade of stars as there ever was. This one seems more forced and artificial than such films normally do.

Many of the stars have little or nothing to do in their cameos: Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster, Diana Lynn, and especially Robert Preston. Perhaps they're the lucky ones, given the limp nature of the script. They might have wound up like Spike Jones -- he and his City Slickers are far more obnoxious here than they were in "Thank Your Lucky Stars" (1943). Or the pitiable Alan Ladd, singing about that greatest of cities, Tallahassee, Florida. Seriously.

The occasional bright spots include Paulette Goddard wearing soapsuds, and Ray Milland hiding his telephone in an overhead light fixture, à la "The Lost Weekend".

I was also keen to see the rarely glimpsed, grey-haired Glenn Tryon, the male lead in 1928's magnificent "Lonesome", one of the final great achievements of the American silent film. "Lonesome" is comparable in some ways to King Vidor's "The Crowd", but is much less frequently discussed.

I think few would argue if I were to say that "Variety Girl" is for completists only.

Caveat emptor: This film's recent video release in the Bob Hope Collection has the George Pal Technicolor sequence in black and white.

I've said this often enough. There is no way I will ever give a film like this a bad review. Just an unregenerate stargazer I guess.

The demise of the studio system makes this kind of film impossible now. You couldn't possibly afford to pay all the talented people here what they would be worth on the open market. But when they're all working at Paramount studios at the time, such films are possible.

The thin plot of this film is that young Mary Hatcher who back as an infant was left in a movie theater and adopted by the managers of several theaters. She became a project for them and the cause of why they founded the Variety Club Charitable Foundation.

Mary's grown up now and has aspirations to be an actress. She goes to Paramount where Frank Ferguson is now a big wig. She and a goofy friend Olga San Juan get everyone confused as to who is who. Especially young DeForest Kelley who is a Paramount talent scout.

Both Hatcher and Kelley were pretty unknown at the time. Hatcher had in fact come from Broadway and the original production of Oklahoma where she had replaced Joan Roberts in the lead. This was DeForest Kelley and it was only his second film. But I seem to remember he got a big break a little less than 20 years later playing a futuristic doctor on some science fiction show.

But this is really just an excuse to have all the Paramount name talent strut their stuff. One interesting sequence was one where Alan Ladd hijacks an airliner and in the midst of a dramatic scene bursts into song with Dorothy Lamour about the capital city of Florida, Tallahassee. Ladd had a pleasant, if not great singing voice and I'm sure he loved the opportunity to spoof his own hardboiled image.

Gary Cooper made an obligatory appearance and this turned out to be his farewell appearance with Paramount, the studio that discovered and developed him.

Of course heading the cast were the two that really kept Paramount in the black in those days, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. Bing was in the midst of a five year run as the nation's number one box office attraction. And in 1949 he would be succeeded by one Bob Hope. They have a duet called Harmony in which the rest of the cast joins in at the finale.

Curiously enough Bing only recorded Tallahassee and with the Andrews Sisters. Why he and Hope didn't do Harmony on record is a mystery to me.

Just about everyone on the lot but Betty Hutton got into this one. I wonder where she was?

"Variety Girl" is one of those films that was popular in the 1930s and 40s which supposedly gives audiences a behind the scenes look at a Hollywood Studio. In each, the various big-time contract players are seen as a VERY scripted version of themselves...and most of the major studios made films like this. Some examples include "The Hollywood Revue of 1929", "The Goldwyn Follies" as well as "Paramount on Parade". For the most part, these films were pure hooey and they are more self-promotion than entertaining when you see them today.

In "Variety Girl", it the story of a very talented young woman and her new, and VERY obnoxious friend....and the women's road to discovery by Paramount. As far as the cast goes, some are actors pretending to be Paramount executives (such as DeForrest Kelley playing a publicity agent) and many are real actors, writers and directors playing a version of themselves. This would include Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Barbara Stanwyck, Paulette Goddard, Gary Cooper, Ray MIlland, Dorothy Lamour, Alan Ladd and quite a few other actors. Non-actors playing themselves include Cecil B. DeMille, George Marshall, Spike Jones and Mitchell Leissen.

I enjoyed seeing the various cameos, though many were simply too brief. What I didn't love was the character played by Olga San Juan. Like Mary Hatcher's character, both were supposedly newbies to Hollywood trying to break into films with Paramount but they simply made San Juan's character too despicable and obnoxious....to the point where it really hurt the film. It was supposed to be funny...but I found her character to be grating every second she was on the screen and her acting way beyond just broad! The 'joke' about all this is that the studio keeps mixing up the two ladies, and when one misbehaves, the other is blamed.

So is this worth seeing? Well, it depends. If you are a fan of old films, you can look past the unlikable story and San Juan and just enjoy the many cameos, as practically everyone at Paramount seems to be in this movie. If you are not a fan of old films, the cameos won't mean much to you and the story itself is simply bad. None of this is very surprising, as most of these 'behind the scenes' films stink and are very short on actual plot. One of the few exceptions I can think of is "Thank Your Lucky Stars" from Warner Brothers. The rest are just more self-promotion than anything else and are tough to love...and this is definitely true of "Variety Girl".