Fille de plaisir

For the first 50 minutes, Playgirl is nothing but cliches and cardboard characters. Finally, Shelley slaps Colleen and all hell breaks loose. Shelley goes on a reign of terror and this film was brought to life. There is entertainment in Playgirl, but the wait was much too long.

Colleen Miller comes from Nebraska to New York. She stays with her cousin, showgirl Shelley Winters while she makes her way as she knows not what. She gets a couple of lucky breaks, and then the boyfriends, money, luxury apartments, and bullets start flying in this tawdry cheap-girls-in-mink soap opera.

It's not the sort of story I enjoy, but director Joseph Pevney handles it well enough, thanks to a good cast -- Miss Miller got the best reviews of her career for her role -- and Universal's ability to put all the men in dinner jackets and the women in slinky dresses and mink stoles. Pevney started out as a child performer in vaudeville. By 1936, he was an actor on Broadway. After the Second World War, he moved to Los Angeles, where he acted in Paul Muni's theater troupe and had tiny roles in movies. He became a movie director in 1950, but that faded out towards the end of the decade, and he worked until 1985 as a TV director -- tied with Marc Daniels for directing the most episodes of the original STAR TREK. He died in 2008 at the age of 96.

Before they started streaming into New York from Minnesota, they used to come from Kansas (or, in this case, its neighbor to the north). Wide-eyed Colleen Miller gets off the Big Dog from Grand Island, Nebraska to try her hand at the modeling game; she batches it with an old hometown friend, now a nightspot shantoozie (Shelley Winters, who forebodingly sings the old Sophie Tucker number `There'll Be Some Changes Made').

Winters has all the right connections, both high and low (or so she thinks). She's having an affair with the married publisher (Barry Sullivan) of a photomag, Glitter, and can set Miller up for dates with any number of high-rolling but penniless scions of old-money families. But it's Sullivan who finds Miller more enchanting than the needy Winters, who ends up throwing a drunken wingding in which a pistol plays an inopportune part. Though cleared of murder charges, the two gals from the Great Plains, now mortal enemies, find that nobody wants them anymore, either for torch songs or fashion layouts (Winters confides that she spends her days `breaking phonograph records and emptying ice-cube trays').

There's a lot more plot (and many more characters, most of them generic) in this cautionary melodrama about the snares of the Big Town - maybe too much of both (though it's unfair to judge from a showing cut down to fit a commercial television slot). And It's not clear whether the playgirl of the title is Winters or Miller, or if it even matters. Joseph Pevney seems to be reworking material about the interface between show business and crime that he had done two years earlier, and much more successfully, in Meet Danny Wilson (where Winters also appeared). The movie comes off as unfocused and strident. But then that's the price to be paid for unloosing Winters.

This film is strictly camp. The only way to watch it is as unintentionally humorous. The first half moves slower than molasses then it just explodes in every direction (or should I say VOMITS).

Lots of gowns, lots of pretty people and a marvelous drunken scene with Shelley Winters - after which she hits the skids.

Be glad the plot is unbelievable as well as the situations. It would be depressing otherwise.

Screenwriter Robert Blees strung together a long list of showbiz and scandal sheet cliches for this Universal feature disguised as a Woman's Picture, with ridiculous coincidences as icing on top. It's tough to swallow.

Shelley Winters is the nominal star, yet the movie actually (following the "Midwest girl travels to NYC to make it big" script trajectory) propels her roommate, beautiful Colleen Miller, toward stardom. Yet Winters as a nightclub singer gets to belt out several tunes quite nicely, and tends to dominate her scenes in a brassy fashion familiar from her later character roles.

I enjoyed the scenes of overnight success as Colleen becomes the top model in the Big Apple by sheer luck, before the movie moves into crime territory and begins to paint all the characters (except for Miller) as cynical creeps. It's so much like those corny cautionary tales of 1930s cinema where Los Angeles and Hollywood are the destinations of disillusionment and a lot worse for young girls. In fact, this movie might have been more successful and certainly more entertaining as an exploitation movie, with the sexual innuendo of the script made more explicit on screen.

The femme stars are both riveting, but the rest of the cast is iffy. Gregg Palmer goes nowhere in the male lead role; Barry Sullivan (one of my favorites) is stuck in a one-dimensional "cad" role, while Richard Long, wearing a dumb-looking moustache, is quite fake as a charlatan who seems to cause the most trouble and is merely there to propel plot twists. One big surprise for me was a treat: young Paul Richards (a decade before TV's memorable "Breaking Point" series) as a sinister and inept hired killer.