Sensation Hunters

A showgirl finds herself romantically torn between a daring pilot and a mining engineer. It's hardly surprising that Arline Judge never really made a name for herself if her weak performance here is anything to go by, and she isn't helped by the inconsequential quality of the material here. Former Mack Sennett bathing beauty Juanita Henson, presumably in the period between her cocaine and morphine addictions, stands out as the brassy, bullying leader of a dance troupe, and a youngish Walter Brennan appears in a couple of scenes as a gormless waiter. Sadly, these two provide the only scenes worth watching.

A tawdry, mundane unsexy demonstration of why you should avoid poverty row pictures. The randy young men of 1933, to whom this was clearly marketed, would have been so disappointed to find that the only saucy thing about this was the very misleading posters of a semi naked Arline Judge.

Charles Vidor, in his first picture certainly doesn't show any promise that he'll eventually become a talented director. He fails completely to engage you with this tired formulaic story populated with clichéd stereotypes. The peppering with so-called comedy is cringingly un-funny and the inclusion of musical numbers serves simply to sabotage the flow. Those musical sections are actually pretty dire - don't expect Busby Berkley here! OK, Monogram might not have had much of a budget but it looks like like they only had one camera available when filming those lifeless numbers. They're presented almost in the style of a 1929 early talkie; no imaginative cinematography, no close ups of the pretty ladies (I assume they're pretty ladies but they might be blokes in wigs - you can't tell!) and the songs are hardly memorable either.

After her superb performance in Gregory La Cava's excellent AGE OF CONSENT, it's so disappointing to see how appalling Arline Judge's acting is in this. What is meant to be a brassy, ballsy personality comes across as an amateurish and crass cartoon caricature. Of course, it goes without saying that she wasn't in the same class as say Joan Blondell but even so, she was better than this. Also sad is seeing poor old Juanita Hansen, the former beauty of the silent screen attempting a career comeback with an embarrassingly poorly written character. With a few exceptions, what's needed to be a successful 1920s screen goddess is not what's needed to be a successful actress. She had significant personal problems so it seems cruel to be critical about her but it's not a good performance.

Like those unsuspecting sensation hunters lured into the cinemas under false pretences back in 1933, you also might be tempted to watch what you might think is a racy, sexy pre-code movie. Spare yourself the disappointment, the boredom and the futility of this and just be grateful that this first incarnation of Monogram went bust shortly after making this saving the world from any more of this type of garbage.

Because it was Charles Vidor's first credited feature, and because it was a pre-Code flick, I was hoping to see something astonishing. I didn't, but I found it a fine pre-Code.

Marion Burns is on her first steps in what she imagines to be a career in the performing arts -- all she has been in before is college shows. She has gotten a job as a singer in Juanita Hansen's troupe, on their way to Panama, where she quickly makes friends with her room mate, cynical old hand Arline Judge, and begins a budding romance with upright Preston Foster, whose mine is somewhere around there. She soon discovers that the troupe is not called on just to entertain on stage; they're there to get the customers to buy drinks, and Hansen is an old buzzard. Gradually things go downhill...

Although Burns is the central character, it's Arline Judge who has the standout role: pugnacious, profane, liable to marry anything with tattoos, and waiting for her first husband to show up again, she's a three-ring circus on her own. It's a lively movie and a lot of fun.

From a really cinema and score lover I feel like movies like this one that keeps hidden on a pre-code section are destinated for the ones that feels the urge to understand how society was back in the day and how the cinema was made!

I like it.

A somewhat disjointed story. Hooray for editing. There is no direct sensation in this movie as the sleeve of the DVD intimates. I am always interested in precode films and how they handled sex. This one has none. The story is eh. A great example of precode sex in films is the one with Constance Bennett The Common Law. Now thats a great story. Anyway its interesting to see Walter Brennan in a minor role and to see Preston Foster as our hero. Juanita Hansen as Trixie plays the alcoholic leader of the womens troupe entertaining sailors and various other vagabonds. The story jumps around too much to be given any serious consideration but I was curious you might be too.