La dame sans logis

I collect Pre-Code films & have 150+ of them. "Girl Without a Room" is not one of my favorites. It is talky, very silly, & much too "busy". The "comedy" is rarely amusing. I agree with other reviewers here about the poor quality of the "singing". On the positive side, this was Mrs. Hopalong Cassidy's (Grace Bradley, AKA Mrs. Boyd) best film performance. And then there's the dance sequence, described below.

The film is noteworthy for it's nightclub female dancer sequence, which lasts only about 5-10 seconds, & that's a shame. The dancer is the uncredited Joyzelle Joyner, & she dances without clothes! It's impossible to tell this from the film video, because she's shown for such a short period of time, & from the waist up, & more so, because of the outstanding body paint that was applied to her in a snake motif (shoulders to ankles).

I have seen three still photos of Joyzelle in character, in her painted "outfit", which show: 1) her full-body make-up being applied backstage by Makeup Artist David S. Garber, with "supervision" from a female assistant (actually, more of a "chaperone"); this photo is dated November 29 1933 (the date the photo was received by a photo service in New York City, not the date the photo was taken). 2) Joyzelle on the film set of "Girl Without a Room" at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, with the backdrop being the back wall of the nightclub scene set in the film. 3) a colorized photo of #2 above, with the backdrop edited out; this photo best shows the magnificence of the body paint; it appears on the front cover of "PIC" Magazine, May 2 1939.

Joyzelle's body make-up is possibly the most outstanding example of its kind in Hollywood history.

Charles Farrell is a Tennessee painter who wins a scholarship to Paris. On arrival he settles into an apartment in Montmartre, where the zany occupants include Charlie Ruggles, Gregory Ratoff, and Marguerite Churchill. Soon he and Miss Churchill are in love, but the other roomers are busy spending his scholarship money and filling him with hooey. Then Miss Churchill sees the painting he has done under their influence, she calls it terrible. They break up.

The movie starts off briskly with the events given in recitative, but it sags in the second half, despite Ruggles' quavering, good-natured nonsense and Grace Bradley as a peroxide Russian gold digger. It never quite recovers, but the lively first half and occasional bouts of nonsense keep it moving throughout.

Presumably this was created as a penance for lustful sinners who only watch pre-code movies for sexy ladies. Only God could have created someone as perfect as Marguerite Churchill. She was made to be irresistible to men so the lustful sinner had no choice other than to endure this hour of hell.

This is one of those abhorrent films where people speak for a lot of the time in rhyme or even in song. When the actors aren't singing, they're doing what was considered at the time, 'comedy acting' - equally horrendous! Paramount made a few of these weird brain-bleaching semi-operas in the early thirties. Another was THIS IS THE NIGHT, which like this, lured red-blooded males into the picture houses with pretty young ladies.

Charles Farrell was ok in some of his pictures but the peculiar nature of this aberration doesn't really allow him or anyone else to act. Charlie Ruggles however as the "modern artist" is almost tolerable.

Even if this wasn't designed by the church to punish sin, Paramount certainly made this to appeal to men. Marguerite Churchill, who was impossibly pretty is given the role of a dissolute, jaded American living in the sexually liberated Paris (as imagined by Hollywood) who spends her days in lacy underwear and an open silky robe. Unfortunately the writers seem to have forgotten to give her role any actual character. What a waste, she could be a great actress in a decent picture.

It also features sexy, sassy Grace Bradley and a couple of seconds of the infamous naked dancer, Joyzelle Joyner. That nude dancing scene is presented as a very, very blurred image from the point of view of Farrell who has been drinking alcohol - allowed in sinful Paris but a banned evil influence in the US. So we're led into a salacious world but told it is a bad, dark place.

There is a shadow in a plot - about the nature of art but really, this doesn't even try to be a normal film. Neither is it remotely funny.

Charles Farrell is miscast as a young hayseed from Tennessee who goes to Paris to study painting. He wins a scholarship but his painting style is very old-fashioned. He falls in with a loony bunch of Bohemians and learns about women and life and art.

He's interested in Kay (Marguerite Churchill) who's from Atlanta but they quarrel and the greedy Nada (Grace Bradley) moves in on him to take his money. There's also the sullen singer (Walter Woolf) who drinks too much but wants to marry Kay. Charlie Ruggles plays Crock, a fellow artist who tell Farrell his style of painting stinks and says, "You don't paint the whistle ... you paint the blow." If you paint the whistle, it's only photography.

Farrell gets drunk and paints a piece that wins a big prize ... until they discover something about it.

Bright and funny with a few good songs. The Russian duel scene is tedious. Farrell hardly bothers to hide his Massachusetts accent even though he's supposed to be from Tennessee. But Ruggles, Churchill, and Bradley are all quite good. Mischa Auer and Leonid Kinskey have small roles.

Mostly for Charlie Ruggles fans; he's far and away the most amusing thing in it. It's supposed to take place in Gay Paree but except for a poilu in the opening sequence there isn't a single French character in the entire piece. Farrell and Ruggles talk their way through their "numbers" which are so badly scored you can barely tell they're even supposed to be musical. After "Love Me Tonight," someone at Paramount must have thought there was a demand for musicals cast with non-singers. Except for one short song each by Marguerite Churchill and Walter Woolf King (billed as Walter Woolf,) no one in this musical actually sings a solo. Churchill is initially rather charming in the title role but her character virtually disappears for the middle third of the story. It looks like they shot this on the Merry Widow set at Paramount. It's worth sticking around for the final line in the movie which is the funniest single gag in it.