Gigolette

The acting in "Gigolette" is very good...and that is the only reason I'm giving this film as high a score as I did! It's the sort of story that you see in old B-movies but which bear little semblance to real life!

Kay (Adrienne Ames) is a cultured daughter of a rich man. You know she's something special when all the male characters see her and almost immediately are bowled overy by her awesomeness. However, her life comes crashing down around her when her father loses all his money and she needs to work for a living. She teams up with two semi-larcenous guys (Ralph Bellamy and Robert Armstrong) to work in a clip-joint...a place where B-girls work to keep chumps drinking as they're being WAY overcharged for cheap drinks. Unlike all the other women working there, she is different...again, as all the males keep telling us.

Eventually, the leader of the two jerks, Terry (Bellamy), decides to go legitimate...or at least mostly legitimate. Gone is the crappy liquor and instead of B-girls, he hires handsome men and women to dance and make customers happy. Kay is naturally the star among the staff.

During all this, a rich knucklehead, Gregg (Donald Cook) has been infatuated with Kay and he doesn't seem to mind her past. Later, when the pair become engaged, he almost immediately assumes the worst about her....making pretty much EVERYTHING Gregg said earlier in the movie a lie. This turnabout doesn't make a lot of sense and the audience is no doubt confused by this...as well as how the film ends.

I think the biggest problem for me is hearing men CONSTANTLY reminding the audience how awesometastic Kay is. I don't get it. The plot also is so unrealistic and silly that I couldn't help but feel it was a film and not real life in any way. Not a terrible story...just not a very good one.

Adrienne Ames was a debutante, but her father died broke. She can't get a job in New York, save working for Ralph Bellamy in his clip joint. It's clear he's lovestruck, and she's grateful, but feels no sparks. While there, she meets wealthy and well connected Donald Cook. Bellamy stops speaking out of the side of his mouth and upgrades to a legitimate night club. Miss Ames continues working there as a dancer for unaccompanied men.

Miss Ames is beautiful, well dressed, and speaks her lines well enough, but director Charles Lamont, moving out of Gower Gulch, can't pull anything from her to make her a star, despite her top billing. By the end of the decade she was out of the movies.

It does raise the question in my mind: was this the movie in which Bellamy first played the man who loses the girl? HANDS ACROSS THE TABLE came out later that year and cemented that role for him in A pictures; the story is that when he read a script with a role marked for "A Ralph Bellamy type", he abandoned Hollywood and went back on the stage. With Robert Armstrong and Dewey Robinson.