Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A.

The movie is effective as long as it sticks to the movie "Rain" script that it is adapted from. Unfortunately when it strays, it becomes pointless and dull. I suspect that director Spenser Williams didn't want to offend his audience with a portrayal of a Reverend lusting after a prostitute. Franchette Everett is excellent as Gertie. She brings the type of sensuality to the film that really lifts it up. It is a shame that she was not given more song and dance numbers. Franchette was called the most beautiful woman in Harlem and should have been a big star in Hollywood, but she refused to take racist roles.

"I got a sugar daddy, a sailor, a marine, and a preacher man, if I want to take the time to work on him."

Amateurish acting and weak production value mar this 1946 film from director Spencer Williams. It's a spin on the W. Somerset Maugham story 'Rain' that old film fans may recognize from Sadie Thompson (1928) and Rain (1932), though here the story is altered and it unfortunately plays out like a misogynistic morality tale. Dirty Gertie, you see, is a stripper from Harlem who has a habit of stringing men along, and she's fled to a tropical island with her troupe because she fears getting murdered by her ex-boyfriend. There she meets a slew of male admirers, but runs afoul of a moralizing missionary.

While the film was awfully creaky, there was nothing amateurish about July Jones and Howard Galloway dancing, and their opening act to Dirty Gertie (Francine Everett) was worth the price of admission. Everett is beautiful and certainly appealing, but there wasn't much sizzle to her character, setting aside the scene where she kisses two men that she's dubbed "Big Boy" and "Tight Pants" after a night out. I liked the moment where she hears "Blues in the Night" being played and is haunted by memories, but there wasn't enough of this kind of emotional depth. Also, I have to say, it was an odd choice for Spencer Williams to play the voodoo woman, at least without shaving his mustache, even if it was interesting to see him.

Dirty Gertie drinks, flirts heavily, and takes expensive jewelry from men. She's the heroine of the movie, but she's tarnished, and her doom is foreshadowed many times. The movie has the structure of many black musical films, leading up to a big revue in a nightclub at the end, but those expectations are frustrated. The revue consists only of the dancing of the chorus line, credited as "6 Harlem beauties," and a short dance number by July Jones and Howard Galloway.

Even more frustrating is that Francine Everett, though she was known as a singer and dancer, doesn't sing at all in the movie. She dances only a few steps early in the plot, and in the nightclub revue she only sways a bit as she removes her over-the-elbow gloves at the start of a sadly interrupted striptease.

The oddest thing in the movie, however, is director's Spencer Williams' casting of himself in a cameo role as "Old Hagar," the crystal-globe-reading fortune teller. Williams plays the role in drag, dressed in a house dress and head wrap, but he wears his mustache and speaks in a deep, masculine voice. He doesn't play it for comedy, yet it's hard to say he's playing it straight. Did Williams just step in for an actress who didn't show up for filming that day (that's the sort of thing that happened in making very low budget black movies), or is the explanation something stranger?

Title is the best thing about it, by far. Everything else is pretty much third rate, especially the writing and acting. Makes "Cleopatra Jones" look like "Othello". D plus.

Gertie is a flirty show-girl staying at an island resort, like Maugham's Sadie Thompson. Some interesting characterizations and encounters, but nothing of huge interest. Not nearly as striking as Spencer Williams' religious fantasy movies "Blood of Jesus" and "Go Down Death".