La loi des tropiques

Good movie with the usual plot. Girl doesn't go with intended (always different reasons) and other girl (in this case Constance Bennett) falls in love (with Jeffrey Lynn). He gets telegram and drinks because of being jilted. But they are all good serviceable actors and the top four in the film are as good as any known star or character actor. So, why do some make "it" and some not so much? It comes down to whether you like them when you see them or not. They catch your eye AND THAT'S IT GENERALLY SPEAKING!!

Bennett has top billing, which must have been some consolation for starring in this story of a torch singer in the tropics attempting to elude the law. The film is OK - and it has several pleasing songs sung by a trio of tropical lads - but the presence of Bennett does not raise it from "B" to "A" status. Maybe Jack Warner wanted to help his old poker partner by giving her a job. And she took it because, according to her biographer, she hadn't put away so much as a dime for the inevitable rainy days and she needed the money to support her palatial lifestyle.

Although the former #1 glamour queen of Hollywood is only 36, she is not looking especially fabulous in this film. But Mona Maris, a dead ringer for Bennett's poker playing comrade, Kay Francis, does look fabulous. Unlike Bennett, Francis did save her money for a rainy day, but when the rainy day came she found it impossible to go quietly into obscurity and she too made a few "B" films. Both ladies, like so many other former femme stars out of fashion, took up live theatre in the late 40s. Bennett fans are advised to skip this film and watch Topper instead.

Constance Bennett in the 1940s. Her role is an Ann Sheridan-type role. And she looks like part-Benett, part-Jane Wyman, and a good part Lucille Ball. (The penciled-in brows, the full red lips ...) This could not be called a good movie. It holds its own, though. Jeffrey Lynn is good, as he always was. The other female lead, Mona Maris, is very alluring and a good actress.

The plot is silly as can be.

In "What Price Hollywood?" Bennett sang in French. She wove in and out of seats at a cabaret much in the style of Marlene Deitrich in "morocco." In "City Across The Bay," her sister Joan sings a racy song that puts one in mind of Carmen Miranda. Here Bennett sings a song that is partly in Spanish. (The story takes place in South or Central America.) Everyone gives it his or her best. Often that isn't much but it's a hard movie to dislike.

After just seeing the glorious Constance Bennett at her peak in "What Price Hollywood?" it is sad to see her, at the age of 36, in a B movie, but there you are - welcome to the world of being a middle-aged leading woman in films back in the golden age. She was in good company. In her next film, she would play a supporting role in an A movie that drove 36-year-old Greta Garbo out of Hollywood: Two-Faced Woman.

Bennett at this advanced age (hah!) was still beautiful, but it was hard to tell underneath the fright wig she wore. This improved when she put her hair up later on in the film. She plays a singer who marries Jeffrey Lynn (at age 32, he looks to be much younger than Bennett somehow) in order to escape a detective who's been chasing her. An inventor in a managerial position on a rubber plantation in South America, he wants to bring back a wife, so the two make a deal. Along the way, of course, they fall in love.

This is a pleasant movie, helped by the likability of the key players: Bennett, Lynn, Regis Toomey, and the gorgeous Mona Maris, who plays Toomey's wife. Craig Stevens, then very young and very hunky, has a small part as the owner's son, but he's involved in possibly the best scene, a fight between Lynn and himself.

Bennett deserved better. Shortly before leaving films in 1951, she was honored for her work on behalf of the post-war occupying troops and the Berlin Airlift. In the '50s, she did a club act, returning to movies in 1965, where she looked stunning as John Forsythe's mother in "Madame X." She died shortly afterward. She went out the way she came in.

Deep, deep, miserably deep "B". However, Bennett is delightful, as always, and makes the picture worth watching. Also, if you've ever had the urge to beat the crap out of Peter Gunn, there's an OK fight scene that Craig Stevens gets the worst of, and the chick who plays Regis Toomey's wife is a 40's hottie.