Lady of Burlesque

Iris Adrian and Barbara Stanwyck in Lady of Burlesque

William Wellman's Lady of Burlesque is an occasionally winning musical comedy mystery that has musical bright spots, passable comedy, and uninteresting mystery elements. The film is a cleaned up adaptation of Gypsy Rose Lee's mystery novel, The G-String Murders which was successful enough to inspire a follow-up, Mother Finds a Body. The film occurs almost entirely backstage at a burlesque house where the girls show all that was acceptable under the Production Code. The production numbers are fun, especially Stanwyck warbling "Take It Off the E String, Play It On the G String" and James Gunn's screenplay captures the book's snappy dialogue.

What neither Gunn nor Wellman can transcend is the book's half-assed murder mystery. Every time a body is found, the police gather the many suspects in a dressing room, laboriously questioning them, and the film comes to a grinding halt. Since this was a two week quickie for RKO, I doubt Wellman had any compunction to jazz up the proceedings. He does have a feel for the rat a tat tat backstage patter and provides Ms. Stanwyck a nifty entrance. RKO must have been banking on the leggy appeal of Ms. Stanwyck to repeat the success of 1941's Ball of Fire whose Sugarpuss O'Shea is a twin of Lady of Burlesque's Dixie Daisy. The cheesecake of the film's chorines and Ms. Stanwyck's moxie did indeed insure a windfall for RKO.

The G-String Murders has autobiographical elements that jibed with Ms. Stanwyck's own career. Ms. Lee drew upon her reminisces of a former lover to conjure Dixie's romantic interest, Biff Brannigan. Stanwyck had got her start in the speakeasies and vaudeville theaters of New York, at 16. Her first marriage was to vaudeville comedian Frank Fay. So, Stanwyck didn't have to act, just be. Since she was the Hollywood actress of her era, her performance is a marvel of remembered technique and rueful nostalgia. She is the cynosure of the film and reason enough to see it. The comic in Lady of Burlesque is played by Michael O' Shea who also started as a vaudevillian and was coming off a stage success in The Eve of St. Mark. O'Shea is very good in the vaudeville skits, but somehow lacked cinematic sparkle dust. He had a fitful Hollywood career, but did marry Virginia Mayo.

Lady of Burlesque is not quite a good film, but has its moments. I find it more spritely than Wellman's prestige film of 1943, The Ox Bow Incident, one of the moldier of Hollywood's old chestnuts. Someone could make a good film or mini-series out of the real story of Gypsy Rose Lee and, no, the musical or film of Gypsy doesn't count.

Stanwyck at age 24