Lady of Burlesque (1943)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Disappointment for a huge fan!

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

A Hunt Stromberg Production, copyright 30 April 1943 by Hunt Stromberg Productions, Inc. Released through United Artists. New York opening at the Capitol: 13 May 1943. U.S. release: May 1943. Australian release: 9 June 1944. Australian length: 7,992 feet. 89 minutes. Copyright length: 91 minutes. U.K. release title: STRIPTEASE LADY.SYNOPSIS: Jealousy and murder backstage at the old opera house.NOTES: It once seemed that the novel was not the brainchild of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee but a gimmick dreamed up by Craig Rice who at that time was Miss Lee's publicity agent! The film was actually nominated for an Academy Award for Best Music Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture, losing to The Song of Bernadette.COMMENT: Astonishingly accurate in both spirit and letter, this is a remarkable achievement in the censor-ridden 'forties. The seedy, petty, egocentric world of the illegitimate theatre is meticulously created in all its gaudy, cheap and parochial horror. The murder plot is merely the peg for an expose of romantic squabbles and jealous in-fighting. Condemned to a constant change of garish costumes in decrepit, communal dressing rooms, the girls whine, bicker and wisecrack, fighting both themselves and the common enemies of police, management and two-bit Romeos.Aided by his production designer and his photographer, Wellman brilliantly creates this nether world. Rarely has burlesque been so unglamorously stripped of its escapist essentials. Aside from Stanwyck herself, the girls are a typically hard-cased bunch - especially when they talk - and some of them are not particularly attractive even in visual repose!Unfortunately, the plot keeps getting in the way. Few fans will miss the killer - especially as the player concerned is heavily disguised - but Wellman is forced to film some lengthily tedious dialogue scenes with Charles Dingle's police inspector. (He is not the usual dumb Hollywood cop, which makes at least one pleasant surprise.)Also I would have liked more songs. Stanwyck puts her song and dance across with such incredible, eye-popping skill, it's a pity she spends the rest of the film stooging for O'Shea's garrulously boorish "comic". Barbara handles the dramatic parts with the same charismatic professional¬ism, even making the inevitable fall for the "comic" she disdains so majestically in the first couple of reels, seem almost convincing. O'Shea is such a charmless actor, he ultimately defeats Stanwyck's efforts - but that is not her fault!Most of the other players are right in character, with Iris Adrian, Gloria Dickson (what a change from the sweet heroine of They Made Me a Criminal made only a few years before!), Virginia Faust (this seems to be her only film) and Stephanie Bachelor etching particularly acid engravings. Gerald Mohr is a conventional hood, but Frank Fen ton as a cut-price tenor, Lou Lubin as an obliging peddler and George Chandler as a harassed stage hand are more vividly original.Production values are solid. All in all, despite the preposterous plot and the boorishly boring O'Shea, a fascinating (thanks to Wellman's mise en scene) and entertaining (thanks to die glow-and-go of Miss Stanwyck) slice of low-life Americana.

It's a good thing Barbara Stanwyck graduated to better scripts. Had she remained in films like this she would never have become a star. Hubbub and chaotic backstage drama in a NYC burlesque theater set the stage, so to speak, for a backstage murder.Stanwyck plays Dixie Daisy, a slightly sleazy performer who sings and dances to an audience composed mostly of salivating old men. Dixie's female backup performers are young, curvaceous, bawdy "dames" who wear over-sized hats. The theater's backstage milieu looks and sounds as mocking and caustic as one would expect for such an ignoble place. And amid this baseness a murderer lurks.The script is talky and the pace seems rushed. Despite the tacky superficiality of the characters, they all seem troubled and hurting at a deeper level. The plot moves along quickly with occasional stage performances interspersed with interpersonal relations, not the least of which is a budding romance between Dixie and comic Biff Brannigan (Michael O'Shea). The film's tone abruptly changes, at the midpoint plot turn, from snappy and light to serious and subdued once the murder occurs. The whodunit mystery is interesting, and the identity of the killer was quite a surprise to me.B&W cinematography is adequate if ever so slightly blurry. Sound quality in the copy I watched was better than most films from that era. Prod design appears cheap and minimal. Casting is acceptable except for Stanwyck, who looks too old for the role of Dixie. Yet there's almost no better actress, regardless of what role she happens to be playing. Those lady's hats, enormous and grandiose, add interest to the visuals."Lady Of Burlesque" presents us with a 1940s theater setting that looks and sounds cheap and tawdry. But the murder mystery element adds depth and interest that ups what would otherwise be my negative opinion of this film. And despite being poorly cast, Barbara Stanwyck slaps on considerable value that only she could have provided in that film era.

The film is set in a theatre and is a backstage "whodunnit?". After 45 minutes, we start to see a story develop when one of the Burlesque girls is murdered, but by that stage I was fed up with the film. After the murder, the film continues to be annoying despite a second murder. The men are mainly portrayed as jokers and the women swap comments at break-neck speed in that "wise-crack" style, ie, too fast. Its just all rather tiresome - the dialogue isn't that funny and sometimes you can't understand what they are saying. Judging from what we see of the show that the guys & girls put on for audiences (Stanwyck singing a very flat song, some lame comedy sketches and some wooden dancing by Stanwyck), this is a very 3rd-rate group of entertainers. Other irritations include the Princess Nirvena (Stephanie Bachelor) who affects a terrible Russian accent throughout her performance and the constant references to the world of burlesque as being wild and crazy by the police inspectors. We see no evidence of this. The only funny moments come from the girls reactions as a whole in the dressing room.Its one to avoid.

LADY OF BURLESQUE,an old humble screwball mystery ,very clumsily made, has one thing of real interest—Mrs. Stanwyck, at her rather hottest, as a sex—bomb. As for the rest, it's a quite insipid screwball comedy, unpretentious B slapdash. I find this genre as admissible as the sleazy fancily violent thrillers of the '70s.Mrs. Stanwyck gives a rather standard performance as a wisecracker ;she makes such nice remarks about how men were looking at her ankles when she was 11;today, such confessions would sound utterly unacceptable. But LADY OF … was made in a time when people were having so much more fun ….LADY OF BURLESQUE is about a couple of murders in a burlesque theater ; Mrs. Stanwyck is the Colombina, and an Irishman is her Pierrot; hence the screwball. The execution is, as I already stated, silly and clumsy.Balast.