LIGHT ON THE MOVIES
Hamilton, James S.
Light on the movies Incendiary Blonde — Somewhere in the life of the flamboyant Texas Guinan, probably scattered all through its tempestuous length, there must be a vigorous and colorful saga of...
...That won't offend anybody seriously, and will give the Guinan reputation a virtuous patina that would probably have made that hard-boiled lady hoot with laughter...
...But the personal life-story on which it is strung might have made an old-fashioned bit of sentiment for a Sunday-school library...
...The attempts to make twins of him, so he can carry f;.j o ho::1 a Kve.s, !:r.d to incred:"-!e and \ery dull complications...
...It's a Betty Hutton vehicle, which she rides with all her bounce and vitality...
...But not for the movies, obviously...
...Family) * * * Don Juan Quilligan—An idea with potentialities of some novelty gets mangled to smithereens in this farcical treatment of bigamy and murder...
...Joan Blondell sings like his sainted mother, Mary Treen cooks like her, and somehow he manages to get married to them both...
...All of this is showy material for a handsome and expensive movie production...
...William Ben-dix is once more, alas, a Brooklynite, dumb and softhearted, with a mother-complex...
...Some of the main skeleton of her career is here—joining a Wild West show as a girl, coming to New York and making a Broadway hit, back to the West—Hollywood—to be a silent-movie star of 2-reel-ers and finally running a New York night club, where she brought customers in in droves with her greeting, "Hello, sucker...
...Incendiary Blonde gives Texas only a casual nod as its "inspiration," retains her name for its heroine, and turns out to be Betty Hutton...
...Instead, a blighted love and one marriage, self-sacrifice galore and tragic misunderstandings which one frank talk would have blown away, a night-club as decorous as a stylish ice-cream parlor without a hint of illegality, and within 2 years of her death still a gal as lively and firm-fleshed as—well, as Betty Hutton...
...A lot of well-known talent became a collective cropper in this one...
...Barry Fitzgerald supplies one of his more effervescent Irish characterizations...
...Gone all the husbands, gone the crafty deals that brought her protection in a gangster-ridden age, gone all the years that left her old and faded...
...Light on the movies Incendiary Blonde — Somewhere in the life of the flamboyant Texas Guinan, probably scattered all through its tempestuous length, there must be a vigorous and colorful saga of rough times, from Wild West shows and early movies to the Legs Diamond era of speakeasies...
...And with hints of an actress-to-be...
...Family...
...Arturo de Cordova still mopes along in the trail of Charles Boyer, revealing what he hasn't got that the Boyer has...
Vol. 9 • August 1945 • No. 35
