Lady of Burlesque (1943)

"I'll tell you what the public wants: Girls!"

Our feature begins long after the opening curtain went up for the evening show at the old Opera House, where the viewer promptly gets a front row seat for the current act; and after combining the skimpy outfits with the wild gesticulating by the all-girl chorus filling them out, it doesn't take a viewer long (-- if the title hadn't already given it away, 'natch --) to realize S.B. Foss, owner and proprietor, is running a burlesque show.

But the action doesn't really begin until we move backstage and into the overcrowded dressing rooms, where this well-oiled machine of a company is slipping a few gears as the following acts fritter and frack around, preparing to go on stage next. Why?

Well, see, tonight is also the premiere of Foss' new headlining act, Dixie Daisy (Stanwyck), who is currently avoiding both the claws of a few demoted co-stars and the romantic overtures of swifty Biff Brannigan (O'Shea), one of the troupe’s stock comedians. And as several more rancorous subplots and highly volatile three-cornered love affairs reveal themselves backstage, Daisy takes the front stage by storm and knocks 'em dead with a red-hot rendition of her signature song, "Take it Off the E-String, Play it On the G-String."

But the evening quickly unravels during a later number, a comedic sketch with Biff and Daisy, when the police start pushing their way into the theater. Now normally, when a vice raid is sniffed out, a warning light is flashed backstage so the players can evacuate without getting pinched for public indecency; but this time the alarm failed due to sabotage. And during the resultant melee, once the cops make their move and everyone scatters for the nearest exit, Daisy is caught alone in the darkened basement, where someone reaches out of the shadows, seizes her by the throat, and tries to strangle her...

Not quite film noir, not quite a comedy, and not quite a musical, but more of a musical comedy noir, the wild and rambunctious Lady of Burlesque (1943) was based on an even wilder and more rambunctious mystery novel written by the famed ecdysiast, Gypsy Rose Lee.

Born Rose Louise Hovick in 1911 (-- maybe, more on this in a sec), and referred to by her middle-name, Louise Hovick began her showbiz career early as a singer and dancer in vaudeville, serving as a second banana to her little sister, June Hovick, who headlined the act. Known as the “Tiniest Toe Dancer in the World,” Baby June was a hit all over the circuit and had even appeared in a couple of Hal Roach shorts -- On the Jump (1918), Hey There (1918), crying for the camera whenever their overbearing mother, Rose Thompson Hovick, told her the family dog had died.

Louise and June Hovick.

The devious and slightly demented elder Hovick also had several forged birth certificates for her children to make them old enough to avoid any child labor laws or young enough to qualify for cheaper travel fare, whichever was applicable. And things got so confusing that neither sibling knew for sure when their birthday was -- or even how old they really were!

But June would break away from her mother in late 1928 after an engagement at the Jayhawk Theater in Topeka, Kansas, eloping with Bobby Reed, one of the dancers from their troupe. Her mother raised all kinds of hell over this, having the boy arrested since her daughter was underage according to one of those birth certificates; and even attempted to assassinate Reed at the police station -- only she had forgotten to disengage the safety on her pistol and wound up just assaulting him instead. Undaunted, the two lovebirds still married and June officially left the act and struck out on her own. And while the marriage didn’t last, once out from under Mother Rose’s oppressive thumb, her career flourished both on Broadway and in Hollywood.

Adopting the name June Havoc, she had a breakout performance in 1940 as Gladys Bumps in the Rodgers and Hart musical, Pal Joey, co-starring with Gene Kelly and Van Johnson. All three then transitioned to Hollywood, where Havoc would star in several musicals -- Sing Your Worries Away (1942), Red, Hot and Blue (1949), screwball comedies -- Hi Diddle Diddle (1943), Brewster's Millions (1945), and dramatic roles -- Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947), Chicago Deadline (1949), splitting time between stage and screen.

As for Rose and Louise, well, the act kinda fell apart after June left. Around this same time, Louise realized there was more money to be made working in burlesque than vaudeville. And as the legend goes, her act solidified into something truly special when a shoulder strap on her gown snapped ahead of schedule and, despite her best efforts, the gown wound up on the floor around her ankles to the approving roar of the audience with each failed effort to keep herself covered.

Making this the focus of her act, Louise officially adopted the stage name of Gypsy Rose Lee and soon earned herself quite the reputation as a “high class” stripper due to her acid-tongued commentary, humorous recitations, and a casual stripping style -- which put the stress on the “tease” in striptease instead of the usual bump ‘n’ grind, earning herself a spot in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 and revitalized the art of burlesque itself.

As columnist Dale Harrison put it (Allentown Morning Call, December 27, 1936), “Burlesque hasn’t been itself for more than a decade. The movies, the Scandals-Follies-Vanities type of stage show, the radio, and the Depression were a quartet of competition that had the girlie shows groggy … It remained for Gypsy Rose Lee -- a burlesquer by desperation rather than intent -- to lift “peeling” to a high art. And when she transferred her disrobing from 32nd Street to Broadway, it ceased to be burlesque and became big league entertainment."

Still, at the time, you could only take so much off before you got arrested. And after a successful four year run at Minsky's Burlesque Theater in New York, where she was frequently arrested in many a vice raid -- later translated to film, somewhat, by William Friedken and Norman Lear in The Night They Raided Minskys (1968), Lee went legit and gave Hollywood a shot in 1937, coaxed out west by Darryl Zanuck and 20th Century Fox.

Unlike her sister, this transition did not go well at all. Between 1937 and 1938, Lee, credited as Louise Hovick, appeared in five films, starting with You Can’t Have Everything (1937) and ending with My Lucky Star (1938), all of which were critically panned. She would later star as herself in Stage Door Canteen (1943), performing her act for the troops, and then teamed-up with Anita Ekberg as a couple of ‘exotic dancers’ in the psychological thriller, Screaming Mimi (1958) -- later remade by Dario Argento as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970).

Now, the only film of Gypsy Rose Lee that I’ve actually seen was Belle of the Yukon (1944), a musical comedy western co-starring Randolph Scott and Dinah Shore. And while I didn’t think the film nor her performance was bad by any means, it was definitely odd and marred a bit by her constantly pursed lips and bizarre elocution, as if she was still doing her act.

Thus, as her acting career floundered and failed to find any real footing except for, essentially, playing herself, in 1941, Lee put pen to paper and wrote The G-String Murders, a semi-autobiographical whiz-banger of a whodunit that takes place backstage at a burlesque theater, with Lee serving as the de-facto narratrix to help the reader navigate through these uncharted literary waters.

Hunt Stromberg, meanwhile, was MGM's golden boy producer in the 1930s, who had successfully imported Greta Garbo, oversaw all of Jean Harlow's MGM films before her tragic death, and made a star out of Joan Crawford; he also brought together Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald for their musical extravaganzas, and paid William Powell and Myrna Loy's bar tab for the first four features of The Thin Man (1934-1941) franchise. But by 1941, things had soured so badly between Stromberg and MGM’s head lout, Louis B. Mayer, that he was allowed to walk away from an insanely lucrative contract to try his hand as an independent producer. Something Mayer eagerly let him do, feeling Stromberg would fall flat on his face without him.

Quickly snatched up by the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers -- later morphing into United Artists, Stromberg tapped Lee's novel to be his first feature post-MGM. Now, according to The Hollywood Reporter (October 15, 1941), this would be the second attempt to bring Lee’s novel to the big screen. It seems David O. Selznick had first crack at it, who was also in business with United Artists at the time, optioning the rights and assigning producer John Houseman to adapt the screenplay with Joseph Cotten under consideration for the role of Brannigan. But at some point, Selznick lost interest and Stromberg took over.

Hunt Stromberg (third from left) on the set of The Thin Man.

No matter who produced it, most Hollywood insiders at the time felt adapting The G-String Murders to be an insane and futile notion; and speaking frankly, with the novel's more, well ... saucier elements, I don't think this was something Selznick nor Stromberg could’ve ever even attempted at any of the major studios.

According to Thomas Doherty’s book, Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration, while reviewing the script, Breen was already in a dither, saying, "We are concerned about the prominent use of the object known as the 'G-String' as the murder weapon. It is our impression that the use of this extremely intimate female garment will be considered offensive.” The censors also objected to a routine involving a “Pickle Persuader” but both it and the lethal G-String stayed in the film. There’s also hints that one of the players had an abortion that leads to a blackmailing scheme that also managed to stay in. However, a subplot concerning the stripper’s dressing room getting a new toilet was found objectionable, got nixed, and was replaced with getting a new sink.

Thus, faced with these kinds of restrictions, first time scriptwriter James Gunn (-- no relation to the James Gunn you're probably thinking of --) had to subvert many of the novel's grinds ‘n’ bumps. And to his credit, Gunn still managed to sneak quite a bit past Breen and his hatchet men. I love the bit where Iris Adrian’s Gee-Gee “The Platinum Panic” Graham rips into the others backstage after one of the many catfights, saying, "The next time you girls pull a free-for-all, don’t pull it during my act. Y’know, it’s tough enough doing something artistic for those lugs out there without you [two] calling each other by your rightful names!"

Of course, one of Gunn's alterations was changing the protagonist from Gypsy Rose to Dixie Daisy. And to fill that G-String, Barbara Stanwyck does an amazing job of bringing the heat and the snark -- and she looks absolutely fabulous in those Edith Head designed dresses slit to her nether regions. And when she's dancing, evidenced by her dance-off with co-star Pinky Lee, the star absolutely excels.

As for her singing, well, evidenced here and in Howard Hawks' Ball of Fire (1941), even though Stanwyck lacked the chops of a classical singer her performance definitely grows on you. It's kinda like Ida Lupino's lounge act in Road House (1948); at first encounter, it sounds kinda shaky and teetering toward honestly not very good; but with each passing verse, as both starlets make the songs their own, all doubts are soon flushed. A minor quibble anyway, because the rest of the package drops a payload that easily obliterates any and all concerns.

Speaking of obliterating, as good as Ms. Stanwyck is, the film was nearly stolen out from under her by co-star Michael O'Shea. O'Shea was a revelation to me, here. I had only seen his work once before, as the grizzled First Sergeant who gets stuck in the frozen minefield in Sam Fuller's harrowing Korean War drama, Fixed Bayonets (1951); and I didn't even realize it was the same guy until checking out his credits.

Like with the Hovicks, O’Shea had done his time in the trenches, working barnstorming shows, vaudeville, burlesque, and radio before he broke out in the Broadway smash hit, Eve of St. Mark, and was then imported to Hollywood by Stromberg to fill the vacuum left by several big name actors signing up for the war effort. Here, he's hysterical as the wise-ass comedian and Daisy's punching bag; and the screen just crackles whenever Biff and Daisy trade barbs and rebukes, clobbering each other over the head with one loaded double-entendre after another as the bodies keep piling-up around them.

See, Daisy is initially saved during the raid by the timely arrival of a police matron, who scared the killer off in the basement. Unsure if the villain was really after her -- it was dark down there after all, and when combining the events with the sabotage on the early warning system, Daisy suspects that someone was just trying to scare her off in an effort to shut down the show.

But this theory takes a backseat when Lolita Laverne (Faust) is caught canoodling with the show's straight-man (Fenton), who then has a horrid dust-up with her heel of a boyfriend (Mohr), a gangster saloon keeper; an altercation so violent the act on stage has to switch to a song to try and drown them out (-- one of the film's best handled scenes). And when Laverne later turns up dead, strangled by her own G-String, a lot of the physical evidence points to Daisy being the killer.

Biff, of course, does his best to throw suspicion elsewhere to save his girl, but winds up in trouble himself when the missing murder weapon is found planted in his pocket. And as a wily police inspector (Dingle) tries to sort through all the unruly suspects and motives, things take an even more sinister turn when another stripper, Princess Noveena (Bachelor), the least-popular person in the whole show, winds up dead, too, strangled in the exact same fashion.

Before any more bodies turn up, the show is officially shut down. And while a nervous Daisy feels like a loose-end that needs to be knotted-off, together with Biff, these amateur sleuths unravel a mystery plot that I don't think even Raymond Chandler could’ve cooked-up on his worst three-day bender:

Turns out the first victim was killed twice; first with poison, and then strangled before the poison could take effect. The first victim also knew Noveena's secret: an affair with the boss that culminated with an abortion south of the border, which allowed her to blackmail Foss (Bromberg) into demoting Daisy and making her into the new headliner. The first victim had also withdrawn a large sum of money before she died. Money that wound-up in the straight-man's pocket, who also most likely poisoned her.

Now, despite all of this damning evidence, all the physical clues still point to Daisy as the killer of both women. But who really dunit? The jealous ex-boyfriend? The straight-man? The straight-man's estranged wife? The black-mailed boss? And don't discount any of the seedier backstage hands, holdovers from the theater's Golden Age, whose disdain for burlesque performers is palpable. Or perhaps Daisy was right in the first place: Maybe the motive for the killing was to simply stop the show? Who benefits then? Or maybe, it's a combination of all of the above.

Even though everyone scoffed at Stromberg's folly, Lady of Burlesque went over very well with audiences in 1943 and raked it in at the box-office. Behind the camera, Stromberg brought William Wellman with him from MGM. And 'Wild Bill' Wellman was a pretty ideal choice to direct this picture, I think, because he always gave his leading ladies free rein to dump the usual debutante trappings and be their natural, hard-drinking, rough-talking selves -- see also his efforts in Westward the Women (1951).

Wellman was always so good at capturing a sense of camaraderie in his war pictures -- The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), Battleground (1949), where every person -- the joker, the newbie, the yokel, the asshole etc. -- were all vital in making the squad tick; and turns out the same holds true when he's dealing with dancers and strippers and comedians.

However, Lady of Burlesque does kinda fall flat during the musical numbers, where the director's usually fluid style turns way too static, with lots of long shots, as if to make the audience part of the onscreen theater audience -- an experiment that ultimately backfires, but it was part of his overall theme. (More on that in a sec.) This is remedied, somewhat, by inserts of shots from the side-stages, where we see the act in the background or foreground framed by the more frantic behind the scenes action to break-up the monotony. And I do love the opening dance number, where you can easily tell who's new to the chorus and who's a veteran by the level of their enthusiasm.

But the film really isn't about the show itself, or even the murders, really, but the thunder and chaos of what happens backstage and the interaction of the players to make the show work four times a day. (It's like a combination of the Keystone Cops and The Muppet Show.) Here, Wellman excels, too, where his usual, voyeuristic key-hole camera really doesn't feel like we're spying on the proceedings but are part of the proceedings, giving you a sense of total immersion; and so, yes, even making the audience part of this overall camaraderie.

Over the years since its first publication, many have contended that Lee's source novel for Lady of Burlesque was actually ghost-written by Craig Rice -- an alias for Georgiana Ann Craig, who was gaining notoriety for her John J. Malone mysteries around the same time, which combined the usual hard-boiled knocks with some overtly comedic overtones, resulting in something totally surreal (-- and, according to most reports, highly gruesome). But this controversy appears to have been quelled lately, with corroborating evidence in the form of correspondence between Lee and Craig, who were roommates at the time, and George Davis, an editor for Harper's Weekly, which shows the majority of the story came from Lee with a few suggestions and touch-ups coming from the others.

The author then followed that up with another murder mystery, Mother Finds a Body -- a direct sequel that reunited most of the surviving characters from the first novel -- which was published in 1942, but then Lee was immediately hit with a lawsuit over breech of contract. For, according to the plaintiff, Dorothy Wheelock, an associate editor for Harper’s Weekly, alleged that she and Lee had entered an “oral agreement” back in 1940 before the publication of The G-String Murders, which said they would “collaborate on a joint venture involving the conception, construction, development, writing and exploitation of a literary work with a burlesque background.” This verbal contract also called for a 50/50 split of the profits on the same once it sold.

But after Wheelock claimed to have found a publisher for their book, then still in progress, Lee allegedly backed out of the deal around November, 1940, handing over all the materials they had worked on together. Wheelock then took these materials and wrote her own book, which failed to find a publisher. Wheelock then claimed Lee’s published novels plagiarized their shared work. Lee, of course, denied this until the case was eventually settled out of court -- quite possibly with an assist from Stromberg and United Artists to clear up the movie rights.

On the personal side, when she first moved out to Hollywood in 1937, Zanuck insisted Lee get married to help mollify audiences who were aware of her former profession and looked down upon it. But her marriage to Robert Mizzy was destined to end by 1941. Lee then moved back to New York City, where she had an affair with producer Michael Todd, and appeared in his 1942 musical review, Star and Garter. A year later, Todd would produce a play Lee had written called The Naked Genius, starring Lee and Joan Blondell, but it barely ran for a month -- though the production was later adapted by Fox as Doll Face (1945) -- initially as a vehicle for Carol Landis, who backed-out at the last minute and was replaced by Vivian Blaine.

Meantime, Lee would marry again in 1942 to William Kirkland, and then divorced him two years later. And then married again in 1948 to Julio de Diego, which also ended in divorce. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, Lee had an affair with director Otto Preminger, which resulted in their son, Erik Lee Preminger.

Lee, Robert Mizzy, and Mother Rose (circa 1937).

All the while both Lee and her sister supported their roustabout mother, who opened a boarding house for women in the West End of Manhattan in the mid-1930s on their dime. Scandal soon followed when one of Mother Rose’s tenants, Genevieve Augustine, turned up dead. Rumors soon spread that Rose and Genevieve were lovers, and Rose killed Augustine over a rapacious spat when the latter allegedly started flirting with her daughter, Lee. However, the incident was officially ruled a suicide. Mother Rose would continue to demand money from her estranged daughters until her death in 1954 when she succumbed to colon cancer.

After her mother’s death, Lee once more put pen to paper -- this time, a memoir about her mother and her career; something she felt she could only do after Rose had died without getting sued. Published in 1957, Gypsy: A Memoir would go on to inspire Julie Styne, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Lauents to adapt it into the musical, Gypsy, which debuted in 1959, starring Ethel Merman as Rose, Sandra Church as Lee, and Lane Bradbury as Baby June. The show was a smash hit and ran for nearly two years and 701 shows in its initial run and earned eight Tony Award nominations. But it somewhat notoriously failed to win any, getting wiped out by The Sound of Music -- but it did manage to land a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album. The show was later adapted to film by Warner Bros. in 1962, with Rosalind Russell taking over as Rose and Natalie Wood starring as Lee.

Initially, Havoc wasn’t thrilled with her portrayal in any of these iterations but she basically kept quiet and didn’t raise too much of a stink, allowing her sister access to the royalties without any obstructions -- for a stipend. And Havoc would go on to write her own version of events in two autobiographies, Early Havoc and More Havoc.

In the mid-1960s, Lee served as host for The Gypsy Rose Lee Show, a daytime talk show out of KGO-TV, San Francisco, which ran from 1965 through 1968. She would continue to appear in films, mostly bit parts in things like The Stripper (1963) and The Trouble with Angels (1966). She was also a semi-regular panelist on The Hollywood Squares in 1969. Her last film appearance would be in the Made for TV Movie, The Over-the-Hill Gang (1969), a western, co-starring Walter Brennan, Pat O’Brien and Chill Wills. She would pass away a year later in 1970 due to complications from lung cancer. She was only 59.

“How does one become a striptease artist?” exposited Gypsy Rose Lee during her appearance on the TV-quiz show, What’s My Line? (May 31, 1959). “You take a bag full of marbles and put them in your mouth. And then you take them out, one a day, until you’ve lost all your marbles and then you become a stripteaser.”

Now, for those of you under the age of 40, having "lost your marbles" was a popular euphemism for euphorically embracing a not-well-thought-out notion or decision. And I think it was that kind of self-deprecating humor that is one of the more cherished legacies of Gypsy Rose Lee. And while overshadowed a bit by the more personal Gypsy, I think the rough 'n' tumble Lady of Burlesque should also be cherished as such, too. 

And if you'd like to find out who really dunit, the film’s in the public domain and available for free on many streaming services or dirt-cheap on a number of DVDs (-- the best version I've found was on Amazon Prime under the banner of Moving Pictures Archive), which, alas, is too much of a good thing because a flick this great, with that kind of pedigree, with such a full frontal boom-boom performances by Stanwyck and O’Shea, deserves the full restoration treatment. You listening, Criterion?

Thus, regardless of how bad a print you find for Lady of Burlesque, stick it out. Because you're in for a real crackerjack mystery musical comedy humdinger of a whodunit with lots and lots of mayhem and eye-candy that can sway any and all cinematic curmudgeons. Trust me.

Originally published on July 16, 2013, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.

Lady of Burlesque (1943) Hunt Stromberg Productions :: United Artists / P: Hunt Stromberg / D: William A. Wellman / W: James Gunn, Gypsy Rose Lee (novel) / C: Robert De Grasse / E: James E. Newcom / M: Arthur Lange / S: Barbara Stanwyck, Michael O'Shea, Charles Dingle, Iris Adrian, J. Edward Bromberg, Victoria Faust, Frank Fenton, Stephanie Bachelor, Pinky Lee, Gerald Mohr