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Archive for the ‘Chester Morris’ Category

Red-Headed Woman

09 Feb

Red-Headed Woman — directed by Jack Conway. A gold-digging vamp seduces her way to the top. 79 minutes Black and White 1932.

★★★★

This is Harlow’s tenth principal role, and by this time she sure knows a thing or two, and one of the things she knows is Don’t Hold Back One Inch. She plays this fiery tart without a blush of shame, and it’s a treat to see. Harlow is in her early twenties here, and her hair is not the platinum blond it was to more or less remain. She is being thrust forward by MGM as a sex symbol, which annoyed her and baffled her, as it did Marilyn Monroe later on. Both women realized it was quite unreal and unnatural, that nobody was really like that. Several things militate against our respecting Harlow, but being a sex bomb was not one of them. In fact, aside from apparently wearing no undergarments, she is neither sexy nor pretty. Her face is boxy and her lips are puckered with rouge; her nose is from some other face; her voice is completely untrained, grating, and badly placed. As to her being sexy, well, that may have been so at the time to those who were of her own generation and were in their twenties when she was, and saw her first in Wings, where she is quite remarkable and quite unlike her later incarnations. One has to set these things aside to notice her range and how robust an actor she could be. She drives this uncompromising story forward like a steam engine, plowing every cow off the tracks before her. As an actress, she never asks permission. Gentlemen prefer redheads is what she says and she acts on it roundly. Chester Morris is the stolid mid-western millionaire she finagles into marriage, and bounds on from to score all the money in the world. In fact, if there could be such a thing, she is a female bounder. Una Merkel plays her lemony sidekick, and the great Charles Boyer in an early film appearance, plays the chauffeur who becomes her tidbit. The movie is pre-code, and delightfully impenitent as such. Lewis Stone is the first of many fathers-in-law. Henry Stephenson is one of her willing victims – later to be remembered as the speech therapist around whom Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor dance in the “Moses Supposes His Toeses are Roses” number in Singing In The Rain. Liela Hyams plays Morris’s wife in a lovely and giving performance. May Robson plays the society dame who warns her son too late. Paul Bern one of Harlow’s husbands produced it. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the first screenplay and Anita Loos the last. The film caused a scandal in America, and Britain refused to show it. It was a huge financial success for MGM.

 

 
 
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