Cinema: Bunking a Legend

Harlow, clattering into theaters hard on the heels of Producer Bill Sargent’s fast-buck Electronovision film of the same title, is the best movie to be made this year about Hollywood’s legendary platinum blonde—which means simply that it is bad in a big, bold way.

Ostensibly based on Irving Shulman’s “intimate biography,” this gaudy, highly publicized valentine from Producer Joseph E. Levine stars Carroll Baker, suitably bleached and lacquered, as the Blonde Bombshell. Actually, Actress Baker seems more the bomb blonde-shell, as she shallowly traces the famous footsteps that led Harlow from Kansas City to Hollywood scandal, tragedy, and death from uremic poisoning in 1937 at age 26. Under Gordon Douglas’ direction, the film takes frequent side trips into those gossamer realms of fiction where high seriousness begins to sound suspiciously like high camp.

“Oh, Mama, all they want is my body,” sobs Jean the bit player, explaining to her sex-centered mother that she has declined to court fame on the casting couch. “I knew you were too young for this business,” says Mama.

Jean resists the lecherous counsel of Mama and her sponging stepfather (played with gusto by Raf Vallone) but finds a friend in kindly Arthur Landau (Red Buttons), the actors’ agent who in real life raked up most of the muck packed into Shulman’s scurrilous bestseller. “You have the body of a woman and the emotions of a child,” Landau tells her. Soon Jean’s reputation is made by a ruthless producer whose playbuoyant lair features a bedroom equipped with a Roman-size bath, a circular bed, mirrors, and an adjoining jungle paradise with torrential downpours on tap. His succinct proposition: “Do you think you can be comfortable here?”

Vainly pursuing the womanly fulfillment that her pictures teach, the star weds impotent Movie Executive Paul Bern (Peter Lawford). After his suicide, poor Jean plunges into moral decay, and eventually wanders off alone to the beach in a slinky black formal, as good a way as any to catch a fatal cold. Since its script has already succumbed to silliness back in the first reel, the latest filmflam Harlow will be mourned by few.