Cinema: No Time for Sargent’s

Harlow was one of the most lurid and luminous love goddesses Hollywood ever had. But never in her 26 importunate years—she died in 1937 of uremic poisoning—was Jean Harlow so exploited as in this purported biography produced by Bill Sargent’s Electronovision Inc. The real Harlow was jade of purest quality; Sargent’s Carol Lynley plays her as a pale finishing-school dropout turned unfinished actress, capturing the walk but not the talk. And Lynley is appropriately supported. Ginger Rogers and Barry Sullivan are grotesquely grasping as her stage mother and stepfather; Efrem Zimbalist Jr., playing a counterfeit composite of Harlow’s last costar, Clark Gable, and her last love, William Powell, seems more like Ronald Colman than either.

The cast can hardly be blamed for failing to get a fix on their parts. Sargent employed the rapid-fire, four-camera, damn-the-retakes shooting technique of television. However ragged the result on the big screen, this method enabled him to bring in his Harlow for one-seventh the cost ($600,000) of a rival Harlow being produced simultaneously by Joseph Levine. More important, he finished it in one-seventh the time (eight days), so that Electrono-vision could steal the plunder from Levine, who will not have his Carroll Baker Harlow ready for premiere until the end of June.