Oh, The Glamourous Life!

Dear Constant Reader,

This month celebrates the birthday of the most famous stripteaser, Gypsy Rose Lee. In her honor, I watched Lady of Burlesque, the movie based on her book, The G-String Murders.

Lady of Burlesque, United Artists, 1943.

Barbara Stanwyck stars as burlesque headliner, Dixie Daisy (a change from the book, in which the main character was Gypsy Rose Lee). She’s hit the big time, headlining at the Old Opera House. But not all is perfect; there’s a lot of tension backstage between singer Lolita LaVerne and well, everyone else, and Dixie is fending off the affections of comic Biff Brannigan. Things become even more tense as a haughty Russian princess arrives and takes Dixie’s spot in the show. And then there’s a murder… and another…

The plot is fairly faithful to the book, but the details have been sanitized for the audience’s protection. One of the plot points hinges on the broken toilet in the girls’ dressing room being replaced. No one ever actually says “toilet” and when the replacement porcelain is shown, it’s a sink. The producer’s affair with The Princess is also implied rather than stated.

We never get to see any real striptease on stage; Dixie takes off a fur muff, to reveal a smaller one, but her Edith Head-designed costumes stay firmly in place. During her big song, “Take It Off the E String, Play It On the G String”,  she sings “breaking out in bumps” and there’s an obvious associated move, but the camera focuses only on her face. Cut to Biff in the wings reacting to whatever is happening on stage. Later she does a little chest shimmy; apparently that was acceptable, where bumps weren’t. The Princess does have the outer layer of her costume removed in pieces with a whip. Maybe that was all right because she’s not doing the stripping.

The plot change that I liked best was that when Biff races in to save Dixie from the g-string strangler, she informs him that she had set a trap to catch the murderer and her friend Gee Gee Graham (based on Georgia Sothern) was waiting for her signal. Still, once the murderer is caught we go straight for the romance with Dixie and Biff rushing off to get married. Happy ending!

It’s light-weight fun. I wasn’t so interested in the murder mystery. Both of the murder victims are so unlikeable that it’s hard to care about their deaths and there’s little tension around the police accusations.

However, the on-stage bits are quite entertaining. We get some dance numbers and a bit of comedy, which was just a touch racier than I expected — they did the “pickle persuader” bit and a court room scene. And Pinky Lee, an actual burlesque comic, plays one of the comics. Dixie and the comics perform an “impromptu” dance to cover the sounds of LaVerne and her gangster boyfriend having a noisy fight backstage. There’s also an opening number with chorus girls (fulfilling all the tropes — the bored one, the clumsy one, the show-off, &c.) parading around the stage, to the melody provided by a tit singer, although they never call him that.

It’s nice to see burlesque treated positively and even somewhat accurately, if cleaned up, by Hollywood during the Hays Code years.

Available on DVD, Prime Video, and the Internet Archive.

Affiliate links in this post benefit the American Burlesque Collection, a 501(c)(3) non-profit.

These writings and other creative projects are supported by my 11 Patrons. Thank you so much! To become a Patron, go to my Patreon page. Or you can just tip me if you liked this.

Dear Constant Reader,

Ages ago I said I was going to review my way through my collection of burlesque DVDs. So far, with a big gap between, I’ve reviewed a movie, an instructional video, and a vintage burlesque film. Time for a documentary!

Behind the Burly Q: The Story of Burlesque in America by Leslie Zemeckis (2010)

You aren’t mistaken; I already reviewed Behind the Burly Q. But that was the book. The documentary came first. In fact, it turned 10 this year!

Zemeckis  traveled the country interviewing burlesque performers and others associated with the art or, in some cases, their descendants, to get as full a picture as possible of American burlesque. Seeing the interview subjects and hearing their stories in their own words has an impact the printed page can not match. Zemeckis herself is invisible, allowing the focus to remain on the history. She may be guiding the interviews off-camera, but she’s not a part of them and there’s no obvious agenda other than collecting the stories, where ever they may lead.

The interviews are interspersed with photographs, newspaper clippings, and film footage. Rather than a chronological history of burlesque, the stories are loosely grouped into sections like “Occupational Hazards”, “Too Many Husbands”, or “Big Money”. Of course many burlesque dancers are featured, some well-known like Dixie Evans and Tempest Storm, some more obscure, but the documentary also tells the stories of comics, singers, variety performers, producers, and more.

The history is further fleshed out by relatives of those no longer with us, such as the son of “tit singer” and straightman Robert Alda (actor Alan Alda), Lou Costello’s daughter, Ann Corio’s husband, Lili St. Cyr’s sister (burlesque dancer Dardy Orlando, who was also married to burlesque producer Harold Minsky). Zemeckis also includes a couple of modern day experts, like David Kruh and Kelly DiNardo.

Since the footage was collected, a number of the interview subjects passed away and in the ten years since, we’ve lost even more. With their words and images captured on film, this documentary is a precious record of our past.

These writings and other creative projects are supported by my Patrons. Thank you so much! To become a Patron, go to my Patreon page. Or you can just tip me if you liked this.