Of the three dancing comedies Lana Turner made for MGM in 1939-40 — Dancing Co-Ed, These Glamour Girls, and Two Girls on Broadway — I like These Glamour Girls the least. It’s clear the studio was experimenting with her, trying out different styles to see which would fit best. I get the feeling they thought her future was in comedy at that point, and I wish they had persisted. She was good at it. In these three she’s still the 18/19-year old ingenue with powerful animal magnetism, as they say, so watching these films also shows the dilemmas MGM faced about what genres of comedy they were capable of making. All three were directed by S. Sylvan Simon — all three have the same crisp camera work and lighting, but the different comic styles force quite different decisions about framing and pacing. And of course they are trying to discover what Turner does best. She’s the unquestioned star, but the comic style determines a lot about how she’s lit and framed — and how she commands the space. Dancing Co-Ed, which I like the most, is by far the most cheerful and least melodramatic. It’s a college musical, basically a B-flick raised to A by the production. The supporting cast has wonderful comedians in it and Turner thrives playing off them, at times reaching Carole Lombard-like heights. Her dancing is amazingly cute in it, real bobby-soxer stuff, but it’s not stressed. Two Girls on Broadway, the last of the three, carries baggage — it’s a remake of the foundational Hollywood sound musical, Broadway Melody, and many in the audience in 1939 would have remembered it from twenty years earlier. It’s a backstage melodrama/comedy of the old school, with borderline anxieties about rich seducers, romantic double-binds, and showstopper floorshows. Turner dances with George Murphy, which is a good pairing — both are light and unpretentious, even though they are given a high-class Astaire-Rogers routine rotated through a Busby Berkeley spectacle.
These Glamour Girls attempts to place Turner in the middle of a stuffy women’s dramedy. She’s Jane Thomas, a taxi dancer at the Joy Lane Dance Hall, recently arrived to New York from Corn Falls, Kansas. Philip S. Griswold the Third, a plastered Princeton boy (it’s called Kingsford but there’s not any doubt it’s Princeton — I’ll tell you about it) played by Lew Ayres, dances with her and in his blotto ardor invites her to come to campus for the biggest social event of the social calendar — not only for the Kingsford boys, but also Manhattan debs on the marriage make. Four high society New York debutantes come down to Kingsford as well, each working to secure a partner, each according to the character of their need. It gets complicated. There are a lot of characters. The melodramatic inevitable happens: Jane is cattily revealed to be not just a hick but a dime-a-dance girl; she’s proud of it; she gives the glamour girls the what for; one desperate debutante dies; Princeton boy discovers true womanly worth; his wealthy dad is revealed as a stock fraudster; but there’s just enough money left for Philip to hitch up with Jane. And there’s a lot of frat boy and society gal chatter and flouncing in between.
The film is often called a satire, but I miss the point. The women are too gorgeous, the spaces too brilliant, the privilege too secure. It’s especially hard for me to watch all that Princeton upper crust elegant wastrel stuff. I went there as a grad student, which made me a certified outsider. But I was an R.A., too, so I saw the Eating Club culture up close. It wasn’t as high-class as in These Glamour Girls any longer, but it was irritating to see it inadequately vilified in the movie. The screenplay was apparently an autobiographical story by Jane Hall, who as a kid from Arizona was orphaned and went to live in Manhattan with her high society aunt. She became quite the item — she rewrote the script as a story for Cosmopolitan, and even made it to the cover.
The film has its fans, but to me it’s stiflingly cluttered — so many crowds of elegantly dressed 1 percenters and yards of beautiful women that they stuff the frames. With all those characters caught up in debutante crises, snob displays, and wastrel escapades, the plot can barely keep the comic spirit going. But there are a couple of quite fine things going for it. Lana’s dancing is okay, but the music for her dances is great! A nice example of the quality swing soundtracks of the time. First there’s Philip’s first dance with Jane at the Joy Lane Dance Hall:
Later, Jane wows the glamorous prigs with her dance-hall chops at the big shindig. (Her partner is Peter Lind Hayes, and Lana is having fun).
The comedy has a hard time getting through, even though most of the cast are solid comic actors in other films. Turner has no Lombard moments; she’s being set up for the great what-for dressing down of the deb world. It’s pretty good.
On paper, the script is probably elegant and well-made. There’s witty repartee. The sentiments are already bending toward the MGM small-town virtuousness that will completely suffocate their comedies in the coming years, but the focus is still on the upper class. Lana does look marvelous, though, and she gets the cute happy ending she deserves.
