DuBarry Was a Lady was adapted from a successful Broadway musical by Cole Porter. Like most of Porter’s Broadway productions, it was a racy affair. (Apparently, there was a Madame DuBarry rage at the time. Marie Antoinette’s court rival has receded into the historical background since then.) Like most Hollywood adaptations of Porter’s shows, the movie version is butchered, Porter’s lyrics bowdlerized, and in fact most of Porter’s songs were excised altogether. The two-tiered story is very Old School. The first concerns contemporary reality in which an enthusiastic dancing juvenile, Alec (Gene Kelly), loves a glamorous cabaret singer-dancer, May (Lucille Ball). She loves him back but rejects him because he’s too poor. An idiotic hatcheck boy at May’s nightclub, Louis Blore (Red Skelton), also loves her. When Louis wins the Irish Sweepstakes, he adopts the habits of a rich man and asks May to marry him. May agrees, but explicitly only for the money. Soon after, Louis mistakenly imbibes a spiked drink that he had intended for Alec, and is transported into a dream world in which he is Louis XVI, May is Madame DuBarry, and Alec is a dashing revolutionary leader. When he comes to after the requisite triangular adventures, he gallantly abdicates his claims on May in Alec’s favor, and all is resolved in an ensemble dance number.
I’m not familiar with Porter’s play but there’s no doubt in my mind that it was infinitely better than the witless film version. The misery begins and ends with Red Skelton, a comic whose appeal escapes me. (The Broadway show starred Bert Lahr, a much more gifted comic. Lahr not only played the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz a few years earlier, he was later largely responsible for bringing Waiting for Godot to the US.) Skelton plays Louis like an imbecile who walked full speed into a tree, a slapstick ham with limited physical agility. Pairing him with Lucille Ball (MGM thought it was a good thing to regularly pair the oafish clown with beautiful girls — and apparently it was profitable) is hard to handle. Ball had only recently moved from fiscally constrained RKO studios, where she’d performed in many borderline and even straight up B films (including a few major dramatic achievements like Stage Door and The Big Street, and the neglected gem Five Came Back), to hyperopulent MGM, where they basically did not know what to do with her. She’s better than Skelton, but that’s not saying much.
There’s not much point going further into DuBarry as a comedy. Most of it isn’t very funny and its story was old in the Jurassic. The structure of the original play was altered, so that the central dream sequence takes an age to emerge, mainly because of the many musical numbers that had to be horned in with very little connection to the ongoing plot. The film is worth seeing for two things that have little to do with comedy: the stellar music of the Tommy Dorsey band and the grandiose, overpowering use of Technicolor.
The early ’40s produced a lot of big band swing musicals. Fox made the best of them, featuring Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Raymond Scott, Woody Herman and a marvelous house band. But MGM had Tommy Dorsey, who at the time was surpassing Goodman as the most popular band leader in the country. DuBarry includes a couple fiery numbers in a band that included Buddy Rich on drums, Ziggy Elman and Chuck Peterson on trumpets, and Milt Raskin on piano. Their first number, “Well, Git it!” shows the band at its best. I’ll admit that it’s still hard for me to watch an all-white big swing band, but I’ll also admit this is a pretty impressive gig. It centers on a couple of mini-duets — the dueling trumpets of Elman and Peterson, and a piano duet with Raskin and an uncredited studio man. It also has nothing to do with the story.
In a later scene, Kelly performs a dance spectacle to Porter’s song “Do I Love You?” which he had just sung to Ball in her dressing room. The routine was choreographed by Charles Walters, whom I know little about. This was the last of Kelly’s film dances that he didn’t choreograph himself. It’s a fine performance and clearly influenced Kelly’s own routines in Cover Girl a year later.
For me, the comic high point of DuBarry is Virginia O’Brien’s rendition of the Roger Edens-Yip Harburg song, “Salome.” (Again, nothing to do with the plot.) O’Brien was famous for her deadpan delivery. This is her best that I’ve seen. It’s curious that some of Porter’s more ribald songs were excised but “Salome” was substituted. It’s a perfect imitation of Porter’s style — “no matter how you slice it boys, it’s still Salome.” (Harburg also co-wrote Groucho’s famous “Lydia the Tattooed Lady.”)
The dream sequence is uninteresting, just an excuse for slapstick tableaux. It does feature another Dorsey tune, this time in livery and periwigs.
The rest of the tunes are a dull hodge-podge. But that’s not interesting. It’s obvious that things like acting, story, music direction, editing, even directing and producing (by the usually gifted Roy Del Ruth and Arthur Freed, respectively) mattered very little. The focus was instead on color — dazzling, lurid, overpowering color. Like many of the MGM musicals made at the same time, there should be another word for it than “musical.” “Colorful” would be more accurate, since Technicolor is by far the central actor. Every aspect of the production is subordinated to vivid color. (I’ve read that when Technicolor was first adopted, the company insisted that productions had to include its own house assistant photographers as consultants. I’m sure that influenced how the hues were emphasized, a form of wordless product placement.)
This was the film that established Ball as a hot redhead, and boy is that red hot! I’ve opined in other posts that I feel the requirements of glamor and gorgeous photography can interfere with comedy by drawing the audience’s attention into a sort of awed, contemplative gaze. In DuBarry something similar happens with Technicolor. The effect is to make the human actors into vehicles of hues — costumes, sets, makeup, hairdos and the like are so pronounced they diminish the characters and the story. It’s the color version of a deafening soundtrack.