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Can I get you a glass of strychnine or something?
A Girl Must Live (1939) is the most amorally effervescent backstage musical never to come out of pre-Code Hollywood. It should so obviously be called Gold Diggers of 1939, I forgive it the absence of Busby Berkeley. He presides in spirit, if not in visuals—which is to say, plenty of scanties, but no giant fruit.
You don't need a gun and a girl for this kind of picture; you need a stage and a girl, as many girls as you can get, really, a couple of male marks with or without skeptical wives, at least one eligible bachelor, and a producer with enough tsuris to open a show of its own, all communicating in cross-talk, double-talk, and double entendres delivered at the average speed of the Bonneville Salt Flats. There may or may not be catfights. There will be surely be gams. Insofar as a plot is preferred to hang the shenanigans and repartee on, this one almost literally hits the ground running with the St Trinian's-style escape from a Swiss finishing school of the dark-haired, determined girl now calling herself Leslie James (Margaret Lockwood); the name is a loan from one of her co-conspirators, the daughter of a legend of the Edwardian stage who swears her mother's reputation will open any door in the West End. "If you see Bob—Robert Donat," her schoolmates wave her off, "you might say hello from me! And if you bump into Flanagan and Allen, say oi from me! Don't forget what your mother taught you! And if you do, write and tell us all about it!" She'll have no shortage of material the second she lands at a theatrical boarding house in Bedbury Square, populated with a classic assortment of jobbing entertainers and dominated by the offstage dramatics of Gloria Lind (Renée Houston) and Clytie Devine (Lili Palmer), an equal-and-opposite couple of ravenous chorines perpetually vying for plum roles and sugar daddies, not necessarily in that order. Lately their mutual sights have been set on the handsome, reserved Earl of Pangborough (Hugh Sinclair), but when Leslie coasts her way into the chorus of Joe Gold's Midnight Frolics, she spoils their game by piquing the interest of the Earl, who hints at a genetic predisposition toward showgirls with his family's descent from Nell Gwynn but seems to meet with only the mildest of friendliness from Leslie even after he helps her retrieve the landlady's cat from the back garden to chase off a mouse after midnight. An all-comers con man and a gullible investor thicken the mix. By the time the full gallimaufry has careened off for a weekend at the ancestral pile with the Earl—and his aunt who may have a social connection to the original one-time Leslie James—you don't even really need a plot, but it's still fun to watch it strip and wisecrack its way toward the ever-hopeful closing reprise.
If there's not that much original in A Girl Must Live, it doesn't matter because the film puts it all over with verve and panache and all those other energetically well-deserved descriptors: this is a movie that never stops moving any more than its characters do, hustling with a wink right from the credits where the three female leads announce their names to a man with a clipboard as if checking in for a cattle call. The one boarder at Mrs. Wallis' (Mary Clare) who isn't in "the profession" is the sanitary engineer Mr. Bretherton-Hythe (Moore Marriott); he upsets the lunch-time shop talk by celebrating the installation of his latest convenience in the middle of the Brighton Promenade, but he's got his genre's number when he tells Leslie, "What the drama wants today is high kicks and low jokes." Hence such gems of dialogue as "Your mother sent you to Switzerland to finish your education, not to begin it" or "I must say you wear clothes almost as well as you don't." If the British Board of Film Censors had to be dodged in the same way as the Production Code Administration, then the exchange that sails closest to their wind might be the prospective chorine's complaint of "Four-ten? I got six in my last job" met with the pungent reminder, "This is for dancing." Implicit in any gold-digger musical, of course, is an awareness of the negotiable line between the two kinds of work and the show's central number "Who's Your Love" spells it out effectively as each girl in her brief plumage and sequins gets a chance to advertise her specialty in competition with her fellows: —Now I'm the one you're looking for, 'cause I can sing and dance. —I can't sing and I can't dance, but oh! how I romance. —I've got lots of sex appeal and I can swing my hips. —Hips are swell for swinging, but for kissing you want lips. —If you want a well-read girl, give me a second look. —I can tell you stories you won't find in any book. The camera has already crash-zoomed in on the Earl of Pangborough, the front-row object of the girls' efforts both metafictional and actual. The no-holds-barred tactics of Clytie and Gloria include a striptease in shadowplay, drolly literalizing the aunt's dry agreement that the visiting chorus girls would "outstrip" any challengers from the Earl's own class. But even the non-racy lines owe metaphysical royalties to Ben Hecht or S.J. Perelman, as when Joe Gold (David Burns) is accused, "You couldn't produce a sideshow in a circus!" and brushes it off with "That's enough of my personal history," a line I am incapable of not hearing in the voice of Groucho Marx. Casual surrealism proliferates in put-downs like "Oh, shut up. Your voice is like the echo of a bunch of radishes" and even statements of fact like the vocal effects artist Miss Polkinghorn (Drusilla Wills) proudly confiding, "I started as Noises Off. I was the scream in East Lynne." A spat between the gold diggers of Holborn is punctuated by her most convincing mee-yow; their later actual catfight will escalate from floor-wrestling to a full-on duel with fire irons. Gloria chases her rival down the stairs shrieking, "Bring back my practice things at once, you little Hungarian shoplifter!" Spotting the other girl chatting up the show's angel in the fur trade, Clytie purrs ominously, "Looks as if that Aberdeen half-breed got her claws into the skunk merchant." The long-suffering housemaid Penelope (Kathleen Harrison) sums them both up: "They couldn't tell the truth to their dying fathers if they knew who they were." You can see the concentration of cynicism in this picture is visible from space. Everyone's working an angle, even our ingénue heroine with her assumed name and her demure game which might backfire on her even more badly than the schemes of her more blatant housemates. "If you're thinking what we're thinking," a savvy stray chorine warns, "well, we thought of it first." Or as Gold declares to a potential backer in accents of purest 42nd Street: "You see, films is my real business, but with all these foreigners making pictures in England, it don't give us British guys a chance. That's why I'm back in this racket."
Paramount among the racketeers of A Girl Must Live is the character played by Naunton Wayne, who floored me. If you know the actor only as vague little Caldicott of The Lady Vanishes (1938) et al. or even the proto-Columbo Superintendent Finsbury of Obsession (1949), watch out for Hugo Smythe Parkinson. Probably for the good of all concerned, I cannot make him sound as charming or as crooked as he is in his blameless, shameless fashion, imperturbably boosting wallets and slithering out of bills and going in by turns with Clytie and Gloria on the badger game it seems they are accustomed to run on the wealthier stage-door Johnnies, switching his allegiances as needed to anticipate the sexual fickleness of other men; he passes himself off as one girl's cousin, another's fiancé, I haven't a clue what he really is, he doesn't seem interested in women at all. He bargains over the fleecing of the Earl as if he's making a dinner date with his mind on some other job, as if the sordid particulars—and his percentage of the take—are all one to him and for all we know they are. "Trust you," Gloria scoffs, sotto voce as she smiles with her teeth for the benefit of passersby and Hugo looks as quizzically poker-faced as he always does. "You'd steal a blind man's dog if you thought you could get tuppence for it." Even his climactic drunk scene that blows the gaff on the three-way effort to seduce the Earl of Pangborough finds him as dizzily calm as a silent clown, remembering that his entrance depends on a convincing excuse for barging around a manor house in the middle of the night: "I got to see a man about a bathroom." He opens a door and blinks existentially at the taps and the basins. A Kelvin-cool customer, lightly troubling the contours of the comedy. I wouldn't trust him as far as I could trip him and he's marvelous.
According to the credits, A Girl Must Live can be sourced to the 1936 novel of the same name by Emery Bonett, but it really plays as though screenwriter Frank Launder and director Carol Reed staggered out of an all-night marathon of Depression-era Warner Bros. musicals and set about gleefully translating them from Broadway to the West End, relying on the likeness of entertainers, lovers, and suckers the world over. It even ends like a pre-Code, as if the film just flapped out of the camera: the romantic ending is elided into an ever-receding punch line while the last word is given to our hustling antiheroines, adjusting their frou-frou and re-setting their sights on the latest specimen of the nobility to heave into view. I almost regret to read it was not a quota quickie but an A-picture for Gainsborough, it has so much of the freewheeling, lessonless attitude of a cheaper production, which I mean as a compliment. I would love to point to a nice little box set of early Carol Reed, but I am afraid I watched this film on watermarked, incrementally undercranked YouTube because I couldn't find it any other way. It is still a national treasure, or at least it should be. This profession brought to you by my personal backers at Patreon.
You don't need a gun and a girl for this kind of picture; you need a stage and a girl, as many girls as you can get, really, a couple of male marks with or without skeptical wives, at least one eligible bachelor, and a producer with enough tsuris to open a show of its own, all communicating in cross-talk, double-talk, and double entendres delivered at the average speed of the Bonneville Salt Flats. There may or may not be catfights. There will be surely be gams. Insofar as a plot is preferred to hang the shenanigans and repartee on, this one almost literally hits the ground running with the St Trinian's-style escape from a Swiss finishing school of the dark-haired, determined girl now calling herself Leslie James (Margaret Lockwood); the name is a loan from one of her co-conspirators, the daughter of a legend of the Edwardian stage who swears her mother's reputation will open any door in the West End. "If you see Bob—Robert Donat," her schoolmates wave her off, "you might say hello from me! And if you bump into Flanagan and Allen, say oi from me! Don't forget what your mother taught you! And if you do, write and tell us all about it!" She'll have no shortage of material the second she lands at a theatrical boarding house in Bedbury Square, populated with a classic assortment of jobbing entertainers and dominated by the offstage dramatics of Gloria Lind (Renée Houston) and Clytie Devine (Lili Palmer), an equal-and-opposite couple of ravenous chorines perpetually vying for plum roles and sugar daddies, not necessarily in that order. Lately their mutual sights have been set on the handsome, reserved Earl of Pangborough (Hugh Sinclair), but when Leslie coasts her way into the chorus of Joe Gold's Midnight Frolics, she spoils their game by piquing the interest of the Earl, who hints at a genetic predisposition toward showgirls with his family's descent from Nell Gwynn but seems to meet with only the mildest of friendliness from Leslie even after he helps her retrieve the landlady's cat from the back garden to chase off a mouse after midnight. An all-comers con man and a gullible investor thicken the mix. By the time the full gallimaufry has careened off for a weekend at the ancestral pile with the Earl—and his aunt who may have a social connection to the original one-time Leslie James—you don't even really need a plot, but it's still fun to watch it strip and wisecrack its way toward the ever-hopeful closing reprise.
If there's not that much original in A Girl Must Live, it doesn't matter because the film puts it all over with verve and panache and all those other energetically well-deserved descriptors: this is a movie that never stops moving any more than its characters do, hustling with a wink right from the credits where the three female leads announce their names to a man with a clipboard as if checking in for a cattle call. The one boarder at Mrs. Wallis' (Mary Clare) who isn't in "the profession" is the sanitary engineer Mr. Bretherton-Hythe (Moore Marriott); he upsets the lunch-time shop talk by celebrating the installation of his latest convenience in the middle of the Brighton Promenade, but he's got his genre's number when he tells Leslie, "What the drama wants today is high kicks and low jokes." Hence such gems of dialogue as "Your mother sent you to Switzerland to finish your education, not to begin it" or "I must say you wear clothes almost as well as you don't." If the British Board of Film Censors had to be dodged in the same way as the Production Code Administration, then the exchange that sails closest to their wind might be the prospective chorine's complaint of "Four-ten? I got six in my last job" met with the pungent reminder, "This is for dancing." Implicit in any gold-digger musical, of course, is an awareness of the negotiable line between the two kinds of work and the show's central number "Who's Your Love" spells it out effectively as each girl in her brief plumage and sequins gets a chance to advertise her specialty in competition with her fellows: —Now I'm the one you're looking for, 'cause I can sing and dance. —I can't sing and I can't dance, but oh! how I romance. —I've got lots of sex appeal and I can swing my hips. —Hips are swell for swinging, but for kissing you want lips. —If you want a well-read girl, give me a second look. —I can tell you stories you won't find in any book. The camera has already crash-zoomed in on the Earl of Pangborough, the front-row object of the girls' efforts both metafictional and actual. The no-holds-barred tactics of Clytie and Gloria include a striptease in shadowplay, drolly literalizing the aunt's dry agreement that the visiting chorus girls would "outstrip" any challengers from the Earl's own class. But even the non-racy lines owe metaphysical royalties to Ben Hecht or S.J. Perelman, as when Joe Gold (David Burns) is accused, "You couldn't produce a sideshow in a circus!" and brushes it off with "That's enough of my personal history," a line I am incapable of not hearing in the voice of Groucho Marx. Casual surrealism proliferates in put-downs like "Oh, shut up. Your voice is like the echo of a bunch of radishes" and even statements of fact like the vocal effects artist Miss Polkinghorn (Drusilla Wills) proudly confiding, "I started as Noises Off. I was the scream in East Lynne." A spat between the gold diggers of Holborn is punctuated by her most convincing mee-yow; their later actual catfight will escalate from floor-wrestling to a full-on duel with fire irons. Gloria chases her rival down the stairs shrieking, "Bring back my practice things at once, you little Hungarian shoplifter!" Spotting the other girl chatting up the show's angel in the fur trade, Clytie purrs ominously, "Looks as if that Aberdeen half-breed got her claws into the skunk merchant." The long-suffering housemaid Penelope (Kathleen Harrison) sums them both up: "They couldn't tell the truth to their dying fathers if they knew who they were." You can see the concentration of cynicism in this picture is visible from space. Everyone's working an angle, even our ingénue heroine with her assumed name and her demure game which might backfire on her even more badly than the schemes of her more blatant housemates. "If you're thinking what we're thinking," a savvy stray chorine warns, "well, we thought of it first." Or as Gold declares to a potential backer in accents of purest 42nd Street: "You see, films is my real business, but with all these foreigners making pictures in England, it don't give us British guys a chance. That's why I'm back in this racket."
Paramount among the racketeers of A Girl Must Live is the character played by Naunton Wayne, who floored me. If you know the actor only as vague little Caldicott of The Lady Vanishes (1938) et al. or even the proto-Columbo Superintendent Finsbury of Obsession (1949), watch out for Hugo Smythe Parkinson. Probably for the good of all concerned, I cannot make him sound as charming or as crooked as he is in his blameless, shameless fashion, imperturbably boosting wallets and slithering out of bills and going in by turns with Clytie and Gloria on the badger game it seems they are accustomed to run on the wealthier stage-door Johnnies, switching his allegiances as needed to anticipate the sexual fickleness of other men; he passes himself off as one girl's cousin, another's fiancé, I haven't a clue what he really is, he doesn't seem interested in women at all. He bargains over the fleecing of the Earl as if he's making a dinner date with his mind on some other job, as if the sordid particulars—and his percentage of the take—are all one to him and for all we know they are. "Trust you," Gloria scoffs, sotto voce as she smiles with her teeth for the benefit of passersby and Hugo looks as quizzically poker-faced as he always does. "You'd steal a blind man's dog if you thought you could get tuppence for it." Even his climactic drunk scene that blows the gaff on the three-way effort to seduce the Earl of Pangborough finds him as dizzily calm as a silent clown, remembering that his entrance depends on a convincing excuse for barging around a manor house in the middle of the night: "I got to see a man about a bathroom." He opens a door and blinks existentially at the taps and the basins. A Kelvin-cool customer, lightly troubling the contours of the comedy. I wouldn't trust him as far as I could trip him and he's marvelous.
According to the credits, A Girl Must Live can be sourced to the 1936 novel of the same name by Emery Bonett, but it really plays as though screenwriter Frank Launder and director Carol Reed staggered out of an all-night marathon of Depression-era Warner Bros. musicals and set about gleefully translating them from Broadway to the West End, relying on the likeness of entertainers, lovers, and suckers the world over. It even ends like a pre-Code, as if the film just flapped out of the camera: the romantic ending is elided into an ever-receding punch line while the last word is given to our hustling antiheroines, adjusting their frou-frou and re-setting their sights on the latest specimen of the nobility to heave into view. I almost regret to read it was not a quota quickie but an A-picture for Gainsborough, it has so much of the freewheeling, lessonless attitude of a cheaper production, which I mean as a compliment. I would love to point to a nice little box set of early Carol Reed, but I am afraid I watched this film on watermarked, incrementally undercranked YouTube because I couldn't find it any other way. It is still a national treasure, or at least it should be. This profession brought to you by my personal backers at Patreon.
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How so, aside from Margaret Lockwood? (None of the other musical comedies I have seen from Gainsborough have given me the transatlantic jolt of this one.)
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Check. It certainly had that. (And to be fair, Evergreen (1934) ends with a striptease.)
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We were visiting the city the year before all this nutjobbery blew!
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I remember visiting other cities! I enjoyed it!
(Thanks for the plaque.)
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Joe Gold so wishes he were Minsky.
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I kind of want to double-feature this object with Hips, Hips, Hooray! (1934). It would be impossible to have an un-innuendo'd conversation afterward.
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Okay, I'm honored.
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Frank Launder, a legend!
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Nine
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I was delighted.
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It really was!
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Thank you! The film that inspired it was.