Movies - or more properly Hair

Dixie Jamboree (1942) is a bit substandard even for poverty row's Producer's Releasing Corporation (PRC), a Mississippi showboat story with Guy Kibbee as the captain, Lyle Talbot the heavy, and lightweight Eddie Quillen as the closest thing to a romantic lead they could come up with. The real interest in this for me is Frances Langford, or more exactly, the thing on her head. This review is not so much of this half-assed movie, but of a hair style.

That's Eddie Quillen, warily eyeing the immobile hair sculpture, or at least the tiny face buried within it. I recently reviewed the Eleanor Powell/Jimmy Stewart film Born to Dance in which Langford does not stand out at all because her head is not crowned by a gigantic immobile hair sculpture like this. She had a pretty good voice, and seems to have done well opposite Don Ameche in the Bickersons radio program, but as a screen actress she leaves much to be desired. Such as personality. Her lack of personality is more obvious when she is ostensibly the star of the film, and when she has a gigantic immobile hair structure perched upon her head, making her small round face seem even tinier and less appealing.

Here she is in Career Girl, another PRC cheapie made around the same time (greatly enhanced by the participation of Iris Adrian - really the only reason to watch it), with her hair sculpture even more gigantic and frightening. 1944 was not a good time for hair, or design in general. There was a trend in set design for musical films to create huge empty apartments or night-clubs dominated by one large baroque motif, isolated and enlarged like a piece chipped off an old picture frame and expanded a thousand times, and this sort of paralyzed upswept head encrustation appears to spring from the same puzzling source. Betty Grable's lack of appeal for me I attribute to her participation in this unappealing trend which makes a round face rounder and a blank face blanker. Her 1945 film The Dolly Sisters is a relentless assault of these frozen squiggly head sculptures, each one more freakish and unnatural than the last. They have the same visual impact on me as a baroque settee with tufted satin upholstery - too much detail creating a kind of nausea, see-sickness as it were. I am still forming theories on the sociocultural basis of this late-wartime design trend but at present it baffles and sickens me.