Movies - Frances Langford again

 I had bookmarked Girl Rush (1944) a while ago because it stars the obscure comedy duo of  Wally Brown and Alan Carney, but when I realized it also features Frances Langford I decided I'd better download it and get it watched.  Well, it's pretty terrible, combining a mediocre Gay Nineties music hall story with a flat RKO western and the Brown-Carney duo seems to me to be justly forgotten.

 Langford's hair is again an enormous superstructure some five or six inches high, perched atop her head like a Venusian Brain Bat but with sausage curls added in the back for that Gay Nineties look. To be fair, most of the girls in the movie have the same sort of hairstyle but hers is far and away the most huge and imposing. The movie is mercifully short, and other than feeding my temporary Langfordmania its only really notable moment is during the scene we see below - Robert Mitchum in drag.

As I was sitting in the sauna at the health club today, pondering the mystery of Frances Langford's immense hairdo, I recalled this scene from Dixie Jamboree, where she takes the wheel of the riverboat in a cartoonishly enormous captain's hat.  It was then that I figured it all out.

  In the 1920s and 1930s, it was cute to be little.  There was nothing more charming than a chest-high jazz-baby gazing up at her big strong man and a sweet little gold-digger like Joan Blondell could wrap any man around her little finger just by acting helpless.  In the '40s small women were not hep.  It wasn't cute any more to be little except in a juvenile role or as comedy relief, probably because the war effort demanded more of women and they were, temporarily at least, taking on a more autonomous and self-determining role in society.  Frances Langford was five feet one inch tall. Like the even more diminutive Carmen Miranda she was tricked out in high heels and big hats, and her colossal coiffure, to make her more acceptably large.  It really is a terribly unflattering style for her, and I find her much more human looking (and her vocal style more interesting) in this clip from the 1930s.

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.