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"Through these portals pass the most beautiful girls in the world," announces the sign above The Earl Carroll's Vanities revue, and Mitchell Leisen can't resist pricking the tacky fantasy by having a frowsy cleaning lady shuffle by right on cue. The endless supply of "glorious, glorified creatures" kicks off as Kitty Carlisle's warbled ode to "eyes and lips and hips and ankles and dimpled arms and knees" echoes through a procession of rotating tableaux, with starlet after half-dressed starlet pinned to life-sized French postcards as stenographers and cowgirls. The salacious pageantry is where Leisen's apprenticeship under De Mile comes into play, the vaginal imagery includes gigantic jewel boxes opening like clams to reveal splayed nymphs and an ocean of undulating feathers surrounding the erect palm trees atop a cardboard island. Running the show is Jackie Oakie, not a madcap Busby Berkeley visionary but a traffic cop scrambling to keep the showbiz lava flowing through the proscenium. Eros must be spiked with a little Thanatos, thus a couple of murders in the mix, one of which (droplets of blood sprinkled over a showgirl's bare shoulder) gives a foretaste of Argento. Carl Brisson models a look for Liberace, Gertrude Michael pays tuneful homage to reefer madness ("Sweet Marijuana, you alone can bring my lover back..."), and Duke Ellington attacks the piano keyboard before being machine-gunned by Franz Liszt ("The Rape of the Rhapsody"). For his part, the police detective (Victor McLaglen) looks up the chorines' dresses, barks orders ("Go rivet some panties on your cuties, will ya"), and finally just sits back and enjoys the surrealism of it all. With Toby Wing, Dorothy Stickney, Jessie Ralph, Charles Middleton, Gail Patrick, and Donald Meek. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |