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"Have you got all the men you need, Zaza, or shall I send in the firemen?" Vie de coquette, she is the music-hall starlet (Claudette Colbert) seen curled up in the luggage car after a panning shot that also introduces tippling mother (Helen Westley) and wry partner (Bert Lahr). A saltando Belle Époque, a bustling backstage view, the frame sometimes split by the curtain, cf. Ophüls' Divine. She breezes in and out of rooms, throwing off a rival's pitch or dodging a horny impresario or helping a sacked colleague. "No, my audiences don't like sad faces." The Parisian gentleman (Herbert Marshall) catches her eye, that he resists her onslaught of flirtatious devices merely heightens her love. Rise to legitimate theater, a strict regimen: "Work, defeat, despair and, oh yes, a broken heart." An absurdly underseen entry in the George Cukor oeuvre, something of a companion piece to Camille and a foreglimpse of Heller in Pink Tights, a bravura friskiness throughout. (Producer Albert Lewin certainly studies its textures before launching his own directorial career.) Sequined gown and headdress and striped pants and top hat, Colbert and Lahr bouncing on the footlights. "Only one makes your life sublime." "Only one at a time." The moonlit sky glimpsed from a moving train dissolves to a screenful of engine steam for the couple's goodbye, the planned assault on the paramour's wife yields to tears with their tiny daughter. A sustained tracking shot ponders the heroine's mixed emotions as she steps into the show attended by her beau, "a silly song" becomes a secret message between former lovers and the kinship with the Renoir of The Golden Coach becomes crystalline. With Constance Collier, Genevieve Tobin, Walter Catlett, Ann E. Todd, Rex O'Malley, and Ernest Cossart. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |