This
is a lighthearted piffle with a silly plot, but it is hard to take your eyes
off of Lana Turner. She stuns. This was one of her first leading roles at
eighteen and before the marriages and scandals took their toll on her. She
was always lovely but got harder and more glamorous as she got older but
here, she is a s fresh as a newly minted julep. She really was discovered
in a malt shop - not Schwaabs as legend has it but in a different one on
a break from school. She passed through the hands of Zeppo Marx who was one
of the top agents in Hollywood after leaving the brothers and then she was
taken under the wing of director Mervyn LeRoy and signed with MGM. One of
her earliest tests was a role in the Andy Hardy series and she passed.
Also, in that film is Ann Rutherford as Andy Hardy's long-suffering girlfriend
and she is in this one as well. This was basically a vehicle for Turner
to see if she could make it. She has some fine backing with more experienced
actors, but there would be no reason for this film to exist except for Turner.
The plot is pretty corny - a Hollywood studio
is looking for a replacement dancer to co-star with Lee Bowman whose wife
and partner is pregnant - Mary Beth Hughes in a tiny role. They decide on
Turner who is a dancer with her father (Leon Errol) on vaudeville - but to
promote it they pretend to have a national college contest to get the role.
And she and Rutherford go to college. Undercover. The fix is in. There she
meets the campus reporter (Richard Carlson) who has the appeal of a cheese
sandwich. But of course, she falls in love with him.
But in real life she was falling for the
band leader - a guy called Artie Shaw - she says they hardly spent any time
together on set but when the film finished decided to get hitched. After
one date. Probably not a great idea. The marriage lasted about as long as
the life span of a firefly. She said "he treated me like an untutored blonde
savage and took no pains to conceal his opinion". It was his third marriage
and he had five more - among them Ava Gardner and Evelyn Keyes. It was her
first of seven - just a practice run - among them Lex Barker but her most
famous relationship was with gangster Johnny Stompanato - who was killed
by Turner's daughter. There are a few solid character actors to go along
with Lana - Monty Woolley as a professor, Walter Kingsford as the college
head and Thurston Hall as head of the studio. Shaw gives us a few instrumental
numbers - Lana dances a bit but dancing was not her forte.
