There, there…just put it out of your mind. Just put it out of your mind that Joseph E. Levine's Harlow will actually have anything whatsoever to do with the life and career of Jean Harlow, the 1930s MGM star and Hollywood's first "blonde bombshell." Don't worry your little head over anything even tangentially redolent of the '30s seeping in to corrode the assertively mid-'60s vibe and aesthetics of this lacquered, $2.5 million soap opera. Dispense with all hope of accuracy—from made-up names to fabricated events, Harlow is an absolute work of fiction. Don't look for logic—Jean Harlow looks exactly the same AFTER her Hollywood glamour makeover as she did when we first meet her as a struggling dress extra. Don't pay any attention to physics—Harlow and her mother appear to be roughly about the same age. And don't search for credibility—Red Buttons plays a near-mythical character: a "Hollywood agent from Mars" of such ludicrous selfless, principled devotion and honesty he makes the denizens of Hogwarts look plausible by comparison.
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| The question you'll be asking yourself as the movie's end credits roll |
No, Harlow is a market-driven exercise in expediency and exploitation. A movie as artless and willfully artificial as a Dacron® polyester housecoat. Its purpose is neither to pay homage to its titular subject, nor to say anything meaningful about fame, the film industry, or even recognizable human psychology. It is, pure and simple, an act of commerce. A product designed to capitalize on the popularity of Irving Shulman's sleazy 1964 bestseller Harlow: an Intimate Biography, and a project divined as yet another bid in the campaign waged by producer Joseph E. Levine to sell protégé Carroll Baker to the public as successor to the Marilyn Monroe sex symbol throne (Monroe died in 1962).
Over the years, I've found that by accepting Harlow for what it is—a slick, schlock titillation package with no bearing on Hollywood, history, or even reality as we know it—I am then free to get down to the important business at hand: joyfully reveling in Harlow as a campy, satin-covered, marvelously misguided, miscast, multi-million dollar mistake.
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| Carroll Baker as Jean Harlow |
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| Red Buttons as Arthur Landau |
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| Angels Lansbury as Mama Jean Bello |
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| Peter Lawford as Paul Bern |
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| Mike Connors as Jack Harrison |
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| Martin Balsam as Everett Redman, head of Majestic Pictures |
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| Leslie Nielsen as Richard Manley |
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| Raf Vallone as Marino Bello |
For those genuinely interested in the fascinating and brief life of Jean
Harlow (she died at age 26 of uremic poisoning), there are several books available that provide a more fact-based
overview of the actress' career than Shulman's largely discredited work of biographical
fiction. The internet offers a wealth of information in the form of written profiles and video documentaries available on YouTube. But better yet, just check out any
one of Jean Harlow's feature films (my favorite, Dinner
at Eight) if you want to get a sense of Harlow's unique brand of star quality, and appreciate how she was more persuasive as a gifted light comedienne
than a sex goddess.
Look anywhere but to Joseph E.
Levine's expensive-but-cheap-looking rush job, filmed at a careless, breakneck
speed in an (unsuccessful) attempt to beat a low-budget rival Harlow film to
the boxoffice in 1965. (The 2011 book, Dueling
Harlows by Tom Lisanti, details how Levine chopped months off of his own film's
pre-production schedule when made aware of an independent studio's plans to release
a Harlow movie starring sound-alike actress Carol Lynley, and utilizing an
inexpensive television-based technology [saddled with the William Castle-esque
name of "Electronovision"] requiring no more than an eight-day shooting
schedule.)
Truth be told, when it comes to Joseph E. Levine's Harlow, those unfamiliar with the actual life and personage of Jean Harlow will find themselves at a distinct advantage. The movie is a wholesale work of inaccuracy, gossip, and time-tripping anachronisms; the less one knows (especially pertaining to how people dressed and looked in the '20s and '30s), the better. But while Harlow is valueless as historical biography, it's fairly priceless as a laugh-out-loud comedy of the absurd. A shining, overlit example of that uniquely '60s brand of glossy, overwrought melodrama mixed with tentative sleaze. Harlow promised to salaciously blow the lid off the many myths surrounding the life of the silver screen goddess. Yet, little did audiences suspect that the film's taunting tagline: "What was Harlow really like?" was really a literal, non-rhetorical imploration posed by the screenwriter and producer to anyone within earshot.
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| According to Carroll Baker, filming on Harlow began without a completed script. During filming, a feud erupted between Baker and Levine resulting in the termination of her six-picture deal with his Embassy Pictures. An act that led to her suing the producer (and winning) for breach of contract. Levine's revenge was to have a shrill witch of a character named Cheryl Barker--modeled to look just like Baker--appear in his film next film, The Oscar |
Truth be told, when it comes to Joseph E. Levine's Harlow, those unfamiliar with the actual life and personage of Jean Harlow will find themselves at a distinct advantage. The movie is a wholesale work of inaccuracy, gossip, and time-tripping anachronisms; the less one knows (especially pertaining to how people dressed and looked in the '20s and '30s), the better. But while Harlow is valueless as historical biography, it's fairly priceless as a laugh-out-loud comedy of the absurd. A shining, overlit example of that uniquely '60s brand of glossy, overwrought melodrama mixed with tentative sleaze. Harlow promised to salaciously blow the lid off the many myths surrounding the life of the silver screen goddess. Yet, little did audiences suspect that the film's taunting tagline: "What was Harlow really like?" was really a literal, non-rhetorical imploration posed by the screenwriter and producer to anyone within earshot.
The best way to enjoy Harlow is to ignore its allusions to reality and perhaps see it as a show business parable, the second entry, if you will, in Joseph E. Levine's unofficial "Hollywood as Cesspool" trilogy: The Carpetbaggers (1964), Harlow (1965), and The Oscar (1966).
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As evidence of Harlow's hurried production schedule, note the crewmember captured in the marbled glass in the second screencap above. In her 1983 memoir Baby Doll, Carroll Baker recounts tales of filming being so rushed on Harlow that there was no time for rehearsals, the script was being written as they went along, and, barring any major technical gaffes, the printing of first takes was the norm.
It shows! It shows!
The plot, such as it is, is summed up by the man who discovers Harlow, the only man who sees her as a talent and not a piece of tail--the saintly talent agent Arthur Landau (whose portrayal as a paragon of virtue can be attributed to his being the main information source for Shulman's book). He tells the wannabe star, "You're the sweet, beautiful girl next door. But on fire inside."
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Anyone familiar with my twisted taste in movies knows that every complaint fired at a film like Harlow is actually a valentine. Bad movies are made all the time, but it's a special kind of art to make a watchable lousy movie. And for me, Harlow is a bad movie classic. It's so gonzo in its half-baked, "1930s as filtered through a 1960s prism" sensibilities; it reminds me that they just don't make 'em like this anymore. I love every hair on Carroll Baker's ghastly Dynel wig.
I love the vulgarity at the core of movies like this. I love the garish sets, the superficial overemphasis on glamour, the tin-eared dialogue, the broad-strokes acting, and thoroughly loopy disregard for period detail. Perhaps it's cruel and reveals a small spirit on my part, but I have a special place in my heart for grandiose flops like this (that's flop in the artistic sense. Harlow, while no blockbuster, did make money). Joseph E. Levine produced a number of my very favorite "good" films (The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge, The Lion in Winter), but as the saying goes, when he was bad, he was better. Harlow, along with The Oscar, Where Love Has Gone (1964), and The Adventurers (1970), are the best of Levine's worst. Just brilliantly gauche, sex-obsessed behemoths that look like the kinds of films Ed Wood, Roger Corman, John Waters, or Paul Morrissey would come up with if they'd been given the budget.
PERFORMANCES
As is so often the case with female-centric camp-fests like this, the male cast is a dull and sexless bunch. Peter Lawford looks like the walking embodiment of the word "debauched," Raf Vallone has spark, Red Buttons might as well be wearing a sign saying "Nominate me for Best Supporting Actor, please," and Leslie Nielsen proves once again that when it comes to drama, he's a hell of a comic actor. Angela Lansbury, on the other hand, is so good it's as if she'd wandered in from a different movie.
As a fan of Hazel Aiken, the crass, New Jersey hit-woman Carroll Baker played in Andy Warhol's BAD (1977), I have to say, Baker only shines when she has sarcastic dialogue to deliver. Perhaps working off her feelings about producer Levine, Baker only comes alive (the same can be said for the screenplay) when Harlow requires her character to display contempt for her stepfather, Marino Bello.
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I was eight years old when Harlow was released, but I remember absolutely nothing about the whole Jean Harlow mania that erupted due to Schulman's sordid biography. A huge bestseller; I remember my mother had a copy of the book around the house, but, being unfamiliar with the actress, I paid it no mind. Had I known of the book's scandalous reputation, I'd have been all over it. According to the New York Times, in 1964 all four of the major studios had Harlow films in the works. Only Joseph E Levine's "authorized" version and producer William Sargent's B&W Electronovision version were left standing when the smoke cleared.
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Carol Lynley's Harlow opened three months before Levine's version and flopped at the boxoffice (and at the cost of a mere $500,000, that isn't easy to do). Levine's heavily promoted film opened to good boxoffice but scathing reviews.
For her part, Carroll Baker refused to see Harlow, only managing to catch it by mistake three years later when it was shown as the in-flight movie on a plane she was taking to Buenos Aires ("I was trapped! Actually, as I watched it, I was pleasantly surprised," Baker later wrote). Now, who can ask for a better recommendation than that?
BONUS MATERIAL
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| Body Talk Baker seductively shimmies to composer Neal Hefti's song Girl Talk, a marvelous (ragingly chauvinist) bit of '60s light-jazz that incongruously crops up in this scene taking place in the early 1930s. Although the song went on to become a pop standard of the day (but failed to garner Oscar attention), I've never been able to figure out just what this very modern song is doing in this period movie. But why look for logic? Later in this same montage sequence, Baker actually breaks into a spirited 1960s twist! |
Screenwriter John Michael Hayes (The Carpetbaggers) decides on Harlow's point of view: "I can either write the story about a girl
who slept with everybody to get to the top, or an innocent girl who fought off the
wolves, kept her integrity intact, and made it to the top on her own merits. Which do you think?" Baby Doll: An Autobiography- Carroll Baker -1983
Seriously? Those were
the only two options?
Hayes, opting for the latter, reduces the entire scope of Harlow's
screen legacy to the banal issue of "Will she?" or "Won't she," thereby making
this already trite movie even more insipid than it needed to be. Presented as something
akin to a human pressure cooker unable to keep the lid on her own overflowing sex
appeal, Jean Harlow is introduced rebuffing the advances of a lecherous actor. And the film tirelessly keeps offering up variations on this theme well-nigh for
the next two hours.
Made up to look more like '60s-era Marilyn Monroe than Harlow, and carrying on throughout as though she were Ross Hunter-era Doris Day caught in a
loop of The Constant Virgin; Baker
sports an astonishing number of flattering, form-fitting costumes, and some of
the stiffest, ugliest wigs I've ever seen in a major motion picture.
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| Jean Harlow and her agent, Arthur Landau, take in the rear-projection scenery The real moral behind Harlow is that talent agents are the most trustworthy people in show business |
The plot, such as it is, is summed up by the man who discovers Harlow, the only man who sees her as a talent and not a piece of tail--the saintly talent agent Arthur Landau (whose portrayal as a paragon of virtue can be attributed to his being the main information source for Shulman's book). He tells the wannabe star, "You're the sweet, beautiful girl next door. But on fire inside."
And so the die is cast. Through a passive mother (Lansbury),
a parasitic stepfather (Vallone), skirt-chasing moguls (Nielsen), matinee idols
(Connors), and impotent husbands (Lawford), Harlow
is made up of vignettes that keep hammering us over the head with the same
message: The world's most famous sex symbol had a lot of trouble with sex in
real life. Zzzzzzzzzz.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Anyone familiar with my twisted taste in movies knows that every complaint fired at a film like Harlow is actually a valentine. Bad movies are made all the time, but it's a special kind of art to make a watchable lousy movie. And for me, Harlow is a bad movie classic. It's so gonzo in its half-baked, "1930s as filtered through a 1960s prism" sensibilities; it reminds me that they just don't make 'em like this anymore. I love every hair on Carroll Baker's ghastly Dynel wig.
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| The ever-dull Mike Connors (he'll always be "Touch" Connors to me) plays a Gable-like matinee idol |
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| In this scene, we're asked to believe that the rather mature-looking Carroll Baker is too young to sign a movie contract without her mother's signature. |
While I lost my respect a long time ago for what it meant to be a "Method" actor when I learned that Edy Williams was once a student of Lee Strasberg (yes, THAT Edy Williams of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls). Baker puts great stock in her Method training, and indeed, the Oscar-nominated actress (Baby Doll) can be pretty effective under the right circumstances (Giant, Andy Warhol's Bad, Star 80).
Harlow isn't one of those circumstances. By all accounts, Baker was rushed into this film, exhausted, unwilling, and unprepared. And I'm afraid it shows. Her flat line readings are matched only by her unconvincing display of even the simplest emotions. Of course, given the lines she has to speak, I can't blame her for phoning it in.
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| The always-wonderful Angela Lansbury is a standout in her all-too-brief scenes as Harlow's mother |
As a fan of Hazel Aiken, the crass, New Jersey hit-woman Carroll Baker played in Andy Warhol's BAD (1977), I have to say, Baker only shines when she has sarcastic dialogue to deliver. Perhaps working off her feelings about producer Levine, Baker only comes alive (the same can be said for the screenplay) when Harlow requires her character to display contempt for her stepfather, Marino Bello.
Harlow: Cheap, shoddy greaser!
Bello: Nobility runs in my veins.
Harlow: King liar, Prince loafer, Count ne'er do
well, Baron loudmouth!
Bello: I'll turn you over my lap and spank some
respect into you!
Harlow: I'm too smart to get that close to your lap.
Bello: Perhaps your agent would find a part
suitable for me…
Harlow: He
only handles people.
Bello: Hey, sweetheart, your paycheck...?
Harlow: There isn't any.
Bello: But I have a horse running at 3 O'clock!
Harlow: Better tell him to walk.
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| Harlow plays fast and loose with history. Paul Bern (Lawford) is portrayed as Harlow's first and only husband. In truth, he was the second of three. |
THE STUFF OF FANTASY
They're
called clichés for a reason. Harlow traffics in so many over-familiar melodrama/soap opera tropes, even on first viewing you'll swear you've seen this film before.
The tortured, waking up in a strange bed in a sleazy room with a sleazy stranger, scene
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| 1. A downsliding (albeit, artfully posed), Harlow reacts in silent horror to the depths to which she's fallen |
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| 2. In Valley of the Dolls, Patty Duke's less artfully-posed Neely O'Hara doesn't fare much better |
The self-disgusted, "I can't stand the sight of you!" cold cream on the mirror scene
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| 1. Glass in hand, a boozy, bed-hopping Harlow has had her fill of herself |
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| 2. In Queen Bee, Joan Crawford finds even she can only tolerate just so much Joan Crawford |
The firm and testy "This is for your own good!" avuncular agent intervention scene
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| 1. Harlow's agent tells her she looks bloated, puffy, and older than her years |
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| 2. Neely's agent tells her she looks bloated, puffy, and older than her years |
The hitting rock bottom, "Been down so long it looks like up to me!" beach scene
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| 1. A drunk and depressed Harlow throws herself a beach pity-party |
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| 2. In Valley of the Dolls, Anne Welles swallows her dolls with a bit of water (not to mention lots of seaweed and sand) |
THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I was eight years old when Harlow was released, but I remember absolutely nothing about the whole Jean Harlow mania that erupted due to Schulman's sordid biography. A huge bestseller; I remember my mother had a copy of the book around the house, but, being unfamiliar with the actress, I paid it no mind. Had I known of the book's scandalous reputation, I'd have been all over it. According to the New York Times, in 1964 all four of the major studios had Harlow films in the works. Only Joseph E Levine's "authorized" version and producer William Sargent's B&W Electronovision version were left standing when the smoke cleared.
For her part, Carroll Baker refused to see Harlow, only managing to catch it by mistake three years later when it was shown as the in-flight movie on a plane she was taking to Buenos Aires ("I was trapped! Actually, as I watched it, I was pleasantly surprised," Baker later wrote). Now, who can ask for a better recommendation than that?
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| Suffering in Mink- my favorite subgenre of film That's Hanna Landy (Hutch's gal-pal in Rosemary's Baby) as Arthur Landau's wife, Beatrice. |
BONUS MATERIAL
The rarely-seen 1965 Carol Lynley "Electronovision" version of Harlow
In this film, Lynley offers a very different, less flattering take on Jean Harlow (she's pretty self-possessed), it has Ginger Rogers as Mama Jean (in her last film role, and very good!). Hurd Hadfield (The Picture of Dorian Gray - 1945) is splendid as Harlow's husband Paul Bern. No production values to speak of, but in several ways, an improvement over Joseph E. Levine's version.
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| These early publicity shots show Baker in more period-appropriate makeup, suggesting that there was perhaps a time in the pre-production phase when authenticity was sought in the costuming and makeup. Had the film been shot in B & W (the way we see Jean Harlow in our minds), I think Carroll Baker would have looked great. But by evidence of that color photo, the period look was possibly scrapped because it was so harsh and unflattering. |
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