LOVE FOR SALE
by Pat Padua

VIRTUE (Eddie Buzzell, 1932).

Nobody orders Carole Lombard around. In 1932, just before the Hays code went into effect and forbade Hollywood from showing or even speaking of the seedy side of life, Lombard played Mae, a prostitute trying to make good. Mae is a serious role, but Lombard's smart-alecky tough dame isn't far from the screwball heroines for which she's best remembered.

As Virtue starts, a judge orders Mae to leave Manhattan with all her other friends of ill repute. She boards a train but changes her mind at the last minute, hopping a cab to her friend's (and fellow harlot's) place. Pat O'Brien is Jimmy, the cab driver who picks her up and thinks he knows all about dames. At first you think he has her made for a hooker. Then he tells her - I got you pegged - you're a stenog! Phew. Mae and Jimmy fall in love and get married. She doesn't tell Jimmy about her past - she wants to, but as a colleague advises, a man likely won't take it right. Jimmy finds out the hard way.

I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop but there was somehow a happy ending after all. Kudos for liberal usage of "sap" and "chump".

KISS ME, STUPID (1964).

Director Billy Wilder's bawdy comedy has a mixed reputation. Several years earlier, Wilder's The Apartment was considered pretty risqué too: Jack Lemmon works in a Manhattan office and somehow ends up loaning out his apartment to co-workers looking for a discreet place to take their mistressess. Still, it won the Best Picture Oscar - I wonder if that's because you really aren't meant to sympathize with any of the cads - it's poor Jack Lemmon, sweet on kept woman Shirley MacLaine, who you feel for.

In Kiss Me, Stupid the sleaze quotient is considerably raised - it was roundly comdemned by the Pope! (Though I imagine The Apartment was too) - and the sympathies, too, are changed. Orville (Ray Walston) is an amateur songwriter in Climax, Nevada, a small town outside Las Vegas. He's insanely jealous of any man - the milkman, the dentist, even the teenage piano student he tutors - who encounters his foxy wife Zelda (Felicia Farr). Dino (Dean Martin) is a sleazy Vegas singer who stops at the Climax gas station, helmed by Orville's pal Barney (an annoyingly mugging Cliff Osmond). Barney is also Orville's lyricist, and he schemes to keep Dino around to hear and maybe buy some of their songs. But Orville doesn't want Dino's famously lecherous paws near Zelda. So Barney goes to the Belly Button Club, the local brothel, and hires Polly the Pistol (Kim Novak) to pretend to be Orville's's wife. Orville picks a fight with Zelda, which sends her packing off to her mother's and makes room for Polly. And of course, Zelda ends up at the Belly Button Club, holed up in Polly's trailer. It's all very Restoration Comedy.

What makes this all poignant - and controversial - is that the chemistry between Polly and Orville is stronger than what you see between Orville and Zelda. (And this is despite Novak's awful accent - I'm not sure what she's going for, but her voice fails. Her eyes, however, succeed, and you can see her falling when Orville plays a ballad he wrote for his wife.) You end up rooting for them, but the film doesn't really satisfy in the end.

For the Gerswhin fan: Kiss Me Stupid resurrected three obscure George and Ira numbers. "Sophia" and "I'm a poached egg" are silly, but the ballad, "All the live long day (and the long long night)" is a nice surprise. Too bad nobody's recorded it.

 

CineScene, 2001