Variety Girl (1947)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Redundant and unnecessary.

People are voting emotionally.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

The flimsy story is an excuse for a wonderful parade of some of our favorite stars - some of them doing unusual or uncharacteristic things, and doing them rather well. Alan Ladd for instance joins Dorothy Lamour in singing "Tallahassee", whilst the ultra-lively Pearl Bailey has "Tired", and Gary Cooper saddles up a wooden horse on a carousel! True, there is a bit overmuch propaganda for the Variety Club for my taste and it's surprising other show-business personalities didn't object to the Club's annual banquet being turned into an all-Paramount affair. On the other hand, there's so much fun and good humor in the picture, plus of course, an inside view of Paramount Studios (very much confettied and hokied-up of course, but still more entertaining than a realistic tour of Monogram, say), that Variety Girl is hard to resist.

This was arguably the last of the 'all-star' spectaculars generated by the second world war and alas it ranks a bad nowhere to such admittedly ho hum entries as Hollywood Canteen and Thank Your Lucky Stars. On the plus side buffs will welcome the chance to see Frank Ferguson in a rare leading role and whilst it's true than many of the Paramount 'names' are wasted there is the odd moment - Ray Milland answers the phone in his dressing room by removing it from the porcelain bowl below the ceiling light and Alad Ladd reveals a pleasant singing voice in Frank Loesser's Tallahassee - it would, of course, have been a 'natural' to have seen Ladd teamed with frequent co-star Veronica Lake in something but the studio had let her go the year before. Worth a look but that's about all.

There's plenty of stars in this homage to Variety clubs international but precious little entertainment. A poor script and shoddy production values make this movie look as though it was shot over weekends on whatever sets happened to be available. Painful to sit through at times with dated comedy routines that were probably not very funny even at the time. Of the performers Pearl Bailey does a not bad musical number, and Bing Crosby and Bob Hope come the closest to being funny.

... and that's as flimsy an excuse for a parade of stars as there ever was. This one seems more forced and artificial than such films normally do.Many of the stars have little or nothing to do in their cameos: Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster, Diana Lynn, and especially Robert Preston. Perhaps they're the lucky ones, given the limp nature of the script. They might have wound up like Spike Jones -- he and his City Slickers are far more obnoxious here than they were in "Thank Your Lucky Stars" (1943). Or the pitiable Alan Ladd, singing about that greatest of cities, Tallahassee, Florida. Seriously.The occasional bright spots include Paulette Goddard wearing soapsuds, and Ray Milland hiding his telephone in an overhead light fixture, à la "The Lost Weekend".I was also keen to see the rarely glimpsed, grey-haired Glenn Tryon, the male lead in 1928's magnificent "Lonesome", one of the final great achievements of the American silent film. "Lonesome" is comparable in some ways to King Vidor's "The Crowd", but is much less frequently discussed.I think few would argue if I were to say that "Variety Girl" is for completists only.Caveat emptor: This film's recent video release in the Bob Hope Collection has the George Pal Technicolor sequence in black and white.