Red Hot and Blue (1949)

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Despite having a good cast and a good script, this film is not that good at all. Betty Hutton is an aspiring actress who is absolutely bonkers in more or less every film she's in. It would be good to see her in a serious role rather than comedy roles where she is over the top. Victor Mature wants to be a Broadway director and is a bit more believable. This is probably down to the writing rather than his performance. He has some good lines, but it's just that other characters around him are not so well drawn or believable. Hutton is quite spirited, and you well believe that she can hold her own in a fight with a man or woman, maybe even two men. It would take a big woman to get the better of Hutton. Overall, it is disposable fun.

Betty Hutton is a chorus girl hoping for a big break who is all of a sudden the target of the mob. She recounts her story for the gangsters (and the audience) of how she got involved. It includes lecherous producers, backers and a loyal boyfriend (Victor Mature), and features several wacky numbers, including a burlesque of "Hamlet" that refers to the story of Shakespeare's classic play with the lyrics, "And the name of this omelet is Hamlet!" (And you thought "Gilligan's Island"'s Hamlet parody was camp!) Typically, this "omelet" really could have laid an egg itself, but thanks to Hutton's vivacity (which everybody came to expect in her films), it doesn't. June Havoc ("Gypsy's" real-life Dainty June) plays a secondary role, an irony over the fact that Hutton later played her mother in a summer stock production of that classic Jule Style/Stephen Sondheim musical. Broadway's Frank Loesser, who later wrote songs for the gangsters of "Guys and Dolls", wrote the music for this, and plays a featured role.

This was not certainly one of Victor Mature's better films. In fact, he is terribly miscast here. Mature always excelled in roles where he played the villain or tough police officer. Instead, in this film, he plays a director who is in love with the ever zany Bette Hutton. Keeping up with Miss Hutton, who gives a wonderful performance, is more than anyone else could endure.June Havoc, who died recently at age 97, appears in the film as Hutton's room-mate. She is given little to do here. Remember her as Gregory Peck's Jewish secretary in "Gentleman's Agreement?"The ending of "Red, Hot and Blue" becomes inane. How they get the best of the bad guys here is rather ridiculous, but it's fun to watch Hutton vamp and sing around the foolish script.

Red, Hot And Blue which was also the title of one of Cole Porter's more successful shows from the Thirties has absolutely nothing to do with this film starring Betty Hutton and Victor Mature. If Paramount did anything they bought the title and nothing else.Hutton plays one of three roommates and members of a little theater stock company in which Victor Mature is the director. They're doing some serious things at his company like Hamlet. But Paramount asking us to envision Betty Hutton in Hamlet is really a bit much. A serious version of Hamlet that is. Betty does contribute a rollicking swing version of the Hamlet story in her own raucous style.Betty's got a publicity agent in William Demarest who is busy trying to get her in the media with a variety of loony stunts. The last one was more than she bargained for when he set her up with William Talman who is going into the producing business, but in fact is a gangster. When she's the only witness to his sudden demise, she get kidnapped herself by one of the gangster factions looking for answers to Talman's murder.Although Betty's fans will love Red, Hot and Blue the film really gets more silly than funny. Mature looks really uncomfortable doing some of the physical comedy that's called for in the end. I've a feeling that Bob Hope or Eddie Bracken might have been what was originally in mind for her leading man.Frank Loesser wrote the score for Betty and he gave her one of her best musical numbers a few years earlier in The Perils Of Pauline with I Wish I Didn't Love You So. He didn't write anything remotely as good for her in Red, Hot and Blue, but the songs do fit her personality. Loesser also appears as one of the hoodlums.June Havoc is one of Betty's roommates doing an Eve Arden part probably because Eve Arden was busy elsewhere. Art Smith plays a Walter Winchell like columnist and Raymond Walburn a lecherous old coot out for a little back seat fun with Betty or whomever. All three are memorable.It's not hardly one of Hutton's best films, but it will satisfy her fans.