Cinema
Stripping
By ISABEL QUIGLY MUSICALS are much more theatrical than most films, in the sense that they need you taking part. They may be spec- tacular, and go in for every kind of visual and aural cheat,. from an expanding universe to stereophonic lungs, yet they are anything but mere spectacle—they want you there, joining in, humming and foot-tapping and excited, and will entice you in by every means they can think of. Seeing a musical 'cold,' without a large live audience out for fun (and that doesn't mean the critics at 10.30 on a wet Mon- day meaning), can be a rather glum business, like getting to a fairground half an hour before things start up. but this time Christmas, blizzards and the vagaries of press day have meant that I saw Mervyn Leroy's Gypsy, out of hours, with the organ and the newsreel and . the rectangular orangeade, and such an active part taken by the audience that the response seemed almost a part of the film, even if it occasionally drowned the next line. And a very different thing from the usual (I imagine) that was.
Gypsy, which is based on the autobiography of Gypsy Rose Lee, is about the transformation of a pretty innocent into the world's most famous stripper, only, if the film is anything to go by, popular notions of what a stripper actually takes off (see Cold Wind in August. for one notion) are remarkably wide of the mark, Gypsy being con- tent with an 1 could an if I would' approach that sends the audience into frenzy while (in her first successful session, at least, that set her on the highroad to fame) leisurely peeling off one glove. (Not that glove-peeling isn't fraugh.
erotic possibilities, on the right hands: I suppose there has seldom been a sexier scene in the cinema than the one in Gilda where Rita Hay- worth took off her gloves. But then Natalie Wood, who plays Gypsy, is no Rita Hayworth.) The story's real heroine, in any case, is not Gypsy (whose real name, anyway, was Louise), but her extraordinary mother, Rose, whose fiery enthu- siasm drove her two daughters (the other, and favourite, one was June Havoc) up and down the States in a desperate search for stardom in the dying vaudeville; till they ended up in a despised 'burlesque' house where, broke and ready to quit, Louise discovered, almost by acci- dent, that beauty and an air of respectability were enough of a gimmick, in someone an- nounced as a stripper, to pack the house.
Rosalind Russell plays the mother as another of her electric, dazzling, tender-hearted impos- sible harridans: middle age has given this rather out-size actress (I speak metaphorically; she has kept her figure) all kinds of new styles and dimen- sions and chances to do things that never suited her when she was young. If there are gaps in one's understanding of what goads her into such a frenzy of mistaken ambition, Miss Russell manages, by sheer panache and spirit, to make one forget them, and she has the knack of mak- ing quite middling lines sound sizzlingly witty. One of her assets, and the film's, is the presence of the unfailingly right Karl Malden as Rose's patient, permanent beau, whose touching wedding-day nerves and happiness are sacrificed (like everything else) to Rose's one-remove ambi- tion in her daughter. Whenever the film looks like rocketing too far into hilarity, there he is, a figure of warmth and sanity, to tug it back, and once he leaves the story it looks and sounds a bit hollow, like Rose's heart and finally Rose's position in her successful daughter's life. Natalie Wood has the right air of fragility and youth, but it is hard to believe (on the evidence of the few professional occasions shown us) in her final achievement of fame and fortune. The songs are rather unmemorable except for one which runs through the film and is sung in every tone and style from moppet ragtime to seductive drawl. with good ironic effect when you think back, forward and round about in the story.
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