No dear readers this is not a great film and Kim Novak, trying hard as she does, cannot carry this movie to success. There are very few similarities to the real life of Jeanne Eagels who did actually make films including two talkies. I saw a MOMA screening of the 1929 "The Letter" and Eagels is AMAZING in it. Looks like a cross between Irene Dunne and Miriam Hopkins (though rather dissipated) and acts like a less mannered Bette Davis.
I am always totally fascinated and charmed by Kim Novak though I know she isn't a very good actress. However she is very, very good when playing the girl next door who is aware of her sex appeal (Madge in "Picnic" for example) or a girl from the wrong side of the tracks on the make ("Pushover"). The early and totally fictional scenes of Jeanne Eagels as a carnival dancer trying to hustle her way from the sticks to the Great White Way, show a winning and convincing Kim Novak. She is sexy and has the right mixture of naiveté and calculation. However as the melodramatic story lurches into Fame and Misfortune mode, Kim and the movie slide downhill fast. Kim does a very bad drunk scene (Eagels' various drug addictions are only hinted at towards the last 15 minutes of the movie, alcohol is her main problem throughout the film) and she has many of them throughout the movie. Novak also doesn't convince as a sophisticated and accomplished Broadway star which is what Eagels was. She quickly becomes hammy and unconvincing and the script not only hurts her but accomplished actors like Agnes Moorehead and Charles Drake.
Jeff Chandler who I also adore and am taken with, is also really bad in this. He does a labored and unconvincing Noo Yawk accent though I think he was a New York native. His work sometimes looks like a bad imitation of intense "method" performers like Brando. Nothing he does seems natural and he screws up his face to express emotions. He actually seems worse than Novak who often is rather blank and oddly clumsy.
The script is terrible with real clunkers throughout. Just for historical reference, Eagels was never a carnival performer. She performed in tent shows as a teenager on the straw hat circuit where she met and married her first husband Morris Dubinsky. That marriage which may or may not have produced a child was over by the time she hit Broadway as an ingénue supporting the likes of Billie Burke and George Arliss. There was no "Elsie Desmond" and no "Sal Satori" either nor anyone really that resembled them in her life. "Jack Donohue" is her second husband Ted Coy who she did divorce.
The death of Eagels happened as she was preparing to go out one night and collapsed in her apartment. She was rushed to a private clinic where she convulsed and died. Heroin was found in her system as well as alcohol and painkillers. In the movie Kim swallows a handful of pills while slinging down some hooch after nearly being raped by a vaudeville comic in her dressing room in Sal's Coney Island theater.
The film ends oddly with a tear-stained Chandler watching on a movie screen the image of Kim Novak sing (dubbed by a mystery singer) and dance "I'll Take Romance" in a darkened theater. Though Eagels did appear in Ziegfeld shows and as a chorus girl in the teens, she was never a musical performer.
The movie really has this attitude that Eagels shouldn't have wanted fame but seven babies with Sal and a house in Brooklyn. Ambition is fatal for women and they should stay home and take care of their men. Jeanne/Kim was ambitious and self-centered and had to be punished for wanting more. Her achievements aren't celebrated rather they are held against her.
I don't really think this should be remade and if it is, tell a story that remotely resembles the truth.
Anyway a major misfire.
I am always totally fascinated and charmed by Kim Novak though I know she isn't a very good actress. However she is very, very good when playing the girl next door who is aware of her sex appeal (Madge in "Picnic" for example) or a girl from the wrong side of the tracks on the make ("Pushover"). The early and totally fictional scenes of Jeanne Eagels as a carnival dancer trying to hustle her way from the sticks to the Great White Way, show a winning and convincing Kim Novak. She is sexy and has the right mixture of naiveté and calculation. However as the melodramatic story lurches into Fame and Misfortune mode, Kim and the movie slide downhill fast. Kim does a very bad drunk scene (Eagels' various drug addictions are only hinted at towards the last 15 minutes of the movie, alcohol is her main problem throughout the film) and she has many of them throughout the movie. Novak also doesn't convince as a sophisticated and accomplished Broadway star which is what Eagels was. She quickly becomes hammy and unconvincing and the script not only hurts her but accomplished actors like Agnes Moorehead and Charles Drake.
Jeff Chandler who I also adore and am taken with, is also really bad in this. He does a labored and unconvincing Noo Yawk accent though I think he was a New York native. His work sometimes looks like a bad imitation of intense "method" performers like Brando. Nothing he does seems natural and he screws up his face to express emotions. He actually seems worse than Novak who often is rather blank and oddly clumsy.
The script is terrible with real clunkers throughout. Just for historical reference, Eagels was never a carnival performer. She performed in tent shows as a teenager on the straw hat circuit where she met and married her first husband Morris Dubinsky. That marriage which may or may not have produced a child was over by the time she hit Broadway as an ingénue supporting the likes of Billie Burke and George Arliss. There was no "Elsie Desmond" and no "Sal Satori" either nor anyone really that resembled them in her life. "Jack Donohue" is her second husband Ted Coy who she did divorce.
The death of Eagels happened as she was preparing to go out one night and collapsed in her apartment. She was rushed to a private clinic where she convulsed and died. Heroin was found in her system as well as alcohol and painkillers. In the movie Kim swallows a handful of pills while slinging down some hooch after nearly being raped by a vaudeville comic in her dressing room in Sal's Coney Island theater.
The film ends oddly with a tear-stained Chandler watching on a movie screen the image of Kim Novak sing (dubbed by a mystery singer) and dance "I'll Take Romance" in a darkened theater. Though Eagels did appear in Ziegfeld shows and as a chorus girl in the teens, she was never a musical performer.
The movie really has this attitude that Eagels shouldn't have wanted fame but seven babies with Sal and a house in Brooklyn. Ambition is fatal for women and they should stay home and take care of their men. Jeanne/Kim was ambitious and self-centered and had to be punished for wanting more. Her achievements aren't celebrated rather they are held against her.
I don't really think this should be remade and if it is, tell a story that remotely resembles the truth.
Anyway a major misfire.