Lady of Burlesque (1943)

Lady of Burlesque is a 1943 comedy/mystery directed by William A. Wellman and starring Barbara Stanwyck. It’s a murder mystery set in a burlesque theatre.

Dixie Daisy (Barbara Stanwyck) is the headliner at S.B. Foss’s burlesque theatre. There are the usual backstage dramas. There are romantic entanglements between the girls and the male comics. One of the girls is involved with Louie Grindero (Gerald Mohr), a slightly shady ex-racketeer. The stage manager doesn’t like burlesque artistes. The haughty Princess Nirvena (Stephanie Bachelor) is no princess but she has plenty of attitude and doesn’t get along with anyone. Dixie and Lolita La Verne (Victoria Faust) don’t get along at all. Comic Biff Brannigan (Michael O’Shea) is crazy about Dixie but she doesn’t share his feelings.

But these are all just the usual dramas you expect in any theatre. They’re not likely to lead to anything serious. They’re certainly not likely to lead to murder.

But something does lead to murder.

Almost everybody in the theatre is a suspect. There are performers and stage hands constantly wandering about all over the place so anyone could have entered the dressing room at the time of murder.

With so many romantic dramas and jealousies almost anyone could conceivably have had a motive. And there are plenty of suspects without rock-solid alibis.

The murder weapon was a G-string. A G-string that has now mysteriously disappeared.

This is nothing startling in the plotting department but it’s a perfectly decent murder mystery.

As you might expect the movie’s biggest asset is Barbara Stanwyck. This is a semi-comic movie and Stanwyck can handle that sort of thing with ease. She also gets to be sexy. She has no problem with that either. She can certainly be a sassy wise-cracking dame. And she does some remarkably energetic dancing.

The movie’s biggest problem was of course the Production Code. An inherently sexy story had to be made squeaky clean. Burlesque was all about pretty girls taking most of their clothes off. In this movie we have pretty girls who don’t take off any of their clothing at all.These are the most over-dressed strippers you’ll ever see.

Burlesque was also about risqué comedy (it was often lame but it was always risqué). In this movie the onstage comedy routines are both lame and tame.

On the other hand once the performers are offstage we do get some hardboiled dialogue and some very amusing bitchy exchanges.

One thing I really love about this movie is that every single scene takes place in the theatre. It gives it an atmosphere that is claustrophobic but also emphasises that this is an entire separate world with its own rules.

The movie was based on the novel The G-String Murders by Gypsy Rose Lee. For some years there was controversy about the authorship of the novel, with claims that it was ghost-written by Craig Rice. It’s now generally accepted that Gypsy Rose Lee did indeed write the novel, with Rice perhaps doing a little bit of polishing. The novel’s great strength is that it was written by one of the great burlesque queens and she was writing about a world she knew intimately, and a world she loved. It vividly captures the seedy-glamorous world of burlesque.

It is sad that the story had to be toned down so much. One of the cool things about the burlesque of the golden age of strip-tease (which was over by the mid-1950s) is that we know exactly what these burlesque shows were really like. We know because of the existence of large numbers of burlesque movies which were actual filmed burlesque shows. We know that burlesque in its heyday was a whole lot sexier than anything in this movie. These burlesque movies are easy to find, they’re worth seeing and I’ve reviewed a bunch of them including Midnight Frolics (1949), 'B' Girl Rhapsody (1952) and Everybody’s Girl (1950).

Despite being toned down it’s an enjoyable lesser murder mystery and Barbara Stanwyck is in sparkling form. Recommended.

The good news is that Lady of Burlesque is very very easy to get to see. The bad news is that it’s public domain and the prints are not great. It really needs a restoration and a Blu-Ray release.