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Between family and show business, inescapable attachment much like Nabokov's "ectoplasmic band." Violet and Daisy Hilton, twenty years older since Freaks but still conjoined duchesses on the vaudeville circuit, a métier of songs and shootings. Publicity stunts have their appeal to the one "shortchanged in love," enter the smooth sharpshooter (Mario Laval) eager to use matrimony as a way into Daisy's wallet. Suspicious of the gigolo yet dedicated to her sister's happiness, Violet goes along: "If I have a date, you have a date, too, dear." Uneasy applause underscores the wedding on stage, a stuck organ note later registers vengeance against the deceitful groom. Wellman's Lady of Burlesque and Mann's The Great Flamarion are the chief models for the severities of Harry Fraser's backstage melodrama, threadbare and tawdry and tedious and ludicrously moving. The cad serenades his bride with mandolin over the phone, on the other end she falls asleep with receiver in hand and dreams of herself magically unglued from her sibling, a bare camera records the blur of exploitation and empathy. Plate-juggling, accordion-squeezing and bicycle-humping comprise the intervals between crises, Allen Jenkins adds a grain of authentic seediness as their manager, nodding approvingly. Hurdles with the law ("They say it's bigamy!"), the impossible diagnosis, epiphanies in the garden ("Nature never grants favors..."). Front and center are the Hiltons, with lines they can't recite and yearning they can't fake. "Never a more unusual case presented in any court," this chunk of Poverty-Row Brecht lands on the lap of the befuddled judge who can only consult the audience. With Patricia Wright, Alan Keys, Norval Mitchell, and Edna Holland. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |