I have to admit that when I saw this film announced on the classic movies channel, I thought I wouldn't bother. Thankfully, there was nothing else worth watching so I decided to give it a try - and, oh boy, am I glad I did!
PERILS OF PAULINE (1947) is great fun from beginning to end, in turns love story, musical, actioner, and a reminder of how great the spirit was in the film industry in the late 1940s, after WWII, to me the real golden age of the cinema.
Betty Hutton is superb as Pauline. It boggles my mind that her career fizzled out when she had everything to be better than the much better known Doris Day, for instance. She is beautiful, fun, sings well and is just... magnetic! John Lund is great as the male lead and love interest, Constance Collier is memorable as the no nonsense grand old dame Julia, Billy de Wolffe appears in little bits but his contributions are always eye-catching, and William Demarest embodies a fantastic spoof on silent movie directors.
The sequence which begins with pie throwing, and sees Hutton and Collier going through a number of studio sets shooting different films and ending up in a lion's den, to then sign a movie contract, is one of my all time favorites - any movie, anywhere - and I think that it must have served as blueprint for some of the initial sequences with Gene Kelly and Donald Connor in SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, which came out five years later.
Besides all its others, PERILS OF PAULINE boasts one of the tidiest and most fitting ends I have ever seen - and I have seen many movies.
Really loved all 96 minutes of this flick. Highly recommended. 9/10
PERILS OF PAULINE (1947) is great fun from beginning to end, in turns love story, musical, actioner, and a reminder of how great the spirit was in the film industry in the late 1940s, after WWII, to me the real golden age of the cinema.
Betty Hutton is superb as Pauline. It boggles my mind that her career fizzled out when she had everything to be better than the much better known Doris Day, for instance. She is beautiful, fun, sings well and is just... magnetic! John Lund is great as the male lead and love interest, Constance Collier is memorable as the no nonsense grand old dame Julia, Billy de Wolffe appears in little bits but his contributions are always eye-catching, and William Demarest embodies a fantastic spoof on silent movie directors.
The sequence which begins with pie throwing, and sees Hutton and Collier going through a number of studio sets shooting different films and ending up in a lion's den, to then sign a movie contract, is one of my all time favorites - any movie, anywhere - and I think that it must have served as blueprint for some of the initial sequences with Gene Kelly and Donald Connor in SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, which came out five years later.
Besides all its others, PERILS OF PAULINE boasts one of the tidiest and most fitting ends I have ever seen - and I have seen many movies.
Really loved all 96 minutes of this flick. Highly recommended. 9/10