i love wisecracking dames

Back in 1937, Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball, Eve Arden, and Ann Miller were all trying to make it big on Broadway while boarding at the Footlights Club.

Stage Door is an immensely entertaining film from the height of Hollywood's Golden Age. It balances nonstop wisecracks with tearjerking tragedy, while retaining the ring of truth that keeps it from slipping into melodrama. It was a model for 1939's The Women, a first big role for the fourteen-year-old Ann Miller and twenty-five-year-old Lucille Ball, a departure for Rogers playing a serious role (with just a little tapdancing), and the most famous of Hepburn's early serious performances, before she broke into comedy herself with Bringing Up Baby.

Rogers, Ball, and Arden swap wisecracks with the regularity of a tommy gun. Adolphe Menjou plays a cad for a change, while Gail Patrick makes an attempt at coming down off her high horse. Finally, Andrea Leeds does a strikingly effective imitation of Olivia de Havilland. It's hard to pick just one of these loveable characters over the others.

But it's possible: Lucille Ball's Seattle-born Judy Canfield. She stole my heart. While she could already hold her own against world-class wisecrackers Rogers and Arden, she had not yet developed her ditzy redhead personality of the Fifties. Here she plays a vulnerable girl-next-door who just happened to have stumbled into the theater. She gives it her best, weathers the heartbreaks, but in the end, well...

The genuineness of her performance is heightened by our knowledge that her part reflects Ball's own Hollywood career. Except, in real life, as her career began to wane, Ball discovered television, and stuck it to Hollywood. She (and Desi) ended up buying RKO, the studio that made Stage Door. Hollywood loves a happy ending.

(Tip: Try a Stage Door/A Star Is Born double header: both were released in 1937, both are archetypal showbiz dramas with remarkably similar plots, both feature Adolphe Menjou playing a producer, and, most importantly, both are great movies.)