Word: harlow
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...Harlow, clattering into theaters hard on the heels of Producer Bill Sargent's fast-buck Electronovision film of the same title, is the best movie to be made this year about Hollywood's legendary platinum blonde-which means simply that it is bad in a big, bold...
...question of about the same importance now confronts the world of letters: Who wrote the novel that contains this gooey hooey? Jean Harlow wrote it, with the help of an M-G-M journeyman. Completed before Harlow's death, the manuscript has been hidden away for the past 32 years. Published last week in the midst of a harrowing Harlow revival, Today Is Tonight (Grove Press; $5) reads like the first crude script of a Harlow movie-happy but sappy, and crammed with such insights as: "Funny that a man should want you tanned all over." An earnest preface...
...Jean Harlow's life was what was killed, actually cut to ribbons, in this version. You would never know that Harlow covers six years, if her agent had not loudly said that Harlow was a minor at the beginning of her career and died at 26. You'd never guess that her first marriage, to an important man, lasted almost a year, for in the film it goes for less than a day. And you never learn of her second marriage, of her deep remorse at being a barren woman, and of her bitter feud with her studio...
Surprisingly, the acting in this otherwise total mess is decent. Carol Baker chose to play Harlow as a bewildered little girl, though with a woman's anger, and she is the only truly pleasing part of the movie. Raf Vallone and Anglea Lansbury make convincing parents, and Michael Connors is a charming man-who-Harlow-didn't-marry. Only Red Buttons, as Arthur Landua, really stinks...
...Harlow isn't bad, it's disappointing, which is worse. So much could have been done with the life is the 1930's sex goddess, and so little was, that all the good acting and photography is wasted. At least in Hercules and its uproarious sequels Mr. Levine didn't try for anything more than unbelievable adventure, and he succeeded. The films were funny because they were so bad. But his attempt at believable biography, at a good film, is not bad enough to be funny, just stupid enough to be pathetic...