Word: jessel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Golden Girl (20th Century-Fox) is a corny musical pseudobiography of Lotta Crabtree, whose 19th Century theatrical career carried her from California mining camps to Broadway. Getting almost as much mileage out of his script, Producer George Jessel sets the story during the Civil War, rigs up a fictitious romance between Lotta (Mitzi Gaynor) and a dashing Southern spy (Dale Robertson), trots out a series of old-fashioned vaudeville turns, plays for tears, waves the flag (both Union and Confederate) and endlessly plugs such oldtime numbers as Oh, Dem Golden Slippers...
Treading lightly at first, the film soon begins taking itself as solemnly as Gone With the Wind, and seems to last almost as long. For a couple of reels Lotta yearns for the stage before Producer Jessel lets her go on; then he takes her on a tour that dawdles like an actor poring over his scrapbook. Her suitor follows on horseback. First she thinks he is a gambler, then a bandit, before he emerges proudly as a Southern patriot...
...Jessel hits his last sequence like a drummer going into a sock chorus. Lotta is in mid-performance in a big New York theater. A letter arrives, seeming to seal the death of her lover in a Southern hospital. Suddenly her father (Hoofer James Barton) rushes in to announce that the war is over. Tearfully, Lotta goes to the center of stage and sings a mournful chorus of Dixie to the outrage of the audience. Her partner (Dennis Day) steps out of the wings, gives the New Yorkers a lecture that echoes Lincoln's "malice toward none," and soon...