Harlow

Like the pavement on the road to hell, this film has been made with good intentions. Joseph E. Levine wanted to get completely out of his Hercules rut. Carol Baker tried to sew up her reputation as America's hottest sex symbol. And Hollywood felt ready to display its new maturity and discuss Adult Problems.

Harlow also shines with Hollywood polish. It's colorful, snappy, everyone looks larger than life. Even the music isn't too bad. But no one, not the director, the writer, or the producer, seems to have considered what the film was supposed to do, what point of view it should take. So they've produced the same stereotyped, meaningless trash they were trying so hard to avoid.

The script bounces so fast from cliche to cliche that you have barely enough time to recover from one proverb before bang comes the next. "Baby," says agent Arthur Landau to his fledgling actress Jean as he extracts one dollar from her first day's pay, "one day you're going to resent that ten per cent." And sure enough, about one hour later, she does.

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 and its head, Louis B. Mayer.

I could forgive the film's historical mistakes if it had been honest in what it had shown, if it had not protected those persons who deserved criticism. But changing Mayer's name to Everett Redman, and making him into a kind, fatherly type, is pleasing the Devil, not protecting the innocent. Hollywood still has a lot of growing up to do when it can manufacture a film about moviemaking in the 1930's and conceal the character and identity of the biggest power in that industry.

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.