Wear the White Dress Without the Brassiere

Hollywood attacks itself like a rabid dog gnawing on its own leg in Bombshell, a surprisingly vicious indictment of everything it stands for. It seems surprising for something so mean-spirited to have come so early in the Dream Factory's saga of self-loathing, and it's even more surprising because it seems so heartfelt. Bombshell passes itself off as a lightly satirical romantic comedy, but I don't think it believes this nonsense for a second, because the romance is all disguised manipulation, and the comedy is almost all bitter. Of course by displacing much of the evil onto a single character, string-pulling and fast-talking publicity man E.J. "Space" Hanlon (Lee Tracy), it protects the real bastards (studio heads, producers, etc.) from undue attention. But despite this shield of plausible deniability, it still serves up a pretty strong indictment of the virtual indentured servitude of contract players: famous actress Lola Burns (Jean Harlow) has no control over what parts she plays, no control over what the studio machinery decides is going to be written about her in the papers, literally no control over her own reality, a fact that's revealed to her when she decides to ditch it all and escape into the real world.

There's an incredible amount of overlap between reality and fiction. Harlow seems to be playing herself: her Lola is an actress typecast in raunchy comedies, known for her censorship-baiting costumes ("wear the white dress without the brassiere" is her wardrobe instruction one morning), who longs to be recognized for her acting chops instead of her bustline. They even call her "the If Girl," a nickname rich with the kind of delicious questions her male (and female) viewers must have asked every time she strode onscreen. Beyond that, though, this Lola happens to have recently costarred with Clark Gable in Red Dust, and her primary assignment at the beginning of this film is to do retakes of the infamous rain barrel bathing scene. Remove the "Lola" part, and it's like a documentary. There are other constant references to the real Hollywood, too: Lola mentions Gable's performance in Susan Lenox with Greta Garbo and later appreciates some romantic wooing by comparing it favorably to scenes in Norma Shearer and Helen Hayes films, and an assistant director waxes fondly about Tahiti by discussing his assignment on White Shadows in the South Seas. Throw in the rumor that the film was partly based on Harlow's own experiences in Hollywood, right down to her greedy father (played by Frank Morgan here), and tell me where exactly the line between reality and fiction falls. The film's title even ended up as the title of one of her biographies.

I'm guessing it's somewhere around the film's portrayal of Lola Burns, because I think (or would like to believe) Jean Harlow was probably a lot smarter and less shallow than her character, at whom a fair amount of the film's venom is directed. Sure, she's the victim of an unjust system that makes it quite impossible for her to live a normal life, but honestly, she doesn't seem quite capable of normalcy. From her designer sheepdogs to her designer European-Count boyfriend to the awful "mid-Atlantic" accent she adopts when she can't help being pretentious to her gold-plated phone (yes, the film is black and white, but the phone is so obvious that it had to have been intentional), Lola embodies the Hollywood artificiality she hates.

And it's here, when Harlow has to communicate this contradiction—basically, she wants to escape from something that she can't separate herself from—that I finally got her as an actress, as a sex symbol, and as a unique combination of the two. I have to admit that I've never really liked her or understood her appeal. She stinks up the room in The Public Enemy (honestly, what the hell is she doing in that movie?), and she's shrill and mostly unfunny in Platinum Blonde and Libeled Lady. I finally understood her sexiness in Red Dust, but Mary Astor blew her off the screen in that film, and the only time she'd convinced me as an actress was her delivery of a single line in China Seas. But I finally get her appeal. She's consistently funny: her near-constant high-pitched temper tantrums are a hoot instead of being grating, and her deluded attempts to behave like a normal human being are simply side-splitting. She's best in a couple of silent moments that had me laughing out loud. First, after she decides what she really needs to do is adopt a baby, the music swells on the soundtrack and she gazes reverently upward—at a velvet painting of a mare and foal!—selfishly unable to understand how horrible the empty chaos she inhabits would be for a child. And second, after a last-act romancing by the suave and wealthy Franchot Tone, she retires to her room for romantic daydreams, a trick she learned from Hollywood. She turns on the radio for the soft music that's supposed to be playing, and it doesn't register on her face for a moment that what comes out is ear-splitting jazz. It's a great comedic performance that provides a new delight in almost every scene. And she doesn't skimp on the drama, either: late in the film, after Hanlon's hijinks have driven her nearly insane, she's quite moving in her desire to get a little taste of reality, even if it means jettisoning her career.

If it were all Harlow, this would have been a really good movie, but it's also stocked with a number of supporting players, familiar faces and strangers, who nail every line in the excellent screenplay by Jules Furthman and John Lee Mahin. Una Merkel, always a delight as the squeaky-voiced, wise-cracking second female lead in countless films, plays Lola's scheming assistant Mac, who has a series of whip-smart exchanges with Louise Beavers, whose standard role as the maid is expanded here into someone who gets some of the film's best lines: "Don't scald me with your steam, woman—I knows where the bodies are buried!" And there must be so many bodies—perhaps soon to include Lola herself, the film implies with its odd ending, which states uncategorically that Lola's little bit of defiance did nothing except to convince her that defiance was utterly futile under the studio system. Unless your name is Bette Davis or Olivia de Havilland, I suppose.