The Helen Morgan Story

After Doris Day scored a success with Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me and Susan Hayward did well with both Jane Froman and Lillian Roth in With a Song In My Heart and I'll Cry Tomorrow, it was decided that chanteuses of the past were good box office. So Ann Blyth gave it her best effort in a whitewashed version of The Helen Morgan Story.

Problem is that those other women had reasonably happy endings to their stories. Helen Morgan died in 1941, ready to make a comeback, but the years of booze, legal and illegal, took their toll on her body. She was only 41 years old, but packed a lot of hard living and heartache into her body and soul.

I guess it was decided that the audiences wouldn't take to her real unhappy ending so an ending that was out of This Is Your Life was tacked on to this film. It ends roughly in the middle thirties.

Although it's not mentioned at all in the story, Helen Morgan had a Hollywood career. She did an early sound film Applause, shot in New York while she was still on Broadway and introduced in that What Wouldn't I Do For That Man. That was one of her biggest hits and absent from this film. I guess Warner Brothers couldn't secure the rights.

Of course her two best known shows were Showboat and Sweet Adeline. Irene Dunne played her role in the film adaption of Sweet Adeline, but we are fortunate to have Helen doing her original role of Julie in the 1937 Universal film of Showboat. It's where fans today can see and appreciate her best. She also has a number in Al Jolson's Go Into Your Dance and sings another of her hits, The Little Things You Used to Do. Now Warners had the rights to that one.

The Helen Morgan presented here is a hard luck woman who had the misfortune to love and be loved by two wrong men for her. Bootlegger Paul Newman and married attorney Richard Carlson are the men in her life. Actually she did have two marriages, late in her life, and way after the action of this film takes place.

Newman plays one of the first in a long line of cynical characters he breathed life into in his career. To paraphrase a current hit film, he just can't seem to quit Helen nor she him. And Richard Carlson just wants to have his cake and eat it to, wife and kiddies at home and a tootsie on the side, many in fact.

Ann Blyth does a fine acting job. Why she wasn't allowed to use her own fine voice is a mystery since she actually sounds more like the real Helen Morgan than the dubbed Gogi Grant does. You'll see that for yourself in Showboat. Personally I'd have told Jack Warner to take the part and put it in an inconvenient place with that kind of arrangement.

It's hardly the real Helen Morgan Story, but it's a grand excuse to hear some fabulous Tin Pan Alley tunes of an era never to return.

Clearly inspired by other biopics like Love Me or Leave Me (1955) and I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955), this is another tale of a chanteuse whose career success is affected by booze and bad men. Helen Morgan was a star in the 1920's, a nightclub singer who crossed-over into theater for Flo Ziegfeld on Broadway in Showboat. However like so many others, a rapid ascent gave way to a slow decline.

The screenplay by Oscar Saul, Dean Reisner, Stephen Longstreet, and Nelson Gidding, rationalises that the sado-masochistic love of Helen (Ann Blyth) for Larry Maddox (Paul Newman) is what brings her success and failure. Her alcoholism is an ironic symptom of the era of prohibition. Helen is ambitious, but her love for Larry tells us that she would give it all up if he would agree to marry her. However as Larry isn't the marrying kind, she is miserable, not a good state for an entertainer to be in. The lower class milieu that accompanies showbusiness is a breeding ground for these crooks, who see talented women as their meal ticket and a way to improve themselves, and it's no coincidence that Ruth Etting and Fanny Brice too had their troubles with gamblers. When Larry slaps Helen repeatedly and calls her a tramp, the scene could be from any number of biopics.

The dialogue uses period slang for amusing affect eg 'You made those dames look like they were hanging out to dry', Larry is 'stuck on' Helen and tells her 'You're hooked'. When Helen is drunk at a rehearsal, it is said of her 'She's only running on 4 cylinders. It's the gasoline she uses'. The narrative has period oddities such as a lesbian at a rent party, and the wife of lawyer Russell Wade (Richard Carlson) who has an arrangement where it appears she too can be a lesbian, though she refuses to release her meal ticket. Helen gets the standard self-pity in 'I'm no good' and 'Everything I touch turns bad', and we hear the tale of the death of her father when she was a child (Freud, anyone?). However what no one seems to notice is that when Helen is appearing in Showboat and at her nightclub AND drinking, the plain fact seems to be is that she is overworked. Also when Ziegfeld offers her the part of Julie in Showboat that would make her famous, there is no indication that she can even act.

Although the biopic is one of Hollywood's most corrupt genres - revisionist history existing as a star vehicle - it is redeemed when the person biographed is presented as a star. Although Ann Blyth can sing, her vocals are (inexplicably) dubbed, not with Morgan's recordings - Morgan died in 1941 - but by Gogi Grant. Grant's voice is lovely, has that Garland loudness and heartthrob sincerity for ballads, and is also able to jazz it up for 'On The Sunny Side of the Street'. Director Michael Curtiz only lets us see Helen as a star in two numbers - 'The Man I Love', and Why Was I Born?', both when she is supposedly drunk and of course, in perfect voice. Curtiz uses the genre standard cut-aways so we have others opinion of how wonderful Helen is, but otherwise we get Helen singing numbers interrupted or up-staged by drama. There are two other numbers which Helen completes in full - her two songs from Showboat performed in non-Showboat settings, Bill and Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man, but the songs are less showy.

Blyth uses Morgan's signature scarf and sits on the accompaniest's piano as she sings, however often her buck teeth up-stage her. Blyth had been memorably directed by Curtiz in Mildred Pierce (1944) with Joan Crawford, and the later Helen recalls Crawford, in her stark make-up and, in a scene where she is required to tell a lie, where her face is a grimace. Curtiz uses expressionist camera-work to indicate Helen's drunken point of view, and the numbers she falters in when performing are camp - her tipsy rehearsal for 'Somebody Loves Me' wearing a hideous dress, and 'You Do Something to Me' where she falls off the piano. Curtiz cuts from her fall to a newspaper headline 'La Morgan stops Broadway show - flat on her face!'. When Helen is 'missing' on a drunken binge, she gets splashed by a passing car, and is ridiculed in a bar when she sings along to a radio broadcast of her own vocal. However, Blyth's screams of Helen in detox jump over camp into empathy.

Curtiz uses the cringe-worthy orchestration of Morgan songs behind dialogue scenes - you can bet 'The Man I Love' gets a workout in the Helen/Larry scenes, but also the silhouette of someone who hangs themselves. Newman is too young for his role - he was actually older than Blyth when the film was made, but he seems younger - and his technique shows. But although he has practically nothing to do, Alan King is good to have around.

You man remember Helen Morgan from the 1936 version of "Show Boat." This film biography, starring Ann Blyth and Paul Newman, shows her rise from sordid beginnings to fame and fortune through her decline and death due to alcoholism. Gogi Grant did the singing for Blyth, once again leaving average viewers bewildered by the decision to cast someone who cannot sing as a singer. This film features many great songs that Morgan made famous during her lifetime, among them: "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man," and "Bill" from "Show Boat," "Why Was I Born?" "Ain't She Sweet," "Baby Face," "If You Were the Only Girl in the World," "Avalon," "The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else," "Love Nest," "Do, Do, Do," "Breezin' Along with the Breeze," "The Man I Love," "On the Sunny Side of the Street," "Someone to Watch Over Me," "Deep Night," "April in Paris," and "You Do Something to Me." ---from Musicals on the Silver Screen, American Library Association, 2013

Mostly fictional, miscast biographical hogwash of hard luck songtress Morgan. Ann Blyth, in her last theatrical feature, was the wrong actress for the title role, many were considered she was probably the least suitable, so the film starts off with a major flaw from the get go. Judy Garland whose style especially when young was compared to Morgan's would have been ideal. Another shortcoming is that although Blyth was a singer whose voice was relatively close to the real Helen Morgan's she is dubbed by Gogi Grant, also a fine singer but completely different from Morgan in sound and technique. If they were going to dub her why not use Helen Morgan's voice? Curtiz direction is unremarkable here, a few of his more customary florid touches would have helped greatly. Paul Newman who was just starting out when this was made is adequate but missing that loutish air that is needed for the reptile he is playing either Kirk Douglas or Robert Ryan would have been more suitable. The real Morgan story is a compelling one so this comes off as a wasted opportunity.

Since I was born decades after this film was made and this film was made about the period of Helen Morgan's life decades before 1957, I wasn't sure I would be able to appreciate it as much as perhaps it deserved to be. Actually I found it to be somewhat timeless in its depiction of the eternal quest for fame and fortune and the pitfalls that occur along the way. Even in today's headlines we see talented performers who achieve fame and fortune only to stumble due to relationship difficulties, substance abuse and shady characters in their entourage. Although I am not familiar with the real Helen Morgan, Ann Blyth does a credible job in portraying how stardom doesn't always lead to happiness and Paul Newman is very good as an opportunist with a conscience.