We Love Lucy & Stage Door!
Who doesn't love the fast-talking, backstage dramedy Stage Door?
Stage Door combines the explosive screen presences of some of the most popular screen actresses of the late '30s: Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, and Lucille Ball, plus some up-and-comers, including Ann Miller, who was actually only 14 years old at the time (she lied to the bigwigs about her age) and could keep up with Ginger!
This blog post is my entry into the We Love Lucy blogathon hosted by Musings of an Introvert. Click to read all of the other entries today, on what would have been her 109th birthday.
A note about Lucy, first. Of course I've seen I Love Lucy. I've seen a few of her films: Follow the Fleet; Stage Door; Joy of Living; Beauty for the Asking; Dance, Girl, Dance; Ziegfeld Follies; Easy to Wed; Forever Darling; Critics Choice; and Yours, Mine and Ours and I love her magnetic presence. She was a trailblazer, and today I want to talk about one of her earlier roles (and one of my favourite films), Stage Door.
In Stage Door, aspiring actresses come and go (and stay, until their money runs out) at the Footlight Club, a boarding house in New York City, while they wait for their big break. As Katharine Hepburn's high-falutin', mid-Atlantic-speaking Terry Randall moves in, we meet Ginger Roger's brash Jean Maitland and Lucy's Judy Canfield as they discuss going out on a double date just for a chance to eat a nice meal.
The film then follows the women of the Footlight Club as they try to find success. Katharine and Ginger spend the whole movie at odds with each other (mirrored in real life, too!), bickering and landing jobs, finding love, trying to break out from under someone's thumb.
The others at the boarding house are also vying for the same success, including Kay, an out-of-work actress who's three weeks late on rent despite having receive rave reviews in a play a year earlier. She's convinced that if she can just speak to Mr. Powell, played by Adolphe Menjou, that she'll get cast in his next play and she'll bounce back.
Unfortunately for Kay, it doesn't work out that way, and Terry wins the role instead, and plays it to a raving audience. On opening night, Kay's life comes to a tragic end, in a situation not dissimilar to Peg Entwistle's fate, complete with a potential new job having been just within reach.
Though she's relegated mostly to a minor role, Lucy seems to represent the normal ideal of what women were supposed to want back then. She chased her dreams, and when those dreams were unreachable, she abandoned them to get married. She gets the happily ever after, but not the stardom. We get the sense that when she marries her rich fiancé she'll get everything she ever wanted.
She also has a dry sense of humour, saying things like, "I expected a rabbit to jump out any minute," about Katharine's tall hat at the beginning, and that she prefers Amos and Andy to Shakespeare when the older Miss Luther scolds the girls for teasing Terry about her love of the Bard.
One of the many things I love about Stage Door is how the characters almost mirror the real aspects of each actress's life. Katharine Hepburn, the classy and well-educated woman who succeeded playing smart women, mirrors this in Terry. Ginger Rogers, the everywoman who can sing and dance and always always has a witty comeback ready to go, mirrors this in Jean Maitland. And Lucy, actress who wants to move on to bigger and better things in her life, mirrors this in Judy Canfield.
Lucy, we all know, was on to bigger and better things than a film career: she became a television legend, a pioneer and trailblazer for women in television and business, women who wanted to succeed, and she did it all at the top of her game.
We still celebrate her as an icon, and who didn't grow up watching I Love Lucy reruns? Who doesn't recognize the famous red hair, the voice, the hijinks?
Lucy is a legend.
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Do you like Stage Door? What's your favourite of Lucy's films? Let me know in the comments, and make sure you read the other entries!
Thanks for your blog entry!
ReplyDeleteOh my goodness, it's been years since I've seen this one! It was so much fun, though, I remember that much. Movies from the 1930s tend to be a lot of fun, and it's always interesting to watch Lucy in one of her earlier films, knowing the comedic icon she would someday become.
My favorite of Lucy's films is probably The Long, Long Trailer or The Facts of Life, although I do love Yours, Mine, and Ours.