"Girls About Town" Review

 

by Daniel White

"C'mon everybody, get hot!", Lilyan Tashman shouts after her sugar daddy (Eugene Pallette) plies her with expensive jewelry in Paramount's Girls About Town (1931). Director George Cukor's second film as solo director, the movie is a fast-paced, upbeat, breezy farce. Wanda (Kay Francis) and Marie (Tashman) are two party gals who earn their living by entertaining out of town businessmen. A Pre-Code production that Paramount provided with an "A" budget, Girls About Town sports a terrific cast and except for a few melodramatic plot twists at the end, is mostly champagne fun and frolics.

Prostitutes, though nobody actually calls them that, there are plenty of scenes with Francis and Tashman cavorting in their night gowns and underthings. Kay Francis plays the more serious of the two, who is questioning the validity of her life ("Don't it make you sick to be pawed by a bunch of middle-aged Babbitt's?"). Happily for her, Midwestern heart throb Joel McCrea soon shows up and the two quickly fall in love.

I'm surprised this movie isn't better known (I had never heard of it), it's a superior piece of filmmaking that offers the viewer laughs and amusement from beginning to end.

Lilyan Tashman as Marie plays the perfect hard bitten flapper, a cynical wisecracker, who rallies to her good time pal's side when the chips are down. Who knows what kind of career she would have had if she'd lived (she died of cancer three years after this movie was released)? Luckily for us, most of Tashman's sound films exist (I don't know how much of her effusive, witty screen presence transmits in the silent movies she made).

Also on hand is that talented bullfrog Eugene Pallette. Known for playing gruff, exasperated patriarchs, here he's more the clown, a true"Babbitt" who gets taken in by a scheme hatched up by Tashman and his worried wife (the always welcome Lucille Gleason).

Finally, a word about Kay Francis. Shortly after completing Girls About Town, Francis would skedaddle over to Warner Brothers where she soon became their leading leading lady. At 5' 8", she's probably the tallest of all the movie queens from the Golden Age of Hollywood (only Katharine Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman match her). Which means she must have been a pretty hot property for the studios to indulge such a tall drink of water. Unfortunately for her, most of the movies she made are not of exceptional quality and she's largely forgotten today. And her reign at Warners was relatively brief. A young upstart named Bette Davis was making quite a stir herself at the studio and by 1938 would seize the crown from Kay's head and proclaim that she was the in-house diva (she also took over Kay Francis' dressing room!). And at 5' 3", Bette was a lot easier to partner up with leading men!

With Louise Beavers, Adrienne Ames, and Frances Bavier (TV's Aunt Bee!) as Joy, though I couldn't place her in the cast, Girls About Town is available on YouTube. Look under Lilyan Tashman movies.