One of the finest parts of Judy Holliday's Oscar-winning performance in Born Yesterday is also, unfortunately, one of the film's only drawbacks: Holliday is so spot-on in her portrayal of the educationally-deprived girlfriend of a corrupt businessman that she captures not only the humorous and occasionally charming side of stupidity, but also the aggravating, off-putting side, to the point that her Billie Dawn is rather unlikeable for the first third or so of the film. What Born Yesterday acknowledges is that truly stupid people are often unlikeable: they're rude, they're aggressive, they're strangely defensive of their own ignorance, and they're nothing like the lovable ditzes or airheads Hollywood usually portrays. Billie Dawn is less confrontational with her stupidity than her shady boyfriend Harry Brock (played by Broderick Crawford), but when we first meet her, she has a perpetual look of blank boredom on her face, as if she literally has nothing going on in her head except maybe a few sparks of mild discontentment, though she certainly couldn't be bothered to figure out why. Is it any coincidence that she shares her real first name, Emma, with the stupid, restless heroine of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary?
What makes Billie Dawn different from Harry, however, is that she does want to learn, and it is within that desire that she quickly wins us over. Holliday is at her best in the scene when Billie, under the book-reading tutelage of newspaper man Paul Verrall (William Holden), begins to see both herself and Harry in a different light, her newfound intelligence both a boon to her self-esteem and a curse, because, of course, with knowledge comes the responsibility to actually use her mind rather than turning a blind eye to things she knows are wrong. Holliday, a theatre actress, originated the role of Billie on stage during the late forties, but she almost lost out on the part when it moved to the screen: Columbia wanted Rita Hayworth to play Billie, and it wasn't until Holliday gained attention in a supporting role in the Tracy-Hepburn comedy Adam's Rib that she seemed like a viable alternative. Looking at the movie now, of course, it's hard to picture anyone else playing the role, especially since Holliday ended up playing variations of Billie throughout the remainder of the fifties. That she won an Oscar for playing Billie is also a testament to how well she understood the part, not because an Oscar is necessarily the be-all and end-all in actor validation but because the Best Actress category in 1950 was especially stacked: in addition to Holliday, there was Eleanor Parker for Caged, Bette Davis and Anne Baxter for All About Eve, and Gloria Swanson for Sunset Boulevard, one of the most formidable row of performances that category has ever seen.
Jean Harlow, Holliday's competition in the third round of Battle of the Blondes, also made a name for herself playing secretly-smart dumb blondes, but she also had a vampish, glamorous side to her screen persona, and she uses -- and satirizes -- both of those images in the 1933 comedy Bombshell. Harlow plays movie star Lola Burns, a flighty but basically good-hearted woman trying to support her eccentric family and battle a rumor-mongoring studio publicity man (Lee Tracy) while looking for romance first with a Marquis, then a Boston society man (Franchot Tone). The character of Lola was largely based on twenties film star Clara Bow, but Harlow lampoons herself as well, reshooting scenes from Red Dust while flirting with the marquis (a reference to the real film she made with Clark Gable in 1932) and posing for hack magazine photos while pretending to boil a potato. Bombshell is heavy on Hollywood in-jokes and light on actual story, but Harlow is wonderful in it, and Tone is funny in a wink-wink nod to sentimental Hollywood romance.
Many people consider Jean Harlow to be the original blond superstar, which of course is technically not true, as both Marlene Dietrich and Constance Bennett (among many others) predate her in terms of being big stars who happened to have blond hair, but Harlow may well have been the first actress to become famous in part because of her blond hair. Her entire image, from her white-blond dye job to her dark eyeliner, was an essential part of her fame, and she more or less maintained her look for the duration of her career (she died unexpectedly in 1937 from uremic poisoning brought on by kidney failure). The funny thing about Jean Harlow is that, by today's standards, she is not typically what we think of as a really beautiful woman -- she has a rather large forehead, and her penciled-in eyebrows look a little alien -- but she was a major sex symbol in her day, and the sum total of her appearance still translates, as does her sense of humor and the way she fires off her dialogue in that voice that swings from high-class to low-class at will. She and Holliday have that in common (though Holliday's voice goes nasally in a way Harlow's rarely does), and it's possible to look at the type of characters Holliday played as the natural successor to the characters played by Harlow, a little less independent after World War II and the move toward conservatism in the late forties, but still lovable, and still capable of great insight when given half a chance.
Born Yesterday: A
Bombshell: B
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