"Battle of the Blondes" Round Two: Veronica Lake vs. Lana Turner

Just as with Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, comparing Veronica Lake and Lana Turner is more difficult than it initially seems, because aside from their common hair color and their status as pin-up girls during World War II, they don't actually have a lot in common. Lake's career more or less began and ended within the forties, while Turner maintained starring roles from the late thirties until the late sixties, and although both had shaky off-screen lives, Turner's was far more notorious, culminating with the 1957 murder of her gangster boyfriend by her teenage daughter; moreover, despite playing similar femme fatale roles during the forties, Turner had a more varied career overall, playing ingenue roles in the thirties and taking parts in soapy melodramas (Peyton Place; Imitation of Life) as she neared middle age. Ironically, Lake is probably better known today because of her iconic hairstyle, but like many of her contemporaries who became famous for particular looks or aspects of their images, her filmography only briefly mirrored her level of fame.

Watching a Veronica Lake movie can be a surprising experience, because despite her va-va-va-voom reputation today, she really doesn't act or come across that way in her films. She is pretty, certainly, and her peekaboo hairstyle gives her an air of mystery, but there is rarely anything overtly sexual about her roles; rather, she has a hard, reserved quality that says "bitch" more than it does "seductress." She is tiny, for one thing, a far cry from other voluptuous pin-up girls, and even when she's letting her hair down, she doesn't seem like the kind of girl who really knows how to have a good time. As she herself said, "I wasn't a sex symbol; I was a sex zombie." Part of this on-screen quality probably came from her off-screen personality, where she was allegedly extremely difficult to work with, to the point that Joel McCrea, her costar in Sullivan's Travels, refused to ever work with her again, saying, "Life's too short for two films with Veronica Lake."

If I sound like I dislike Veronica Lake, I don't; I think she brought a unique quality to movies in the early forties, and in most instances I think she was the perfect person to play the parts she was given, as in The Blue Dahlia, the movie I watched for Battle of the Blondes. The Blue Dahlia was Lake's third film with her most frequent costar, Alan Ladd, and tells the story of a soldier who returns from World War II and finds himself accused of murdering his unfaithful wife. (Lake plays the woman who helps Ladd try to prove his innocence.) Lake and Ladd were initially paired because she was the only actress short enough to make him look tall on screen, but they ended up being a good match because of their shared remoteness, an almost disenchanted quality that fits the tone of a post-war film perfectly. The Blue Dahlia is a tightly-paced, exciting film, featuring a genuine "whodunit?" mystery and a strong performance by Bill Bixby as one of Ladd's fellow soldiers. Lake doesn't have a lot to do, but she is effective nonetheless, especially in the scene where Bixby's character starts to have a flashback -- an instance where her tendency to underact serves her well.

My Battle of the Blondes choice for Lana Turner, meanwhile, was a completely different sort of film, a (mostly) light comedy released in 1939 entitled These Glamour Girls. Turner became a star with her very first film, 1937's They Won't Forget, but Glamour Girls was her first lead role, playing a taxi dancer who accompanies a rich boy to his college's weekend bash. (That's taxi dancer, not taxi driver, as I originally thought when I read the description of the movie; a taxi dancer is -- or was -- a girl who works in a dance hall as a professional dancer, dancing on a dance-by-dance basis with the male patrons, who buy her time with tickets. It was a popular profession to portray in the movies during the thirties and forties.) Glamour Girls is better than it ought to be, mostly because it's populated by talented actors that, in addition to Turner, include Lew Ayres, Jane Bryan and Marsha Hunt, but it also isn't as good as it could have been: Jane Bryan, as a debutante trying to keep up appearances despite her family's dwindling fortune, was clearly capable of a lot more, and Marsha Hunt's storyline as a pitiful party girl past her prime at the age of twenty-three ends in a spectacularly melodramatic fashion, yet is neither commented upon nor even noticed by the other characters. (I won't say what the melodramatic end is, but if you look at the screen shot of Hunt below, I bet you can guess.)

Turner is warm and friendly in These Glamour Girls, yet I never quite lost the feeling that someone who looks like her would never be intimated by a group of rich girls -- or need a job as a taxi dancer. (For the record, her hair is actually red in this movie; it wasn't until the early forties that she became known as a platinum blonde.) She really is beautiful, and she wears a strikingly modern-looking halter dress for most of Glamour Girls, but many classic movie actresses were beautiful, and I never get much else out of Turner's performances. She's good, but I've yet to see her be great, even in The Postman Always Rings Twice. She's icy in a different way than Lake, in a more superior way, as if she knows she's pretty and doesn't have a lot of time for people who aren't, and while I liked These Glamour Girls and her in it, I have to wonder if it would have been better with a different lead actress, or even if Turner's and Bryan's roles had been reversed.

The Blue Dahlia: A-

These Glamour Girls: B