Friday, February 24, 2012

Movie review - "Second Fiddle" (1939) **

Having helped make Sonja Henie movie star, 20th Century Fox didn't let her flounder - she got large budgets, cream support casts (Rudy Vallee), top rank composers (Irving Berlin) and co-star (Tyrone Power), and a script artfully constructed to minimise her limitations. Here she plays a teacher from Minnesota (to cover the accent) who is amped as a possible star for a Hollywood film.

Tyrone Power was a very big star by this stage, certainly bigger than Henie's normal co-stars (Don Ameche, Richard Greene, John Payne) - maybe he had a slot available. Or maybe he enjoyed working with Henie with whom he had an affair, and knew that in Henie films it's normally the guy who drives the action.

For all the bells and whistles though, this film is weak at it's core: firstly it's not remotely believable that Henie would be picked for a role that doesn't involve skating (she remains awkward and chubby and stilted with dialogue), and secondly the guts of the romance plot has Power setting up a false romance between Henie and Vallee for publicity - and Henie buys it. She finds out and runs back to Minnesota - which makes her an idiot, and means there's no real relationship between her and Power. Power says he's fallen for her (we don't see why) and at the end she decides she falls for him (we don't see any loving scenes between them). So it's hollow.

Some cute Hollywood in-jokes ("are the Ritz brothers really brothers?" "no they're related to the Dead End Kids"). One skating sequence happens in the imagination, which is slack.

No comments: