Harlow Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

Harlow Blu-ray Movie Review

Pure Hollywood hokum.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 20, 2013

Is there some unwritten rule in Hollywood that blonde bombshells of the 1930s who have some kind of tragedy invade their careers need to have competing biographical film or television projects about them released almost simultaneously? In December, 1982 the earliest screenings of Frances, a supposed biography of Frances Farmer, were shown in order to qualify the film for that year’s Academy Awards (co-stars Jessica Lange and Kim Stanley did indeed snag nominations, though neither won). Two months later a much more factual account of Farmer’s life based on her ghostwritten “autobiography” Will There Really Be a Morning? was broadcast as a three hour television “event” on CBS. Some two decades or so earlier an even shorter time frame separated two feature films not only about another famous actress, but in this case with both films bearing the exact same title. In May 1965 a low budget affair by the little remembered Magna Pictures entitled Harlow starring Carol Lynley debuted (briefly) to withering reviews. Just a couple of weeks later, a much larger budgeted affair by Paramount (ironically, Farmer’s home studio in her heyday) was released with exactly the same title, and with another Carol (albeit spelled differently), Carroll Baker, in the title role. Neither of these Harlows offered anything approaching historical accuracy (something both shared with Frances), but the mere fact that two films with the same title and ostensibly dealing with the same “facts” were released within mere weeks of each other has always fascinated a certain demographic of trivia lovers and there actually is an excellent book about this situation, Dueling Harlows: Race to the Silver Screen, by Tom Lisanti. (Trivia lovers might be interested in a couple of other Harlow (or Harlow) – Farmer connections. Harlow’s death was announced to a disbelieving public by Cecil B. De Mille on a 1937 Lux Radio Theater broadcast starring—yep, you guessed it—Frances Farmer. Years ago an online poll of Farmer fans asked who they would have liked to have portrayed Farmer in a more factual account of her life and the hands down winner was—yep, you guessed it—Carroll Baker. Baker in her late fifties to mid-sixties heyday had an even more uncanny resemblance to the real Farmer than even Jessica Lange did in Frances, plus Baker has a husky voice quite similar to Farmer’s incredibly distinctive tones.)

Lisanti does an exemplary job detailing the back story (actually back stories) which gave rise to the public’s fascination with Jean Harlow almost three decades after her death. Much of this interest was fostered by the book Harlow: An Intimate Biography, co-written by Irving Shulman and Harlow’s erstwhile agent Arthur Landau (portrayed by Red Buttons in the Baker Harlow). The book came in for rather hostile critical brickbats, not to mention several lawsuits, and was a rather salacious fictionalization of Harlow’s life obviously crafted to sell as many books as possible without much regard for the truth. In that regard, it succeeded admirably, becoming one of the hottest best sellers of 1964, in no small part due to the negative press the book received. Shulman and Landau's tome became the basis for this particular Harlow, and it's little wonder, then, that the film bears almost no relationship to the actress' actual life story.

Joseph E. Levine was a would be impresario who had a rather odd career that included marketing foreign films (Hercules), producing trashy outings that were nonetheless huge hits (The Carpetbaggers), as well as executive producing at least a few major achievements (The Graduate , The Lion in Winter). Several of Levine’s cast and crew from The Carpetbaggers were ported over to Harlow, which perhaps accounts for this film’s similarly low rent feel. It’s frankly pointless to try to delineate where Harlow departs from Harlow (so to speak), for there is a paucity of factual accounting in this film. Some of this is understandable (the standards of the sixties would not allow Paramount to trumpet M-G-M, Harlow’s home studio, and so it becomes Majestic Studioes), but a lot of it is just plain inexplicable, including the film’s really bizarre reimagining of the circumstances surrounding Harlow’s tragically early death.

The film is therefore probably best seen as an out and out fiction recounting the meteoric rise and eventual death of a Hollywood star who just happens to be named Jean Harlow. Arthur Landau is portrayed as the hero of the story, something that is distinctly at odds with the historical record and which was one of the reasons Landau’s co-written book came under such withering response at the time of its release. The fascinating if short lived marriage between Harlow and Paul Bern (Peter Lawford) is given bizarrely short shrift, especially since in the early sixties there was a lot of press that M-G-M had covered up a Bern murder to make it seem like suicide. Instead the film follows the Landau-Shulman book’s lead and makes Bern into something of a wife beating deviant, as if that made his death more palatable.

The supporting cast here is filled with well known names, most playing completely fictional characters. Two exceptions are Angela Lansbury and Raf Vallone as Harlow’s mother and freeloading stepfather. Martin Balsam, Leslie Nielsen and Mike Connors are on hand as various studio types, all of them stereotypes with little meat for the actors to really chew on. There are a number of uncredited bits here, including a quick cameo by Golden Age funny man Fritz Feld (who never worked with Harlow but who co-starred with Farmer in 1941’s World Premiere) as a provocateur in some of Harlow’s early comedy shorts. The film is glossy and well made, but it’s rather silly in the long run. Baker evidently hated making it and was not kind to it in her memoirs, but her performance holds up surprisingly well.

Harlow Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Harlow is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. This is one of the nicest looking catalog releases we've seen from Olive, with next to no damage in the elements to report. The image is stable, clear and boasts excellent, well saturated color that does not seem to have faded much if at all. Fine detail pops quite well in the film's close-ups and even the midrange shots maintain commendable precision. There's some very minor telecine wobble in both the opening credits sequence as well as the closing photo montage of Baker as Harlow.

Harlow Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Harlow features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track which ably supports this dialogue driven film. Neal Hefti's score is completely anachronistic (his main theme is arranged as a Bossa Nova, which in 1965 was already out of date and certainly not in tune—no pun intended—with the film's time frame), but it sounds great in this lossless rendering. (Bobby Vinton sings the closing theme, and aficionados will know one of the supporting themes in the film became the standard "Girl Talk" once Bobby Troup wrote a lyric for it). Fidelity is excellent, though dynamic range is somewhat limited.

Harlow Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements are offered on this Blu-ray disc.

Harlow Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

As Dueling Harlows: Race to the Silver Screen makes abundantly clear, there was unbelievable interest in a Harlow biopic from the 1950s on. A glut of stars including Marilyn Monroe, Stella Stevens, Joanne Woodward, Mamie Van Doren and many others were either outright announced or at least promised the role in various aborted projects. At the time of the bestselling book by Shulman and Landau, no fewer than four major studios had Harlow pieces in the pipeline, and the independent project that would become the Lynley Harlow had also been announced. It's kind of sad, then, that the two that ended up getting made played so fast and loose with the facts. As Frances Farmer mentioned once about one of her own films, The Toast of New York, a highly fictionalized account of so-called "robber baron" Jim Fisk and his mistress Josie Mansfield, "The truth would have been so much more interesting". Evidently some things never change in Hollywood. Though this film is a pretty trashy exercise, this Olive Blu-ray boasts excellent video and audio and Baker fans may well want it in their collections.