Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Vivat Regina!

In our last look some Unlikely Thrushes of the silver screen, you may remember, we peeked in on Miss Constance Bennett and her not uncreditable go at a little song and dance.  This week, we veer sharply in another direction to catch a crucial moment in the long and seemingly haphazard career of a star both unlikely and beloved:  Miss Marie Dressler, who is happy to tell us what's what in this antic moment from The Hollywood Revue of 1929.

Five Gals Five

Oh, that Marie! She'd do anything to steal a scene - even if means going all polychrome.

Seriously, wouldn't it have been fabulous if these ladies had done a picture together? What a festival of dithering, double-takes, withering ripostes, lorgnettes, and lace tea gowns it would have been!

I think it would have required the presence of Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton as token males, and perhaps an Oily Continental (Eduardo Cianelli? Antonio Moreno?) for some gigolo-joke setups. And Louise Beavers and Hattie McDaniel omnipresent in the background, with Isabel Jewell and Iris Adrian as pert Fast Baggages to be smacked down. And a number or two by the Albertina Rasch Dancers. And...

Oh, well. A boy can dream, can't he?

Tugboat Goddess

Marie Dressler! The unlikeliest superstar of the early talkies - a small mountain of a Vaudeville trouper with a face like a bull dog and a figure like the Rock of Gibraltar.

She had soldiered through three decades of an up-and-down career on stage and screen before MGM, desperate for voices, grabbed her, discovered what it had, and treasured her as it did few stars.

She had the most roguish stare this side of Valentino:


And when she stared through a lorgnette, it was never in disapproval, but only genuine confusion:

She had started out as a kind of frightening ingenue:

But wound up the toast of Hollywood, as evidenced by the starry company she kept:

A Barrymore, a Trouper, and the Boss's Wife's Patented Expression...

She played tragic, in Anna Christie with Garbo, and she played high comedy, stretching double takes into triples and quadruples in Dinner at Eight. She played opposite Gish, Harlow, Wallace Beery, Marion Davies, and a brace of Barrymores, among others.

She said, "I have played my life as a comedy rather than the tragedy many would have made of it," and that's something useful for all of us, I think. Her autobiography is The Life Story of an Ugly Duckling; I think she should have named it after another one of her pictures: The Divine Lady.