THE HELEN MORGAN STORY (1957)

It's Chicago in the Roaring Twenties, and everyone was trying to get rich quick. Helen Morgan (Ann Blyth) is a dancer at a sideshow exhibit run by Larry Maddux (Paul Newman) who is using dancing girls to get folks to hear his pitch to buy real estate at Sunny Acres in Florida. When a sudden storm stops the show, Larry decides to pack it in and he pays the girls off. Helen dawdles a bit, Larry sweet-talks her into making out, and a one-night stand ensues. The next morning he's gone and she's alone and jobless. She struggles to find a place in the world of show business, and one day when she's auditioning at a speakeasy she runs into Larry who is now a bootlegger working for a big-time gangster. Back in her life and wanting to help and protect her, Larry gets her hired at the club (but then gets her fired when he beats up a customer who was getting handsy with her), then talks her into posing as a Canadian to win a fixed Canadian beauty pageant (she wins but a reporter finds out she's not from Canada). One of the judges, a married lawyer named Russell Wade (Richard Carlson) takes a shine to Helen, though it's hard to tell at first if he wants her to be a friend or a mistress. Things finally look up when Larry sets her up with her own nightclub—with Russell as a silent partner whom even Helen doesn’t know about—and soon Helen is discovered by Florenz Ziegfeld and becomes the toast of Broadway starring in Show Boat. Sadly, it's all downhill from there as Helen winds up unhappy in love and begins drinking which ends her career and leads to a stay in an asylum, though a final reunion with Larry holds the promise of redemption.

This follows the usual path of the Hollywood biopic—ambition, romance, fame, the downturn into the miseries of alcohol. In real life, it seems her fall was slower—she starred in the film version of Show Boat several years after the stage show and kept performing in movies and in theater until she collapsed on stage in 1941 and died shortly thereafter of cirrhosis of the liver. The problem here isn't that her life has been heavily fictionalized, but that for much of the movie's running time, she feels like a secondary character in her own story. Blyth is outshone not just by the charismatic Newman but also by supporting players like Alan King, Gene Evans and Cara Williams. In the last half of the movie, Blyth is able to cut loose a bit in scenes depicting her downfall, but the unrealistic conclusion (best described as "sadly upbeat") ends things on an unsatisfying note. Gogi Grant does a nice job providing Helen's singing voice on songs like "Someone to Watch Over Me" and "On the Sunny Side of the Street," and it's fun to see Rudy Vallee and Walter Winchell in cameos playing themselves. Pictured are Newman and Blyth.[TCM]