I hadn't before watched a Jean Harlow film but will certainly do so again after watching this early hit of hers. She's by far the best thing in this madcap comedy helmed by the future director of "Gone With The Wind" Victor Fleming. She plays the title role, namely Lola Burns, a recently successful glamour-puss actress, who is very much at the centre of a fawning and parasitical entourage taking in her gee-gee loving father, spendthrift brother, plain-Jane sister, a non-stop agent, always looking for an angle, a tough-talking movie director who may or may not be based on the reportedly virile and tough-talking Fleming himself and last and definitely least, a demented male stalker who wants her to marry him.
Directed at breakneck speed with rapid-fire dialogue to boot, the farcical situations just pile up for Lola until she finally decides to walk away from the whole shebang, with harsh words for pretty much everyone around her. She hides herself away, or so she thinks, at a private holiday resort out in the desert, where she's rescued from her indefatigable mad suitor by a dashingly handsome gentleman, who announces himself as coming from blue-chip Bostonian stock and money and who later in the evening proposes to her. Is this the fortuitous happy ending for which she's been hoping and her big chance to stop the world and get off, well let's say there's a twist in the tale and leave it at that.
I must admit that I found most of Harlow's hangers-on to be downright irritating especially Frank Morgan as her dipso-gambler father and Lee Tracy as her incessant press agent "Space" Hanlon so that by the end I actually felt sorry for Lola as she's put back in her box so that her exploitation can continue and the gravy train get back on track. The real life irony of course was that Harlow was herself thrust into the limelight by her own mother who from what I've read took a sizeable cut of her prize daughter's earnings as well as taking a major part in influencing her career.
Whether this background informed Harlow's performance only she would know but she's certainly head and shoulders above the rest of the cast here and likewise rises above the hackneyed and at times demeaning material with which she has to work.
Sure at time she delivers her lines as if she's just been handed them but her energy, vitality and yes, sex-appeal are what make this movie watchable if only barely tolerable.
Directed at breakneck speed with rapid-fire dialogue to boot, the farcical situations just pile up for Lola until she finally decides to walk away from the whole shebang, with harsh words for pretty much everyone around her. She hides herself away, or so she thinks, at a private holiday resort out in the desert, where she's rescued from her indefatigable mad suitor by a dashingly handsome gentleman, who announces himself as coming from blue-chip Bostonian stock and money and who later in the evening proposes to her. Is this the fortuitous happy ending for which she's been hoping and her big chance to stop the world and get off, well let's say there's a twist in the tale and leave it at that.
I must admit that I found most of Harlow's hangers-on to be downright irritating especially Frank Morgan as her dipso-gambler father and Lee Tracy as her incessant press agent "Space" Hanlon so that by the end I actually felt sorry for Lola as she's put back in her box so that her exploitation can continue and the gravy train get back on track. The real life irony of course was that Harlow was herself thrust into the limelight by her own mother who from what I've read took a sizeable cut of her prize daughter's earnings as well as taking a major part in influencing her career.
Whether this background informed Harlow's performance only she would know but she's certainly head and shoulders above the rest of the cast here and likewise rises above the hackneyed and at times demeaning material with which she has to work.
Sure at time she delivers her lines as if she's just been handed them but her energy, vitality and yes, sex-appeal are what make this movie watchable if only barely tolerable.