How To Make A Movie Out of A Pin Up (Or Not)

Here’s Miss Betty…

We all know Betty Grable’s swimsuit pin-up got ginormously popular. It was a remarkably simple idea that took off because of its fun, playful mystery. Betty wanted all who saw her to follow her and see what she had in store.

Betty in her pin-up suit from the front…

…and a closeup of the unretouched version of the photo.

Even then, retouches were made; namely, the seaming on the back of the swimsuit was smudged a little bit to make Betty’s fanny less defined.

Betty wasn’t the only lady at the top of the pinup heap. Rita Hayworth’s negligee shot was also enormously popular, but Betty’s pinup had one thing Rita’s didn’t: Its own movie. Who knew an entire movie could be based around a single picture, but 1944’s Pin Up Girl did it. Basically. I first saw this movie on FX back in 2008, and while I knew it wasn’t a great movie it was also strangely compelling, so I sat through it as many times as I could and then bought the DVD.

Lorry Jones (Betty Grable) is the darling of the Missoula, Missouri USO canteen, which is nothing but busy every night. She’s so popular that on her last night before leaving for Washington D.C. she hands out a stack of autographed photos to all the servicemen (it’s the swimsuit photo, of course). Marine sergeant, George (Roger Clark), Lorry’s fiance arrives to take her to the station, and ends up being one of a group.

Funnily enough, Lorry has a habit of bending the truth or outright fibbing. She doesn’t want the guys from the canteen to know she’s going to be a stenographer at Civil Service because she thinks it’s too dull, so she tells them she’s going with the USO on one of their road shows. She’s not only engaged to George but to five hundred other servicemen because she likes being nice and wants to help the war effort.

Lorry’s friend, Kay (Dorothea Kent), who’s also going to work at Civil Service, calls Lorry out on her fibs and tells her that her mouth will catch up with her someday. Besides, reality is much more interesting. Lorry breezily suggests a detour to New York City by way of a brush-off.

The ladies arrive in New York at the same time as Tommy Dooley (John Harvey), a sailor who distinguished himself at the Battle of Guadalcanal. Tommy, who’s awfully fresh-faced for a veteran of one of the longest and hardest campaigns of the war, can’t go anywhere without people cheering and wanting to shake his hand, or in the case of singer Molly McKay (Martha Raye) plant a few kisses on him. She likes the boys in service as much as Lorry does, although she’s a little more hard-boiled about it.

Lorry and Kay make a beeline for the Club Chartreuse, where Charlie Spivak and his orchestra are giving out. The bouncer doesn’t want to let them in at first but then Lorry tells him she knows Tommy Dooley and the guy can’t bow and scrape fast enough. It’s the perfect crime until Tommy and his friend, Dud Miller (Dave Willock) show up, and things start looking dire when Molly and club owner, Eddie Hall (Joe E. Brown) come to join them. Even then, Kay, who’s had her first taste of champagne, blurts out that she and Lorry are both in musical comedy, and when a jealous Molly calls Kay’s bluff, Lorry gets up and wows everyone with a song. Tommy is understandably smitten.

That might be the end of Lorry and Kay’s excitement, but when Tommy and Dud show up to Civil Service on assignment for the Navy Department. Lorry switches dresses with Kay, borrows her glasses, and becomes cross-eyed stenographer Lorry Jones by day and glamorous songstress Laura Lorraine by night. How long the charade will work is anyone’s guess, but there are a lot of songs and dances to see both before and after the denoument.

OK. On the surface, Pin Up Girl is a pretty typical Fox musical. The plot mainly serves to provide a box for all the tuneful candies, albeit with one gaping hole: Poor longsuffering Kay disappears from the movie entirely after Lorry trades dresses with her and takes her glasses. I guess she went back to Missoula but who really knows. Dud doesn’t fare especially well, either. He appears at random moments so that Tommy can bounce a few thoughts off of him and he can make a few wisecracks in return, but that’s pretty much all he gets to do. The sparks between Grable and Harvey are minimal; and it says something about Tommy that he’s so easily fooled by Lorry crossing her eyes.

Other than that, Pin Up Girl is pure gold for students of the Second World War simply because it’s incredibly dated. The songs are very much in the time period, starting with the canteen number talking about how the guys want romance and all the girls can give them are various eats like hot dogs and mince pie. Lorry sings about a guy who reassures his girl that she’s all the pin-up he wants.

And how many people today have heard of Charlie Spivak? I’m guessing not many from Gen X or later. I sure hadn’t before I saw Pin Up Girl, but his orchestra struck me as having a brassier sound than a lot of his contemporaries, like Tower of Power only with swing. Spivak’s popularity lasted beyond the Second World War, although none of the songs featured in the film do.

Again, the songs, though. Oh, the songs. Red, white and blue are everywhere, whether it’s Martha Raye’s dress in the first club number, or the dresses and fans worn and floated by the Skating Vanities, who do a lot of whirling and twirling on an impossibly spacious stage.  There are also lots of V’s for Victory (or at least it feels like it), because it was 1944, the film was released right before D-day, and people needed boosts wherever they could get them. That’s probably why Fox dared to pass off Betty marching in formation with platoons of WACs as a finale.

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Oh, and we see Betty dance with a tattooed Hermes Pan, which is pretty fun.

The critics were all over the place in their opinions (and for that matter they still are). While he liked Betty, Bosley Crowther hated Pin Up Girl, giving it such descriptors as “a spiritless blob of a musical.” Variety called it “very pleasing and pleasant.” Motion Picture Herald declared the movie “One of the worst musicals ever produced,” but also, “Too much jive and not enough sweet music,” and “Technicolor helped a lot.” Motion Picture Reviews fell in the middle with, “One roller skating sequence has spectacular beauty in performances and color, but the military finale is overlong and anti-climactic.”

Betty herself considered Pin Up Girl her least favorite of all her movies, but she did a great job with it despite being pregnant at the time. In fact, by the end of filming she was in her third trimester. Maybe that’s why Pin Up Girl wasn’t as good as it could have been–it’s tough to play a romantic ingenue while preggers.

The public, however, loved the movie, giving it a ranking of fifty-seventh in box-office profits for 1944, which isn’t too bad seeing as Pin Up Girl had to compete with the likes of Double Indemnity, Gaslight, and Since You Went Away, among plenty of others. Fox has to be given credit for trying, at least.

For more of the wonderful Betty, please click here. Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you on Tuesday for the wrapup post…

Pin-Up Girl is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon.

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