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At the junction of 42nd Street and All About Eve, the razzing Footlights Club sisterhood. Aspiring debutantes, a screenful of them, playing ping-pong with zingers and getting into wrestling matches over stockings. "Are you running a theatrical boarding house or a gymnasium?" The latest arrival is an upper-crust hopeful (Katharine Hepburn) among starving artists, her roommate (Ginger Rogers) leads the frosty reception. "We started off on the wrong foot, let's keep it that way." Roles are rare with productions closing "like a tired clam," the mope (Andrea Leeds) was last year's rising star, the Broadway impresario (Adolphe Menjou) has his pick of would-be starlets for penthouse dates. The heiress steps into his office to tell him off and instead lands the plum part in his upcoming play. "You know, there's still something not quite right about that line." "You might learn to read it correctly, that might help." The Ferber-Kaufman tragicomedy has its melodramatic turns, though the blurs of solidarity and rivalry between ad-libbing ingénues remain the center of Gregory La Cava's democratic lenses and Renoirian textures. Fresh training grounds for Lucille Ball and Ann Miller, dreading lamb stew and enduring dates with lumberjacks. Constance Collier as the faded veteran keeps clippings of critics' notices handy, in the absence of ermine Eve Arden makes do with a white cat around her shoulders. "Is it against the rules of the house to discuss the classics?" "No, go right ahead. I won't take my sleeping pill tonight." No use for Galatea, Hamlet meanwhile is a beau to still meet. Up curtain and down curtain, opening night is preceded by applause's death rattle on the expressionistic staircase. "Does someone have to die to create an actress?" Cukor abstracts the wisecracking sorority in The Women. With Gail Patrick, Samuel S. Hinds, Franklin Pangborn, William Corson, Phyllis Kennedy, Pierre Watkin, Margaret Early, Grady Sutton, Frank Reicher, Jan Wiley, and Jack Carson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |