A Lovely Appreciation of Betty Hutton and Frank Loesser

When Betty Got Frank

Richard Corliss, time.com, 31 March 2006

Betty's notion of acting while singing was to break each lyric into its components, mine each phrase for the mood or situation, then act that out to the hilt, however short the phrase. Given the Johnny Mercer-Victor Schertzinger ballad "Not Mine" in her debut feature The Fleet's In, she dreamily croons the first line ("It's somebody else's moon above"), then immediately pulls a little girl's mope face for the words "Not mine." She took the same approach to acting, with multiple personalities flashing across her face with lightning speed and violence.

Others might run screaming from this jackhammer assault; Loesser ran and embraced it. He didn't want subtlety, he wanted salesmanship, and Betty has the pertest peddler around. He wrote more than a dozen songs for her, all to be found in The Complete Lyrics of Frank Loesser . They started with the 1943 "Murder, He Says," about a girl's jive-talking beau; during the number she jitterbugs, seesaws her shoulders, puts her hand to her tummy and sashays sexily — all stops out for Betty.

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