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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Betty Hutton (1921-2007)

Betty Hutton, Paramount's incendiary blonde bombshell has died.

Most of the biographical information I know about her is in her entry on imdb, which you can read in its entirety, here.

Turner Classic Movies will pre-empt its scheduled programming on Wednesday (3/15) from noon through 8:00 pm (Eastern) for a memorial salute to Hutton. Click here for details. If you can, try and catch Robert Osborne's Private Screenings interview with her at 7:00. Hutton led a turbulent life and she speaks of it rather candidly.

I've been a Betty Hutton fan for most of my life, having seen Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 circus epic The Greatest Show on Earth when I was a kid. That movie holds the distinction of being the second worst Best Picture Academy Award-winner (right behindMichael Todd's Around the World in 80 Days in 1956), but it's still a great deal of fun. Hutton plays a trapeze artist in love with circus owner (or manager or something) Charleton Heston. She's finally earned the star spot in the center ring, but is bumped when bigger draw Cornel Wilde shows up. So there's your love triangle. Throw in James Stewart, who plays the entire film in clownface; Gloria Grahame as the assistant to an insanely jealous elephant trainer; Balloon Girl Dorothy Lamour (whatever that is); some honest-to-God Ringling Bros. clowns (including Emmet Kelley, who is photographed here for the only time without make-up); and one hell of a train wreck and you get 152 bloated minutes of fun, capped with a severely injured Heston yelling at Hutton, "Judas Priest, woman! You've got nothing but sawdust in your veins!" which can only be topped by our leading lady leading the finale with the film's title song.

She was marvelous in Preston Sturges's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) as Trudy Kockenlocker, a single girl with an over-protective father (an hysterical William Demarest). In her devotion for doing her part for the war effort, Trudy goes out on the town with some soldiers about to be deployed overseas and wakes up the next morning with a ring on her finger and (as she later learns) a bun in the oven - but no memory of what happened. So she enlists the help of 4-F Eddie Bracken. Another superb satire from Sturges.

I'll end this with Annie Get Your Gun (1950, George Sidney) because, to be honest, it's the only other Hutton film I've seen. Judy Garland began the film but had to pull out due to illness (she had already recorded the soundtrack, which has had several grey-market releases). Despite her Paramount contract, Hutton actively campaigned for what she knew was a perfect role for her, MGM or no MGM, ultimately winning it and delivering one hell of a star turn.