Nathan Rabin's Happy Place's Definitive Guide to American Movies about the Film Industry
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Harlow (1965)
The bleak, casually sadistic 1965 biopic Harlow depicts Jean Harlow’s sexuality as an overwhelming, disorienting and ultimately destructive force that was exploited for the benefit of an endless series of cruel predators yet had to be carefully suppressed or it would destroy the actress, her career and everything around her. Harlow wasn’t just sexy. She had the fortune and ultimate misfortune to embody sex in its purest, most irresistible form. This nasty, lurid exploration of her short, tragic existence portrays Harlow as too sexy to live but sexy enough to die young at twenty-six as an enduring icon of both sex and sadness.
In a performance that captures Jean Harlow’s scorching, incendiary sexuality, deep underlying melancholy and unabashed humor, Carroll Baker plays the star of early sound film as a feisty up and comer living unhappily with poignantly dependent mother Mama Jean Bello (Angela Lansbury) and her leering gigolo stepfather Marino Bello (Raf Vallone).
Marino is like the vast majority of the scoundrels the doomed heroine encounters in her journey to Hollywood stardom and infamy: a leering horn-dog with bedroom eyes who sees her as a sex object to be used for professional gain. Baker’s sex bomb won’t let herself be ravished by the many men offering to help her professionally in exchange for sexual favors because she’s afraid of their lust but also of her own sexuality and sexual desires.
When a broken and despondent Harlow finally embraces her sexuality the movie punishes her disproportionately by having her be coldly rejected by men previously established as amoral louts and be spoken of in the most vicious terms by men whose hatred of women and sex has poisoned their minds and their souls. Harlow depicts the life of a woman who was beautiful, popular and funny as an endless parade of sadness and degradation. In Harlow, show-business treats the titular martyr with unspeakable, unconscionable cruelty. That extends to the uniquely mean-spirited movie itself.
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