At least she doesn't show off her genitalia

Nowadays, it seems as if celebrities are ever more comfortable baring their sins and their souls in public. Back in the 1940s, things were quite different, and movies couldn't portray things like the Tiger Woods soap opera the way real life does now. A good example of this might be the 1947 movie Smash-Up, tThe Story of a Woman, airing tomorrow at 1:15 PM ET on TCM.

Susan Hayward stars as Angie Evans, a nightclub singer who's on the way up. That is, until she meets Ken Conway (played by Lee Bowman), a struggling songwriter. Things change for the two of them when they get married. Conway and his partner Steve Nelson (played by Eddie Albert) get a radio gig that makes Ken quite popular, and pushes Angie's career distinctly out of the spotlight. Angie responds by having an affair, so to speak, with the bottle, quickly becoming a raging alcoholic. She also bears Ken a child, but because of her penchant for the drink, she loses Ken, and custody of the child. What's a poor put-upon mother to do? Well, in this case, the answer is to get even more drunk, kidnap the child, and try to show she's a fit mother, something that results in Angie's nearly killing the baby....

Smash-Up is really melodramatic stuff, and that's one of the big problems the story has. In theory, a movie about alcoholic women could have been groundbreaking, just as The Lost Weekend had been two years earlier. However, where The Lost Weekend comes across as gritty and uncomfortably ugly, Smash-Up is only exploitative, and has much more of a Hollywood feel to it. At least they could have recorded one of Angie's drunken episodes and played it on Ken's radio show,à la the David Hasselhoff video which has been parodied over and over. Hayward isn't over the top the way she would later be in I Want to Live!, but there's something about Smash-Up that still makes me want to laugh at it all.

To be fair, though, Hayward did about as well as she could given the material, and got an Oscar nomination for it. She didn't win, possibly because some people compared Smash-Up to the real-life story of Bing Crosby and his wife, Dixie Lee.

Smash-Up, The Story of a Woman has been released to DVD.