Zouzou

Earlier this month, I think as part of the "Hollywood Hair Hall of Fame" spotlight on TCM, they ran Zouzou. Not having done a post on it before and seeing its availability on DVD, I decided to watch it and do a full-length post on it.

Zouzou and Jean are two orphans (presumably) who are being raised by foster father Papa Melé (Pierre Larquey) who uses them as part of the carnival show, bascially just showing them on stage at the beginning to get people to pay for the bigger show and claiming that the two are biological siblings from an exotic part of the world. Eventually they grow up, and Jean (Jean Gabin) joins the navy, while Zouzou (Josephine Baker) continues to live with Papa Melé. Zouzou has fallen in love with Jean, but he sees her strictly as a sister. A sister that he loves like a sister, but a sister nonetheless.

Fast forward a bit, and the family moves to Paris, where Jean becomes an electrician for a theater, while Zouzou becomes a laundress. It's here that she meets Claire (Yvette Lebon), another worker there and daughter of the owner. Zouzou also shows off her singing and dancing talents to her co-workers, having learned the songs of the stage from delivering laundry to the theater.

Those deliveries also bring Claire to the theater, and she meets Jean and the two fall in love with each other. Zouzou can't understand any of this, naïvely thinking that Jean should be in love with her. Meanwhile, back at the theater, the temperamental star Miss Barbara (Illa Meery) threatens to quit the show to run off to Rio De Janeiro with her Brazilian cellist boyfriend. Zouzou performs for the stagehands, and when the curtain gets lifted, the producer sees what a talent she is. But everything is threatened because everybody wants Zouzou. Jean doesn't want people throwing themselves at his sister, and when one of the guys he gets in a bar fight with is found murdered, he's an obvious suspect.

The plot of Zouzou is one that would fit in well with the Hollywood of the mid-1930s, although of course Hollywood would never have given a part like this to a black actress like Josephine Baker. She's suitable enough in the regular acting, although that's not the strong point of this movie. (I'm not suggesting she's bad by any means; it's more that the plot away from the theater wouldn't give anybody a chance to show just how good they could be.) Where she and the movie shines are in the stage numbers. The first one for the stage hands shows excellent use of lighting, while the later numbers in the actual show could just as likely have been staged in Hollywood by Busby Berkeley.

Zouzou is a nice addition to the genre, and also extremely nice for showcasing the talents of Baker for posterity. One note is that while IMDb and the DVD both list a running time of 92-93 minutes (the difference could have to do with rounding), the print TCM ran was only 88 minutes. I don't know if anything was cut out.