Incendiary Blonde

One of TCM's programming themes this month has been "Wonder Women", which has been biopics of women who, in one way or another, been some sort of trailblazing. It's been running on Tuesday nights into Wednesday mornings, with the biopics classified by the sort of woman being profiled. This last Tuesday deals with women who are more or less involved in entertainment (the one stretch is Song of Love, starring Katharine Hepburn as composer Robert Schumann's wife Clara Wieck). There are two movies in Tuesday night's lineup I'd like to blog about, so I'm starting today with the first of those two, Incendiary Blonde, which kicks off the night's lineup at 8:00 PM Tuesday.

Betty Hutton plays Texas Guinan, and if you read the Wikipedia article and watch the movie you can see for yourself just how accurate the movie is or isn't. The movie starts off at her funeral, with her father (played by Barry Fitzgerald) in attendance, which leads to the inevitable flashback to how "Texas" became famous in the first place. This takes us from 1933 back to 1909, at a Wild West show in Texas. One of the show's attractions involves paying $50 to any man who can ride a notorious bucking bronco. Texas is, of course, not a man, but takes up the challenge, and her winning it leads to her getting a job in the show, run by Bill Kilgannon (Arturo de Cordova).

She helps the show get publicity by hiring a midget to play a baby and crawl out on the arena ahead of a stampede, to be rescued by Texas. This does bring them fame, except that there's a newspaperman Tim Callahan (Bill Goodwin). He figures out the ruse, and parlays it into a job as the company's PR man.

This sets up the romantic conflict that runs througout the course of the film. Tim loves Texas, and the two eventually get married. But Texas has always loved Kilgannon. He would be happy marrying her, except that he's got a wife in a sanatorium that he can't get divorced from.

Tim's publicity takes Texas to New York and fame in vaudeville and the Broadway stage, but then she decides to go to Hollywood, which leads to problems as Kilgannon gets caught up in a stock deal gone wrong; as such, this sours the relationship between him and Texas and eventually results in her going back to New York.

By this time, it's Prohibition, and Texas gets a job as the headliner at a club which is taken over by gangster Joe Cadden (Albert Dekker). Texas makes the place a huge success, but unfortunately that brings the club to the attention of another bunch of gangsters, the Vettori brothers, who try to drive Cadden out of business so they can take over the place for themselves.

Meanwhile, Texas has always had a premonition that she's going to die young, something we know from her biography and the beginning of the movie does in fact happen. She sees a doctor who reveals that she's got cancer and maybe two years to live. Kilgannon's wife must have died, as he's now able to marry Texas, not knowing that she's got terminal cancer. There are also the Vettori brothers, who may kill Cadden and Kilgannon first.

Like most biopics, Incendiary Blonde takes a fair number of liberties with the truth, especially in Guinan's relationships with men. She had one legal marriage and two relationships that could probably have been called common-law marriages if the legal need arose, but the Kilgannon character doesn't seem to have been any of those men. The real-life Guinan probably was more involved in the alcohol business than the screen version, although Guinan was never convicted.

Even if the story is changed, it still works well, thanks to Betty Hutton's irrepressible personality. She's also given a lot of songs to sing, and the numbers are mostly well staged. Incendiary Blonde has a further plus in being filmed in vivid Technicolor, which works for a life story as garish as Guinan's.

As far as I could tell, I couldn't find Incendiary Blonde in print on DVD, so you're going to have to catch the rare TCM showing.