The emphasis is definitely on "story"

TCM is running a daytime lineup of biopics about singers tomorrow, and one of the movies happens to be on my DVR from a recent TCM programming feature of "fallen stars". That movie is The Helen Morgan Story, and it shows up tomorrow (May 27) at 2:00 PM. So as is normal practice here, I made the point of watching the movie in time to be able to do a post on it here.

The first thing I noticed was the quality of the print, which seemed a bit fuzzy, like it was a 16mm print for TV or somesuch. In fact, the movie, released in 1957, was shot in Cinemascope, but the print TCM ran fills the 16:9 TV screen, so I'd presume it got panned and scanned and that somewhere up in heaven Sydney Pollack has the heebie-jeebies. (Some of the scenes, however, look like what I'd refer to as the "Cinemascope Diet", in which a print is just squished from the Cinemascope 2.35:1 aspect ratio down to the TV aspect ratio, making everyone look taller and thinner in the process.)

The movie opens up with a bit of a prologue about the 1920s and people thinking they could make it big, before we get to the real story, starting at a carnival in the Chicago area. Larry Maddux (Paul Newman) is one of those carnival huckster types, although this time instead of selling patent medicine or fake entertainment, he's selling swampland in Florida, which was a thing back in the 1920s when Florida hadn't yet experienced its population boom. He's got some grass skirt-wearing dancers to try to draw suckers in, and one of those dancers is Helen Morgan (Ann Blyth), who is naïve enough to think this is the first step on the way to fame in the entertainment world.

Unfortunately for her, Larry's show is closing as he's decided a better way of making money is as a bootlegger, although Larry leaves only after telling Helen he loves her. Helen tries to make her way as a torch singer even though she doesn't have the right sort of voice for it. One day while she's auditioning for a singing job at a speakeasy, who should show up to sell the owner his alcohol but Larry Maddux? He uses his pull to get Helen her job there, before deciding to exploit her in a plot to smuggle booze over the border from Canada. That plot involves having Helen win the Miss Canada beauty pageant. The pageant doesn't work because her real identity is found out, but Helen meets the American judge of the pageant, Russell Wade (Richard Carlson).

One of the prizes of the pageant was the chance of an audition for a Broadway show, and part of Larry's plot to smuggle the liquor was under the cover of bringing the touring cast of a show to New York, which is how Helen ends up in New York. Larry is able to get Helen more singing jobs in speakeasies, at least until one of them is raided. Helen needs a lawyer, so as a long shot she calls the only one she knows, that being Russell Wade. This is the start of an affair between the two, although Russell is in a marriage of convenience to a woman who won't give him a divorce.

Larry keeps scheming to build up Helen's career, although by this point she realizes he's as much after her for the possibility of big money as he's after her to love her. This makes Helen want to get Larry out of her life if possible, but Larry isn't about to let that happen. Florenz Ziegfeld shows up one day at the club, which is how Helen becomes a Broadway star in the musical Show Boat. But Larry gets shot in a bootlegging operation gone bad, and that combined with the rest of Helen's tumultuous personal life, leads her to start drinking to the point that she winds up in the gutter and forgotten.

All of this material is suitable enough for a Hollywood melodrama. The problem, however, is that the writers decided to attach it to the name of a real person in Helen Morgan. Now, the real Helen Morgan was an alcoholic, and she died fairly young in 1941 from cirrhosis as a result of all that drinking. But that seems to be about where the real Helen's story ends in terms of what the movie portrays.

As far as I could discern, Larry and Russell are both made-up characters, while not mentioning that the real-life Helen had a complicated love life with three marriages. A bigger omission is Show Boat and the fact that this led to a minor movie career for Helen (minor in the sense that she didn't make too many movies) with the most famous role being in the 1930s movie version of Show Boat. But Warner Bros., which made The Helen Morgan Story, wouldn't have had the rights to the music in Show Boat.

If Warner Bros. had turned this movie into one about a fictitious performer, it would be a serviceable if not great melodrama. And for that the movie is certainly worth one watch. But it would probably be more worthwhile to look for the small number of films that the real Helen Morgan made, or the recordings she left behind.