Show Girl in Hollywood (1930)

(On Cable TV, May 2021) There’s not a while lot to say about Show Girl in Hollywood by itself, because it’s intensely prototypical of an entire sub-genre of pictures that first came to prominence early in Hollywood’s history: the naïve young woman travelling west, convinced that she’s going to become a Hollywood star. In this specific version of the story, our heroine is a Broadway showgirl heading to California on promises that are invalidated by the firing of a studio executive, the first of many to be let go through the film in oddly amusing ways. It’s an early musical from the first years of sound cinema, so the technical qualities are a bit rough — but the script can be funny at times considering that, even then, Hollywood was all too eager to make fun of itself. It’s also directed by Mervyn LeRoy, one of the first true professionals of Hollywood. It does occur to me that Hollywood making movies about Hollywood in 1930 could be seen as advertising for movies themselves — the beginning of the Hollywood glamour pushed to the masses, the dream factory revving up to full production. At times, the well-worn clichés enthusiastically embraced by the film can be oddly comforting: Show Girl in Hollywood is the archetypical fresh-off-the-bus story of a young woman stumbling into film stardom, and it’s not all that surprising that it still works well enough ninety years later.