French Follies (1951)

French Follies, released in 1951, is another burlesque movie. Burlesque movies were simply filmed burlesque shows, shot in burlesque theatres but without a live audience. A lot of these movies got made so clearly they found an audience. And they are now our only means of seeing this odd kind of theatrical show.

Obviously the audiences at burlesque shows were there to see the strip-tease artistes but an effort was made to give the impression that these were actual variety shows, with singers, musical production numbers and comics. When you watch the comedy routines you can’t help thinking that it’s just as well the shows included strippers as well. It’s hard to imagine anyone paying for such truly dire comedy. Burlesque comedy was dominated by the so-called baggy pants comics. Most of the sketches include a considerable amount of sexual innuendo which is possibly the only thing that might have given them novelty value at the time.

The strip-tease routines are of course extraordinarily tame. There is zero actual nudity. Of course no-one today wanting to see naked women is going to watch such movies - you watch them because they’re weirdly offbeat and they’re fascinating from a social history point of view. They give us not only a look at changing tastes in risqué entertainment but also an interesting insight into changing ideas of what constitutes female beauty.

In that respect this one is interesting. This being 1951 you might expect that the strippers would all be extraordinarily well endowed in the bust department. But, with one exception, they’re not. They have perfectly ordinary female body shapes. They do have good figures but they’re not exaggerated. And the girls have much more of a girl-next-door look than you might expect. This movie suggests that if you wanted to earn a living in strip-tease you didn’t need to be built like a sex goddess. What you needed was confidence, some ability to dance and some ability to project personality.

Their ability to dance varies wildly. Ruby Lee can’t dance at all, but her attempts to do so are so bizarre that they’re fascinating. Some of the others do put some pizazz into their routines. The most entertaining is Joanne Bridges, billed as the Sleepytime Gal. When Joanne does her bump and grind she means it. She really bumps and she really grinds. While some of the others are trying to be tasteful Joanne knows it’s all about the sex.

The costumes worn by the girls range from the mildly outrageous to the wildly outrageous. When you’re a stripper but you can’t actually get naked the costumes do matter and in burlesque the idea was to convey an impression of glamour, in fact with the glamour often being more important than the sexiness.

Since the performances were taking place on a stage (and a remarkably small stage in this case) there’s not much scope for fancy camerawork. In fact there’s no scope at all. They just set the camera up and started shooting. There are no close-ups and the camera doesn’t move. It’s very unexciting cinematically but on the other hand it does give you the feel of watching an actual burlesque show in a burlesque theatre.