The Helen Morgan Story

The Little Girl on the Piano with the Great Big Voice
The Helen Morgan Story is a formula biopic with equal parts soap, song and gin. The thing that makes it stand out are three very good performances and a wonderful parade of vintage 1920's hits voiced for the star by Gogi Grant.
From the moment the film begins to unreel with its Broadway marquee titles you know you are in for a good old-fashioned tearstained campy drama. Loosely based on the life of Helen Morgan, who is most famous today for creating the role of Julie in the groundbreaking "Show Boat" in the 20's. The film centers on her rise and fall as well as her unrequited love for gangster Larry Maddux.
Playing the title role is Ann Blyth who does her best to give Helen all the pathos, drama and tragedy required in such a story. She does a fine job but one can't help but recall her best work as Veda in Mildred Pierce. Some years earlier.
The real stars of the show are comedian Alan King, TV star Cara Williams and a new guy to pictures by the name of Paul...

A typical Hollywood "biography" that transforms an artist's life into a cliché-ridden soap opera...
The film explains the decline of Helen Morgan (Ann Blyth) into alcoholism as the result of unsuccessful romances, especially one with Larry Maddux (Newman), a two-bit bootlegger...

Larry is an almost one-dimensional and ultimately unbelievable character, but he does have qualities that are developed further in later Newman films: he is opportunistic, exploitative, smooth-talking, a man from the wrong side of the tracks who tries to better himself...

Like other Newman characters, he is an outlaw--a con man and gangster--and it is noteworthy that Curtiz had directed Cagney, Bogart and other tough guys in Warners' Golden Era... Larry is also the first of Newman's womanizers--detached, rough, abusive, but irresistibly charming and sexy... He manages to seduce Helen while remaining nasty and cynical, then abandons her, only to keep reappearing and ruining her life... At best he can say, "In my own way, Helen, I love you," although in the unconvincing ending, he...

musical melodrama supreme
Ann Blyth stars as ill-fated torch singer Helen Morgan in the musical biography THE HELEN MORGAN STORY (1957). The movie follows the life of the tragic 1920s songbird from the heights of acclaim in the original Broadway production of "Show Boat" to her dramatic battles with depression and alcoholism.

Inspired by Polly Bergen's searing performance as Morgan in a "Playhouse 90" TV special which aired earlier that same year, producer Jack Warner geared THE HELEN MORGAN STORY as a showcase not for actress Ann Blyth, but rather the popular singer Gogi Grant, whom he employed to supply Blyth's voice for the musical numbers--if the truth be known, Blyth's own singing would have sufficed.

In the tradition of a backstage soap-opera, the more tawdry facts of Morgan's life were glossed over (the "Playhouse 90" screenplay reflected Morgan's life in a more accurate light, having Morgan's mother Lulu as a consultant). Paul Newman plays her stormy boyfriend; Blyth shines...

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