Astúcia Feminina

Fanny Brice is a nightclub entertainer who has a couple of prize fighters tangle over her. She sides with Robert Armstrong and becomes his manager. Things go along swimmingly, unti he starts to have some success, whereupon very blonde Gertrude Astor moves in on him.

It's enough plot to hang the movie on. The real purpose is to have Miss Brice sing five songs by Billy Rose and do her ballerina shtick. Producers John Considine and Joseph Schenck must have figured that as long as Broadway was going Hollywood, the perennial Ziegfeld Follies star was a natural. While she's good and believable, especially with Harry Green to do the raw comedy, the movie career didn't materialize. I expect it was the destruction of the musical movie in 1930 and Miss Brice's pleasant but ordinary appearance that closed that door, and her needing an audience. She remained an occasional guest star, particularly when someone was doing a movie about Ziegfeld, but she retreated to the stage, and let radio stardom come her way.