The Perils of Pauline

A factory girl who wants to be a serious actress keeps blowing the solemn scenes — and becomes the queen of the silent serials instead. George Marshall’s 1947 Technicolor musical is a loose, sunny Hollywood biopic of Pearl White, the real-life star of the 1914 Perils of Pauline cliffhangers. Betty Hutton, Paramount’s human firecracker, plays White as a girl who throws the tomatoes back at the hecklers, wrecks a pie-fight set, and ends up tied to the railroad tracks for a living. John Lund is the pompous actor-manager she loves; William Demarest, Constance Collier, and Billy De Wolfe stock the troupe. Marshall, a veteran of comedies and Westerns, treats early movie-making as a playground. Songs by Frank Loesser (including the Oscar-nominated “I Wish I Didn’t Love You So”) keep it bouncing. Not history — a showbiz valentine.