The Showgirl and the Wolf

Off duty, Tyrone Power, an American pilot enlisted in the British RAF, commandeers a reserved table up front and close to the show at the Regency House, all the better to get a load Betty Grable's singing and dancing. The classic construction of the sequence that follows in Yank in the RA.F. (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1941) is an alternation of shots of Grable in the show with shots of male onlookers either applauding or otherwise indicating enjoyment by nodding or smiling. The four reaction shots of Power within the sequence catch him: a) fixing his tie as he looks; b) moving his eyes up and down as though taking her in, all the while chewing gum; c) sighing heavily and waving at her while she waves at the audience in the song Hi Ya Love; and d) applauding loudly long after the audience has stopped. This is the scene in which Power exhibits the most active enthusiasm in response to Grable, otherwise two-timing her, standing her up, and bungling their engagement. Her show is also the vehicle for sharing her with two openly admiring, avidly pursuing, RAF officers in Power's flight squadron. Yank in the R A.F. contains two Regency House night club spectacles featuring Grable, nuggets which were expanded into her seven Technicolor song and dance hits made during World War II. As the spectacle of the showgirl and the active spectator seems to be the central convention on which these pictures were based, I am interested in beginning the larger project of connecting the features to the war effort with an itemization of the conventionalized cultural units and an examination of the way they are cinematically arranged in the spectacle within the film. The persistent popularity of the spectatorviews-showgirl indicates wide-spread agreement between movie-going public and filmmaking personnel as to how she should play to her all-male audience. This cultural agreement is the basis of the theory of codes I will use. I am considering the collaboration between representation and a special public which was required to produce female forms that lubricated historical imperatives. Specifically, how did the wolf spectator and the girl playing to him expediently serve the version of the attraction of male to female held in the U.S. Armed

Art · Humanities · Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · Theatre and Performance Studies

• From Juke Box Boys to Bobby Sox Brigade

  Tim Snelson•Cultural Studies•2012

  Add to list

• Dictionary of American slang

  Harold Wentworth•Dictionary of American slang•1975

  Add to list

• A Theory of Semiotics

  Open Access•Umberto Eco•A Theory of Semiotics•1976

  Add to list