Universal Studios regular Harry Keller directed the Hedy Lamarr lead melodrama The Female Animal (1958). This campy riff on Sunset Boulevard (1950) sees the legendary Lamarr as Vanessa Windsor, an aging Hollywood starlet. After being saved from a near fatal accident on set, Windsor takes her rescuer Chris Farley (George Nader), an extra, as her lover. After putting him up at her beach house, fate would have it that Chris would accidentally meet and fall in love with Vanessa’s grown-up daughter Penny (Jane Powell).
Soapy, improbable and horny as hell, The Female Animal is a one of kind last gasp of the latter days of the Hollywood studio system. Lamarr rips into her part with an ironic relish, delivering her saucy innuendos with enough bite to make Joan Crawford and Bette Davis blush. The Female Animal is Lamarr’s picture through and through.
Though ostensibly the protagonist, Chris Farley is a two-dimensional, square jawed, muscular piece of eye candy. Motivated by a desire to be a movie star and be the bread winner, Farley is only compelling as the object of Vanessa’s and Penny’s desires. Shirtless for at least half of the movie, Russell Metty’s gorgeous scope photography renders Farley’s muscles as a pleasure garden oasis in a tableaux of seedy L.A. intrigue.
Farley is such a dope that it never dawns on him once he’s realized Penny and Vanessa’s relationship that Penny was just using him as a pawn in her power struggles with her mother. Farley is like Burt Lancaster in The Killers (1946) except with lower stakes and with no one beyond his immediate drama to care about what happens to him. It’s a remarkably simple yet effective bit of subversion that makes The Female Animal unique.
This uniquely pulpy women’s picture was Hedy Lamarr’s final film. A prestige production, it was released with Touch Of Evil (1958) as its supporting feature. The canon of American film history has seen Welles’ classic eclipse The Female Animal in every conceivable way. The Female Animal may not have been an aesthetic triumph like Touch Of Evil, but it would be damn near impossible to find a more enjoyable way to spend an afternoon.
