Burlesque - What It Was and What It Wasn't

Burlesque first of all is a recent movie staring Cher and Christina Aguilera and it is available here at the Fort Worth Library (we also have it in Blue-Ray). And it checks out pretty well, people seem to like it, but the critics thoroughly panned it as being a prettified, cliche ridden view of naked girl show biz, although I'm not sure that this movie shows naked (or completely naked) girls. The descriptions I've read have been pretty vague.

However, the American art form of burlesque, from the late eighteen hundreds through the early nineteen sixties, was all about the naked girls or at least the concept of naked girls particularly when the local laws didn't allow real nakedness and mostly they didn't. All right, it wasn't ALL about the naked or nearly naked girls, there were comedians and novelty acts as well and for a long time American burlesque was simply a bawdier form of vaudeville, the jokes were raunchier and the girls more nearly naked.

Then vaudeville died and only burlesque was left as live entertainment for the masses, movies became king, and to fight the competition, the girls in burlesque became more naked. The striptease became more strip and less tease, the comedians began to disappear and so did the novelty acts and now we just have strip joints where, I understand, the girls start out just about as naked as they can get without it being total and all the "art" goes into what they call the "dancing."

Recently, I've heard, that there has been a revival of interest in the artier aspects of the old burlesque, in famous strip tease artists like Ann Corio, Sally Rand, Gypsy Rose Lee, Lili St. Cyr, women who put some pizazz into taking off their clothes, hence the movie mentioned at the beginning. But, I'm afraid it all looks a lot more glamorous in retrospect than it ever really was.

Movies and books on burlesque abound and we have some here at the Fort Worth Library. One movie is Lady of Burlesque a sprightly tale from the 1940's starring Barbara Stanwyck as Dixie Daisy a headliner in a burlesque show who investigates the murder of co-worker. It is actually based on a book by Gypsy Rose Lee, The G-String Murders. The movie deals with the fact that the lead character is a stripper by never showing her "act" from the neck down. That was all the movie censors at the time would let them get away with. But it does give a notion of the raffish nature of the burlesque milieu. And, as such, it is good fun.

Actually, someone should do a remake of it. It might be a lot more fun than the reputedly candified Cher version of Burlesque. Just a thought.

But, if you want to see what burlesque was REALLY like, I recommend the documentary, Behind the Burly Q. I checked it out expecting to be vastly entertained in a light frivolous sort of way. I wasn't. Instead, I was moved, almost to tears. The beautiful and exotic women who fed the fantasies of thousands of working class men, mostly came from hard lives, poverty and in some cases abuse. Many of them have a fragile but courageous sort of dignity that is touching. With a few exceptions you got that they felt they had made something of their lives that was valuable to them and to others.

It is hard to explain, but it was there. I didn't like that they were exploited. I didn't like that they had few other choices. But I liked them. I liked their gimmicks for making their acts stand out. I liked their over the top glitzy costumes. I liked how they tried to bring something unique and special to what they did. Be warned, however, this is not for family viewing unless you want to do an awful lot of explaining.