Review of Jeanne Eagels

I saw this movie when I was a kid and waited with baited breath to see it again nearly forty years later. I should have skipped it. Hellacious acting, scene chewing by Miss Novak and a story that is nowhere near anything that happened in the life of Ms. Eagels. The only reason I watched it is because it was the last film Gene Lockhart appeared in and his role is so small that if you blink, you'll miss him. (He comes on at the 3/4 mark as the Equity Board President.) It's so totally fictional they have Kim Novak in the last scene singing a song and dancing in a movie called "Forever Young", while Jeff Chandler's character sits blubbering like a total tool. (Eagels never made such a movie, nor did she ever make a musical. Her last movie was The Letter, where she played a murderess.) There is also a very offensive racist scene where Eagel's football player husband (some truth here, as her husband Ted McCoy was a college football player) is showing some black kids outside the studio where she's making a silent film (another fictional film she never made) how to hold a football and he tells them "to hold it like a watermelon". And this film was made at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement! It's a shame that Universal holds the rights to Eagels' final film The Letter. (made by Paramount...Universal holds the rights to all of the pre-1950's movies.) Modern movie goers will never have a chance to see the real Jeanne Eagels and will have to settle for this fictional dreck of a motion picture and assume it's the gospel truth.