The Perils of Pauline

The Perils of Pauline
Movie Review

"The Perils of Pauline" is a fast-paced and patly patterned yarn about a sewing-machine girl named Pearl White, who falls in with a tank-town theatre troupe, falls out with the handsome young hero and finds her niche as a budding "flicker" star.

The fact that the original Pearl White never followed this conventional road to fame is no more embarrasing to the authors than any other of the cliches of their plot—the later recruiting of the hero to be the star's leading man, the subsequent blighting of their romance and a final, tearful meeting after long years. For all its familiarity, it is not the story of Miss White.

However, Miss Hutton plays it with enthusiasm unimpaired and with the wide-eyed and square-jawed persistence of a primitive movie queen. Her travesties of a tank-town trouper and of a "cliff-hanging" serial star are as broad as a half-dozen slapsticks and equally flexible. And her singing of such modern ditties as "Rumble, Rumble" and "Poppa, Don't Preach to Me" are as unabashedly scatty as her howling of the oldie "Poor Pauline." Give Miss Hutton an inch, which Director George Marshall did, and she takes a mile.

And so, too, do Constance Collier, William Demarest and Billy De Wolfe, who play a broken-down grand dame, a film director and a clown, respectively. They all mugg and grimace with great freedom, which is proportionate to Miss Hutton's style, at least, and which makes for rib-tickling entertainment if not for authentic history. In contrast, John Lund's performance as the melancholy theatre "ham" is uncomfortably sober-sided and just a bit too heavy for support.

The old-time actors in the antics do their brief stints with joyful éclat. Meaning no disrespect to the others, they're the only ones who really earn their pay—at least, in a manner consistent with the genuine "Perils of Pauline."

Bosley Crowther - The New York Times
July 10, 1947