“From the Boardwalk... to Monte Carlo Villas... the inside story of the men behind the beauty racket!”
Recently watched: The Beauty Jungle (1964), a fabulously seedy and tawdry long-forgotten British melodrama. Filmed in garish colour, it’s a sensational exposé into the exploitative and degrading secret world of the beauty contest con.
Janette Scott stars as naïve young typist Shirley. On a seaside holiday with her girlfriends in Weston-Super-Mare, Shirley is “discovered” by hustling, hard-bitten local reporter-on-the-make Dan (Ian Hendry). Taking more than a professional interest in the leggy beauty and eager for some column inches, Dan encourages her to enter a small-time boardwalk beauty competition. From there, Shirley becomes addicted to the glamour, artifice and attention and Dan (now her manager) falls helplessly in love with her.
Courtesy of campy hairdresser Lucius (an outrageous old-school gay stereotype), Shirley goes from demure brunette to Jayne Mansfield-esque platinum blonde sex goddess with a cotton candy bouffant ‘do. Abandoning her disapproving family, priggish but dependable fiancé and job in the typing pool in Bristol, Shirley plunges headlong into the mad whirl of beauty pageants, graduating from local contests like Cardiff's Brigitte Bardot and Pontypool's Crumpet Quest to glitzy big-scale national competitions like the Rose of England Beauty Pageant and finally the pinnacle – the Miss Globe contest in Cannes! Just how ruthless the corrupt dog-eat-dog realm of beauty pageants is comes as a nasty shock to poor disillusioned Shirley and The Beauty Jungle builds to a devastating climax!
Like many movies of its vintage, The Beauty Jungle promises more tantalizing sexploitation thrills than it can possibly deliver. The film is tame by contemporary standards (it frequently resembles an early Carry On movie. Note that Sid James gets fourth billing on some posters but in fact he makes only a fleeting cameo appearance, playing himself) but evokes a nicely sleazy atmosphere. The print screened on TV was evocatively faded, scratched and grainy - as if viewed through a retro Instagram filter! The rise-and-fall show biz cautionary tale theme (whereby the heroine learns she should never have left her home town in the first place) is certainly overly-familiar. Completely overlooked today, Janette Scott was a popular leading lady of the time – and the daughter of national treasure / character actress Thora Hird! Scott retired from films by 1966 when she married jazz crooner Mel Tormé. Her performance - a bit hesitant, a bit remote and detached - is beguiling in the Kim Novak acting style. The film is almost stolen from her, though, by Edmund Purdom as slick, perma-smiling lounge lizard movie star Rex Carrick - who has a dark secret! I was totally unfamiliar with this handsome, dimpled British actor who was briefly a promising “golden boy” leading man at MGM in the mid-fifties (he co-starred with Lana Turner in The Prodigal in 1955!). Purdom’s reputation for being difficult, scandals (he had an affair with Tyrone Powers wife!) plus a series of box office flops curtailed his Hollywood stint and he spent the rest of his career making European cheapies (like this one!). The Beauty Jungle is such a great lurid pulp-y title (invoking the 1955 Jayne Mansfield crime drama Female Jungle), but when the film was released for the American exploitation / grindhouse circuit it was re-titled to the far more innocuous Contest Girl!
Janette Scott stars as naïve young typist Shirley. On a seaside holiday with her girlfriends in Weston-Super-Mare, Shirley is “discovered” by hustling, hard-bitten local reporter-on-the-make Dan (Ian Hendry). Taking more than a professional interest in the leggy beauty and eager for some column inches, Dan encourages her to enter a small-time boardwalk beauty competition. From there, Shirley becomes addicted to the glamour, artifice and attention and Dan (now her manager) falls helplessly in love with her.
Courtesy of campy hairdresser Lucius (an outrageous old-school gay stereotype), Shirley goes from demure brunette to Jayne Mansfield-esque platinum blonde sex goddess with a cotton candy bouffant ‘do. Abandoning her disapproving family, priggish but dependable fiancé and job in the typing pool in Bristol, Shirley plunges headlong into the mad whirl of beauty pageants, graduating from local contests like Cardiff's Brigitte Bardot and Pontypool's Crumpet Quest to glitzy big-scale national competitions like the Rose of England Beauty Pageant and finally the pinnacle – the Miss Globe contest in Cannes! Just how ruthless the corrupt dog-eat-dog realm of beauty pageants is comes as a nasty shock to poor disillusioned Shirley and The Beauty Jungle builds to a devastating climax!
Like many movies of its vintage, The Beauty Jungle promises more tantalizing sexploitation thrills than it can possibly deliver. The film is tame by contemporary standards (it frequently resembles an early Carry On movie. Note that Sid James gets fourth billing on some posters but in fact he makes only a fleeting cameo appearance, playing himself) but evokes a nicely sleazy atmosphere. The print screened on TV was evocatively faded, scratched and grainy - as if viewed through a retro Instagram filter! The rise-and-fall show biz cautionary tale theme (whereby the heroine learns she should never have left her home town in the first place) is certainly overly-familiar. Completely overlooked today, Janette Scott was a popular leading lady of the time – and the daughter of national treasure / character actress Thora Hird! Scott retired from films by 1966 when she married jazz crooner Mel Tormé. Her performance - a bit hesitant, a bit remote and detached - is beguiling in the Kim Novak acting style. The film is almost stolen from her, though, by Edmund Purdom as slick, perma-smiling lounge lizard movie star Rex Carrick - who has a dark secret! I was totally unfamiliar with this handsome, dimpled British actor who was briefly a promising “golden boy” leading man at MGM in the mid-fifties (he co-starred with Lana Turner in The Prodigal in 1955!). Purdom’s reputation for being difficult, scandals (he had an affair with Tyrone Powers wife!) plus a series of box office flops curtailed his Hollywood stint and he spent the rest of his career making European cheapies (like this one!). The Beauty Jungle is such a great lurid pulp-y title (invoking the 1955 Jayne Mansfield crime drama Female Jungle), but when the film was released for the American exploitation / grindhouse circuit it was re-titled to the far more innocuous Contest Girl!
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