Image via If Charlie Parker Were a Gunslinger…
Over at The Chiseler, a piece of pre-code appreciation. Anybody who sees BED OF ROSES is pretty much guaranteed to think (1) “Constance Bennett and Joel McCrea sure are lovely to look at, and great onscreen, and great together,” and (2) “Who is THAT?” And the answer to (2) would be “That’s Pert Kelton, honey!”
The movie is probably her apotheosis, but she had a long career doing more or less exactly the same performance. Recently enjoyed her in SALLY, her debut, a mainly lumpen musical with impossibly-sugar-sweet Marilyn Miller — a few fragments of two-strip Technicolor still adhere in places — and BACHELOR BAIT, an early George Stevens comedy which makes good use of Stuart Erwin’s naive hick charm. Pert models a succession of eye-popping dresses: one like the image on a faulty television, another like a futuristic cake. From her first appearance, though, her ability to drip sarcasm from stratospheric heights of disdain was fully developed.