"The Dolly Sisters" is mainly a showcase for the singing and dancing talents of Betty Grable and June Haver. (To give both ladies their due, they sing and dance their hearts out. And they do indeed have some of the prettiest legs in show business.) It's a lush, lavish, big-budget musical, heavy on the costumes and glamour. Many of the musical numbers are best described as daffy exercises in surrealism, what with women artists dressed up, say, as powder puffs, lipsticks, little boxes of rouge.
However, the tale being told isn't all that interesting. It is certainly far less compelling than the actual life and times of the actual sisters, both of them famous vaudeville artists of American-Hungarian origins, who inspired the story. One gets the impression that the sisters' lives were carefully stripped of anything that might have been considered too tragic, naughty and/or complicated. What remains is a slice of generic melodrama. (For some strange reason, even the hair colour of the sisters was changed : in the movie, both protagonists have become so golden blonde that even Adolf Hitler would have gone "Whoa there !")
"The Dolly Sisters" is also beset by some weird plot holes. For instance, one of the sisters meets a handsome young man who steals her heart ; after a number of complications they marry, only in order to lurch towards a painful divorce. Both the man and the woman complain, regularly, about letters not arriving. However, it is never explained what's going on with these letters. Were they somehow stolen or hidden by the woman's sister ? By the sisters' uncle ? By the postman ? The gardener ? The gardener's postman ? The postman's gardener ? Father Christmas ? By the end of the movie you won't be any wiser...
However, the tale being told isn't all that interesting. It is certainly far less compelling than the actual life and times of the actual sisters, both of them famous vaudeville artists of American-Hungarian origins, who inspired the story. One gets the impression that the sisters' lives were carefully stripped of anything that might have been considered too tragic, naughty and/or complicated. What remains is a slice of generic melodrama. (For some strange reason, even the hair colour of the sisters was changed : in the movie, both protagonists have become so golden blonde that even Adolf Hitler would have gone "Whoa there !")
"The Dolly Sisters" is also beset by some weird plot holes. For instance, one of the sisters meets a handsome young man who steals her heart ; after a number of complications they marry, only in order to lurch towards a painful divorce. Both the man and the woman complain, regularly, about letters not arriving. However, it is never explained what's going on with these letters. Were they somehow stolen or hidden by the woman's sister ? By the sisters' uncle ? By the postman ? The gardener ? The gardener's postman ? The postman's gardener ? Father Christmas ? By the end of the movie you won't be any wiser...