The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (Colin Higgins, 1982)
this one is a bit muddled compared to Nine to Five, alas.
first, obviously, Dolly is radiant, she lights up every scene she’s in, and she’s possibly the most beautiful any woman has ever been until Lupita Nyong’o was (correctly!) cast as Helen of Troy. every time she smiled i felt a little faint. wow.
as for the rest of the movie… it’s a full-throated defense of sex workers as parts of their community, but the leading voice of that defense is a cop, quite possibly the person most likely to harm an actual sex worker! it derides the artifice that goes into TV entertainment while naturalizing the artifice of the sex workers who, i guess, just roll out of bed looking like that! the only time there’s any nudity to speak of (one or two girls wear sheer lingerie in earlier scenes, but no breasts are bared until this) is when violence is being inflicted upon the girls by said entertainer! the cop’s (tedious, predictable) marriage proposal after failing to keep the brothel open is met with a stirring rendition of “I Will Always Love You”, which it must be emphasized is a breakup song, to which he responds by taking Mona’s luggage out of the truck she and Jewel were about to leave town in, tossing it in his truck, and then picking her up and putting her in the truck too, which she just accepts despite having explained how it could never work not three minutes ago!
i do my best to judge films by what they are trying to do and not what i want them to do, and i do think it does them pretty well (the governer’s song near the end was a particular treat), but there are so many tensions just beneath the surface of this that, if given any examination at all, could tear the whole thing apart, and i would love to see the movie that actually reckoned with those tensions.
3.5/5 stars