Sadie and Her Sisters: Tracking a Classic Hollywood Character Type

Judging by films produced in Hollywood’s Classic period, from roughly the early 1930s to the late 1950s, there was a time when, on just about any remote tropical island or port of call, particularly in the South Pacific, you were likely to run into a very specific type of woman. Provocative in her looks and brash in her behaviour, she was usually on the run from the authorities, often looking for “work,” and apt to disturb the peace wherever she landed. She was unabashedly sexual, self-sufficient, and breezily defiant of society’s norms and expectations. She had few illusions about human nature, her own as well as others, and a frank, wisecracking way of getting to the truth of any situation.

In the earliest days, she was clearly understood to be a sex worker but not strictly in the more respectful and value-neutral sense we use it today, to destigmatise a person, male or female, who offers sexual services in exchange for material compensation (although she certainly does that). Back in the 1920s and 1930s, she might be called – adding a degree of fussy decorum to the innuendo – a “woman of pleasure” or an “adventuress,” suggesting less a choice of occupation than an approach to life and personal advancement. In any case, once the Production Code crackdown began around 1934, she couldn’t be overtly identified as such. Instead, she came to be called a “travelling entertainer,” usually said with an implied wink and rarely fooling audiences. 

The character was less universal than the more familiar female types of the period – “The Loyal Wife,” “The Madcap Heiress,” “The Career Woman,” et al. – but popped up often enough to take her place among the instantly recognisable archetypes and tropes that drew on expectations and prior associations as narrative shorthand. To acknowledge the censorship standards that sought to rein her in for most of that period, let’s call her “Itinerant Showgirl.”

Over the next three decades, the changes the character went through are illustrative of the changes in Hollywood films and society’s attitudes. They may have cleaned her up, smoothed her rougher edges, made her profession more socially and morally acceptable, and turned her into someone more romantically inclined, but in every iteration, the Itinerant Showgirl managed to maintain at least a vestige of the prototype from which she was born.

Sadie Thompson (Raoul Walsh, 1928) / Rain (Lewis Milestone, 1932) / Miss Sadie Thompson (Curtis Bernhardt, 1953)

The mother of all the wayward women adrift in the Pacific, the progenitor of the type, began life as a character in a 1921 short story by Somerset Maugham, based on people he met on a steamship excursion around the Pacific. Among them were a hard-line Christian missionary and a brash, vulgar woman whose behaviour raised eyebrows. With minimal effort to disguise the real people and situations, Maugham created a story about religious intolerance and hypocrisy. He gave it the title “Rain,” referencing the unendingly wet weather he encountered in the islands. It would become a standard trope of these narratives. 

The missionary, Mr. Davidson, determines that the loud, plump, and cheaply dressed woman, Sadie Thompson, is a “fallen woman” on the run from the law in Honolulu. He embarks on a fanatical crusade to redeem her by both converting her to his strict faith and having her sent back to take her punishment. Just as it appears he has won, he’s found dead on the beach, a suicide, presumably after giving in to his baser urges. Sadie returns to her old ways, exiting on the memorable line: “You men! You filthy, dirty pigs! You’re all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!”

Sadie was a compelling enough character to expand for a stage dramatisation, and Rain was the runaway hit of the 1922 Broadway season. A few years later, the story got its first screen treatment under the title Sadie Thompson, earning an Academy Award nomination for Gloria Swanson in the title role and another for George Barnes’ evocative cinematography of the seedy, rain-drenched setting. 

Raoul Walsh & Gloria Swanson in Sadie Thompson

The film made a noted departure from Maugham’s original by giving Sadie a love interest of sorts, a soldier who wants to take her away to Australia and marry her, an addition obviously meant to soften the character and give her a happy ending. That plot point would remain in subsequent screen adaptations, despite blunting the full force of Sadie’s famous “pigs” line. (She even tells the soldier “no offense” for having said it in his presence.)

Swanson’s costume – wide, floppy hat, cheap fur stole thrown over her shoulder, ankle-strap pumps, crotch-length beaded necklaces, and flouncy parasol – became indelibly linked to the character, instantly recognisable decades later. Slight variations of the look appeared on Bette Davis in a 1950s stage review and Cher in a 1972 television skit, a testament to Sadie’s enduring image. 

Rain Theatrical Poster

As if to leave no question of Sadie’s profession, Joan Crawford prepared for her performance in the first talkie version, Rain, by hanging out with real sex workers in San Diego and going over the top with make-up, hair, and tough-girl attitude. Sticking closely to the story as told in the successful silent version, the film was nevertheless a monumental flop with critics and audiences alike, despite an adaptation by esteemed playwright Maxwell Anderson and direction by Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1930). Seen today, the judgment seems unnecessarily harsh. Crawford does a convincing job as Sadie against the cruel “redemption” handed out by Walter Huston’s missionary (Lionel Barrymore in the silent), and the atmosphere is convincingly wet and foreboding. The sound design is of particular note, making good use of the constant downpour and “native” drums to heighten the tension and gloom. One interesting detail: the scene of local fishermen discovering Davidson’s body was lifted from the silent version with audio added.

Sadie made her final appearance on screen in Miss Sadie Thompson in what New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called “a thoroughly and oddly shampooed version.” Rita Hayworth, minus Sadie’s iconic costume, plays her as little more than a good-time party girl, wrongly accused of illegal sexual activity for money when the Honolulu nightclub where she worked as a singer was raided. That doesn’t stop Jose Ferrer’s Mr. Davidson from hurling his Christian wrath at her and having his own urges stirred by her hot and sweaty torso-twisting. 

Rita Hayworth entertains the troops in Miss Sadie Thompson

In Maugham’s original story it’s left a little ambiguous whether Sadie seduces Davidson or is molested by him. The earlier pre-code film versions imply an attack. This time the rape is made explicit in order to exonerate the bawdy but innocent woman of charges of seduction and uphold 1950s Hollywood standards. A sexually aggressive seducer would never have been allowed the happy Technicolor ending she gets here. It’s a rather disappointing final curtain for the original defiant woman of the South Seas.

Safe in Hell (William Wellman, 1931)

William Wellman directed this “hardboiled and sordid” (Variety) tale of a New Orleans sex worker accused of murder and smuggled to a Caribbean island. Instead of being harangued by Christian do-gooders, she has to fend off the advances of the large population of escaped criminals taking refuge there, thanks to the island’s lack of an extradition treaty with the U.S. When she kills one of them, the very man she was convicted of murdering in the States (it’s complicated), she allows herself to be executed rather than accept a deal that would return her to a state of sexual slavery. Dorothy Mackaill does a convincing job in her scenes of partying with rowdy groups of admiring men, a la Sadie, but her decision to die rather than being caught up “in the life” directly contrasts with Sadie’s defiant return to her old ways.

Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932) / China Seas (Tay Garnett, 1935)

Perhaps one reason for the failure of the Crawford Rain was its release the same month as Red Dust, a new take on the character type that proved popular with audiences. Jean Harlow’s Vantine, on the run from the authorities in Saigon, arrives at a rubber plantation in what was then known as French Indochina (also subject to drenching downpours) and begins a wisecracking, sexually charged relationship with the boss (Clark Gable). He throws her over briefly for a high-class married woman (Mary Astor), but in the end, he opts for Vantine’s frank honesty, humour, and lack of inhibitions. 

Clark Gable & Jean Harlow, leaving no doubts about the nature of their connection in Red Dust

The character is still fairly obviously a sex worker, but new tropes are introduced that will more or less stay with The Itinerant Showgirl through the coming years, as surely as the bad weather:

• The stories carry over the love interest from the Maugham screen adaptations, but now he’s no symbol of respectability and hope for a new life. The man she sets her sights on is a tough guy, an adventurer, rough around the edges and living by his considerable wits far from mainstream American life. “The Outsider,” in other words, a man just like her, who will take her for what she is and not try to tame her, redeem her, or otherwise change her and who would expect the same in return.
• The man becomes her main, often only focus, the object of her desire and the goal of her mission, to the point where she has little effect on anything else that happens. She aims solely to help him see himself clearly, to give up any pretensions of finding someone “better” and let her join him in the life they’re both suited for. Here it isn’t a question of whether (or when) she will get him into bed; the Harlow/Gable chemistry strongly implies that’s either already happening or has occurred before.
• The threat to her amorous mission, the source of the male’s pretensions, is a new female character who will dog her to the end. She’s classier, speaks in more rounded tones, knows how to tell a man what he wants to hear, and can’t always be trusted. The Itinerant Showgirl’s status as a “man’s woman” is enhanced by the presence of this “Good Girl,” who would only shackle the rough, individualistic hero to stifling societal standards and hypocritical refinement. (Shooting him, as Astor does Gable, doesn’t help either.)

Gable and Harlow, in the second of six movies they made together, are the perfect team to convey this shift in the character’s arc. With her, he has both an exciting sexual partner and a “buddy” who can keep up with him on his adventures, who never needs to be protected and coddled, a cheerful adjunct to his freewheeling, rough-and-tumble life.

The winning formula of Red Dust was repeated, more or less, a few years later in China Seas. (The obligatory bad weather is provided by a killer typhoon.) In the new era of the Code, Harlow is no longer overtly a hooker but a “professional entertainer,” who ends up on a steamer shuttling between Singapore and Hong Kong captained by hard-living maverick Gable. But who are we kidding? She introduces herself as “the gal that drives men mad” and later references “that night in that putang joint in Saigon.” (Apparently, the Hays Office was not familiar with the salacious meaning of the word.) The Good Girl here (Rosalind Russell) is a stuffy society woman Harlow describes as looking “like she was smellin’ a dead fish or somethin’.” 

This go-round, the Itinerant Showgirl is deeply complicit in a criminal act that causes the deaths of several people. Since it’s 1935 and the victims are Chinese, she’s forgiven it all because it was ultimately for love, because she just wanted the Outsider to dump the Good Girl and marry her, marry her bad! (So says the newly enforced Production Code.) It’s shocking, but at least it gives her some action, some control over events.

Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939) / To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks, 1944)

No one would ever mistake Jean Arthur for a sex worker, or a showgirl for that matter, but here she is, stepping off a boat in an exotic remote location, this time in “Barranca, port of call for the South American banana boats,” according to an opening title card. Wearing a rather tweedy outfit Sadie Thompson wouldn’t be caught dead in, she has just left a gig in Chile and is heading back to the States, unless she lands a job in Panama. 

Director Howard Hawks retains the essential bad weather (heavy fog, pounding rainstorms) and the tough-guy Outsider (Cary Grant) as her love interest, with the expected sexual tension and combative verbal exchanges. But he bends the Itinerant Showgirl toward the feminine type that critic Naomi Wise identified as the Hawksian woman, characteristically thrust into the company of a group of men performing a dangerous task – in this case flying the mail through treacherous Andean passes – challenging and finally coming to respect their male code. 

The tough-guy Outsider (Cary Grant) caught between the toxic Good Girl (Rita Hayworth, left) and the sweet Itinerant Showgirl (Jean Arthur) in Only Angels Have Wings

Unlike most of the women in the earlier films, she’s not running from anything and, although momentarily unemployed, not stranded by bad luck; like Hawks women in comparable situations, she comes and goes as she pleases. Where she does fit the archetype as it evolved with Harlow is in her single-minded pursuit of the male. Thanks to the Production Code and the casting of Arthur, any notion of the character being a sex worker is by now completely out the window. Where Harlow unabashedly soaks nude in a rain barrel in front of Gable, Arthur bathes behind closed doors, insisting Grant keep out until she’s done and dressed.

Arthur has to work a bit harder, then, to hit the archetype’s marks. As far as being a Hawksian woman, she isn’t quite up to the fast-talking wisecracks of Rosalind Russell in the director’s His Girl Friday (1940) and far from the smouldering innuendo of Lauren Bacall in a similar wandering entertainer role in his To Have and Have Not, but she proves she can be one of the guys and win Grant away from his toxic attachment to a married woman (Rita Hayworth, in a reversal of the contrasting Good Girl convention).

The Hawksian Woman (Lauren Bacall, at piano) in To Have and Have Not

According to Hawks, after seeing Bacall’s performance in To Have and Have Not, Arthur admitted to him that she was wrong in her timid approach to her role. As a sultry lounge singer wooing Humphrey Bogart’s fishing boat captain, Bacall nails the Hawksian Woman, standing toe-to-toe with the male lead in one of the director’s most quintessential films. The story bears little resemblance to Ernest Hemingway’s 1937 novel, notably the change in setting from Key West to the island of Martinique, then under Vichy control. Because this was made during wartime, the reworked plot has strong similarities to Casablanca (1942), but Bacall’s “Slim” Browning is no committed anti-fascist like Ilsa Lund, and she’s not the great love who slips through Bogart’s fingers. Instead, their relationship is playful, bantering, and sexual, more like the one between Harlow and Gable. 

Strange Cargo (Frank Borzage, 1940)

Crawford again, plying her trade in a different tropical locale, paired with Gable, her most frequent co-star of the 1930s. This was the last of their eight films together and arguably the one that best capitalised on their essential proletarian appeal and palpable sexual chemistry. In an earlier movie, Forsaking All Others (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934), they less convincingly played romantically entangled upper-crusters; here, he’s an escapee from the Devil’s Island penal colony and she’s “a girl who had seen too many men,” banished from the island. They’re forced to make a brutal trek through the jungle and over the sea in the company of some unsavoury types and one mysterious saviour-like character. Is it necessary to note that they encounter some pretty nasty weather?

Gable and Crawford in Strange Cargo

The Hays Office mandated changes to the more overtly sexual and violent aspects of the script, but the real damage to the box office came from the Catholic Legion of Decency’s “condemned” rating. The powerful organisation felt the saintly, borderline supernatural character played by Ian Hunter to be a blasphemous evocation of a Christ-like figure. The film was banned in several cities and picketed in other places. 

After the failures of this strangely fascinating film and her earlier work in Rain, Crawford stayed far away from the tropics for the rest of her long career, although her carny dancer stranded in the southern U.S. in the melodrama Flamingo Road (1949) was a not-too-distant domestic cousin of the Itinerant Showgirl.

Seven Sinners (Tay Garnett, 1940)

“I make rough seas. I set the jungle on fire. I’m a ba-a-a-d influence.”

If anyone could bring the Itinerant Showgirl back closer to her origins, it was Marlene Dietrich, and she has a lot of fun with it as nightclub singer Bijou in this rowdy comedy. The movie opens in the middle of a barroom brawl, and it’s soon quite obvious who’s to blame. Sure enough, true to the tropes of the character type, she’s quickly deported and lands on yet another South Pacific island, delighted to find the American fleet there. By the end of the picture, she has instigated an even longer and more destructive nightclub brawl, a marvel of movie stunt fighting. 

The picture was meant to capitalise on the success of Destry Rides Again (George Marshall, 1939), the film that redefined Dietrich’s star appeal and revitalised her career, and it was a box office hit. Her romantic interest here is John Wayne as a Navy lieutenant and scion of a seafaring family, not the Outsider like Gable or Grant. Bowing to the standards of the time, she’s not allowed to be “the kind of girl” destined to win over someone with such respectability. She does her best to put her dreams of a different life behind her, sailing off at the end, ready to wreak havoc on yet another exotic port of call.

Marlene Dietrich, sultry and mischievous even in military drag in Seven Sinners

Dietrich was not new to playing the performer who sets men ablaze; she established that image early on in three films directed by Josef von Sternberg: The Blue Angel (1930), Morocco (1930), and Blonde Venus (1932). What’s more, she famously portrayed a kindred spirit to Sadie Thompson as a woman living “by her wits,” adrift in von Sternberg’s exotic, sexually charged China of Shanghai Express (1932). 

As Bijou, she invests the by-now well-worn Itinerant Showgirl with characteristics audiences had come to associate with the star from those earlier roles: a cynical, sultry world-weariness and an almost masculine approach to sex, heightened by her habit of performing in male drag, as she does here in a Navy uniform. But the standard trappings of the character type are there, notably in her insistence that she works for a living and does her own fighting. She also sports a modification of Sadie’s outfit, with her outrageously showy hats and flouncy parasol, although there’s a distinct lack of relentlessly wet weather.

The film was loosely remade with little effect as South Sea Sinner (H. Bruce Humberstone, 1950) with Shelley Winters (or whoever dubbed her) crooning “It hadda be you” to Liberace’s accompaniment.

Torrid Zone (William Keighley, 1940)

Warner Brothers managed to produce a marginally entertaining adventure-comedy-romance by closely following the footprints left by earlier pictures: remote location, check (Central American banana plantation), Tough Guy Outsider, check (James Cagney as a hot-headed maverick boss), the temptation of a snooty married woman offering a shot at respectability, check (except she, like Hayworth, turns out to be what they called “no damn good”), non-stop wisecracks and insults, check (“Mister, the stork that brought you must have been a vulture”), and of course the Itinerant Showgirl resisting a forced return to the U.S. (Ann Sheridan, causing the usual trouble but still not having much to do with the action plot). The weather isn’t particularly bad, although the trailer does promise “taking the tropics by storm” with “more excitement than a hurricane.”

We haven’t talked much about the atmosphere of colonial oppression, capitalist corruption, and bigotry rampant in these tropical stories. This one has all that in abundance.

“Maisie” series (1939-1947)

We’re stretching the parameters with MGM’s ten-picture romantic comedy series to show how the archetype was potent enough to inspire narratives in other genres and adapt to changing times. In a role originally intended for Jean Harlow, Ann Sothern plays a wisecracking showgirl with high spirits and a big heart who keeps finding herself stranded and unemployed. Only one of the settings is an exotic foreign locale, although it could be argued that Wyoming cattle country, where we first encounter her in Maisie (Edwin L. Marin, 1939), might as well be Bora Bora to a girl from Brooklyn. 

Subsequent entries found her in the African jungle, an Arizona ghost town, and the far-Adirondacks, taking on jobs as a maid, a taxi dancer (a classic, Code-mandated stand-in for “sex worker”), a Rosie the Riveter in a defence plant during the war years, and in her last outing, Undercover Maisie (Harry Beaumont, 1947), recruited for a police department bunko squad, a position about as far from the character prototype as she could get. In one entry, she even enrols in business school. Otherwise, she retains several of the signs of the Itinerant Showgirl, not least in her slightly toned-down, more contemporary version of Sadie Thompson’s flouncy, garish look. 

Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A. (Spencer Williams, 1946)

Mainstream Hollywood movies may have moved the errant good-time girl far from her origins by the 1940s, but independent, low-budget Black cinema still had a place for a character much closer to the prototype. In this film, a flashy dancer is forced to leave Harlem after two-timing her lover and “backer” (coding for pimp or sugar daddy). She lands a job at a Caribbean resort, where she toys with the affections of two young Americans and earns condemnation from not one but two crusading missionaries. It all ends very badly for her.

Francine Everett arrives in the tropics in Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A.

Francine Everett, in the part of Gertie LaRue, was a singer and star of several so-called “race films,” the term for motion pictures with all-Black casts produced exclusively for African-American audiences. She also performed in many of the short musical films known as soundies. Once dubbed the most beautiful woman in Harlem (and, in truth, a beauty to rival any popular star), she refused to play what she considered demeaning, stereotypical roles in big studio films, limiting her work opportunities. She did appear in two Hollywood pictures: Lost Boundaries (Alfred L. Werker, 1949) and Sidney Poitier’s first commercial feature No Way Out (Joseph L. Mankiewicz,1950). 

His Kind of Woman (John Farrow and Richard Fleischer, 1951) / Macao (Josef von Sternberg and Nicholas Ray, 1952)

With the rise of the film noir genre in the post-war era, the Itinerant Showgirl was replaced by the treacherous “Femme Fatale” as the go-to, if deadly, companion to the Tough-Guy Outsider, who had himself morphed into a more tragic figure. The Femme Fatale retained a vestige of the original archetype as a woman who used sex as a commodity. Sometimes, she was a nightclub entertainer, albeit in domestic locales, such as Ava Gardner in The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946). She occasionally showed up in exotic settings, like Jane Greer in Acapulco (Out of the Past, Jacques Tourneur, 1947) or Rita Hayworth in Argentina (Gilda, Charles Vidor, 1946). Their biggest difference from the Itinerant Showgirl is that these women are actually key drivers of plot.

It fell to Jane Russell to pick up the gauntlet in two films with Robert Mitchum that were not huge successes in their day but are now seen as a winning combination of film noir, rom-com, and action movie. The aptly named His Kind of Woman takes place at an isolated resort in Mexico where the two stars arrive by the same chartered flight but not together. He’s a down-on-his-luck professional gambler who has taken a high-ticket job without knowing much about it; she’s the girlfriend of a ham actor played, appropriately enough, by Vincent Price, although she admits to Mitchum that she’s just a nightclub singer out to bag a rich husband. Turns out that what Mitchum is doing in Baja is…ah, who cares? The real attraction of the movie, along with some scene-stealing work by Price, is the sexual chemistry between the leads, promoted by RKO studio owner Howard Hughes on a huge billboard equipped with actual fireworks and the slogan “the hottest combination to ever hit the screen.”

RKO’s “hottest combination” – Jane Russell and Robert Mitchum in His Kind of Woman

The film garnered some good reviews, especially for the Mitchum-Russell match-up, and decent ticket sales, but thanks to extensive rewrites, reshoots, and director and cast changes that stretched out for nearly a year, it ended up losing well over $800,000. Nevertheless, the studio immediately re-teamed the stars for another noir adventure-romance directed by Dietrich’s key collaborator, Josef von Sternberg. In Macao, Mitchum and Russell once again arrive at the same time on the titular island off the coast of China. He’s broke again, an ex-GI mistaken for a New York City cop; she’s a nightclub singer traveling in search of work. The two are perfectly matched in their tough cynicism. 

The plot is as convoluted as the earlier picture, and the production was equally plagued with problems. Von Sternberg, past his glory days of the early 1930s and working off a two-year contract with Hughes, hated the assignment and the constant interference from the studio. Regular on-set fights, delays, and reshoots (by an uncredited Nicholas Ray) once again pushed the production well above budget, and the film sustained almost as big a loss as the first one, depriving audiences of future iterations of one of Hollywood’s best Itinerant Showgirl/Tough-Guy Outsider teams.

The Revolt of Mamie Stover (Raoul Walsh, 1956)

The apotheosis of the archetype, The Revolt of Mamie Stover, takes the Itinerant Showgirl back to her roots. While the word “prostitute” is never used, every sign is there: she’s booted out of San Francisco and told never to return; she’s wooed by a man who gives her money to help her get settled; she quickly becomes the head attraction and chief money-maker at a popular but disreputable “bar” run by an older woman with an iron fist over her stable of girls; she makes a fortune when, not long after her arrival, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and wartime conditions prove a boon for her particular profession. Also, the movie is based on a well-known 1951 novel that makes no bones about what that profession is in a story about a woman determined to amass wealth and power on her own terms.

The film never overtly answers the question but the poster for The Revolt of Mamie Stover makes it quite clear

And then there’s this bit of dialogue:

Mamie: Did you ever stop and think what’s gonna happen when the war comes?
Jim: Yes. People will die. Thousands and thousands of them.
Mamie: Yeah, but some’ll get rich.
Jim: Look, there are dirty names for people like that.
Mamie: I’m used to dirty names.

The Production Code was beginning to show signs of weakening by this time, but it still retained a good bit of its grip on film content. Director Raoul Walsh shot an opening scene that had to be deleted showing Jane Russell as Mamie being picked up by a “john” on a San Francisco street. Instead, the film as released begins with Mamie getting out of a police car that has escorted her to the docks (still a pretty unmistakable sign of her moral and social transgression). Just before she heads to the steamer she has been ordered to board, she turns defiantly, looking straight into the camera with a sullen, set-jaw expression.

As Pam Cook and Claire Johnson noted in their essay “The Place of Women in the Cinema of Raoul Walsh,” published in 1974: “This look, itself a transgression of one of the classic rules of cinematography (i.e., ‘don’t look into the camera’), serves as a reference point for what is to follow. Asserting herself as the subject rather than the object of desire, this look into the camera represents a reaching out beyond the diegetic space of the film and the myths of representation which entrap her.”¹ Cook and Johnson point out the central contradiction of Mamie’s situation; she can only gain power and independence by exploiting her own objectification as a woman. 

Walsh’s involvement with this production is significant; he adapted Somerset Maugham’s story “Rain” for the 1928 silent version with Gloria Swanson, which he directed, as well as playing Sadie Thompson’s soldier lover. In his prolific and highly respected 52-year career as director, he established himself as an essential creator of action films. His male protagonists were rugged individualists, adventurers, outsiders “impelled to test and transgress the Law”,² i.e., the type of man desired by the Itinerant Showgirl. As the main character in this picture, smarter and stronger than any of the men (particularly her rather bland and conventionally upright would-be lover), Mamie can be seen as a female version of the Walsh hero.

When it comes to women, however, especially in the mid-1950s, there are limits to how much freedom is allowable. Mamie makes a fortune during the war, not just from running the club/brothel but also by investing wisely, primarily in real estate. (The sanitised screenplay downplays the novel’s harsh judgement of war profiteering.) The book ends with Mamie determined to rebuild her fortune after the war and rise even higher to a place of respectability. In the movie, she’s crushed when the man she loves ultimately rejects her, and she decides to pack it all in. At the close, we see her arriving back in San Francisco where the same cop who escorted her out of the city drives her to the airport to return to her small hometown in Mississippi. 

We’ve come full circle. Sadie, defeated by the righteous forces around her, returns to the States to meet her fate after all. Itinerant no more, the “showgirl” goes home. There would be no more significant examples of this singular character type in the changing cinema to come.

Endnotes

Quoted dialogue within each section is from the movie being discussed therein.