Review of Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman

Susan Hayward, impossibly young and beautiful, in this Walter Wanger production, portraying Angelica Evans, a young chanteuse with the world at her feet, but who doesn't want the world. She wants Ken Conway, part of an unemployed singing/songwriting duo (sexlessly portrayed by Lee Bowman), but he is socially beneath her. As the effervescent star of a family of performers (who happens to like a little drinkee now and then), Angelica lacks the ambition to continue her singing career. It's easy to understand why – not having been around in 1947, it's hard to imagine that the kind of singing and dancing that Hayward does as Angelica could ever be popular in real life. But, we digress – suffice to say she gives up her career for love. Hubby, and his partner, played by Eddie Albert get jobs as singing cowboys on the radio (another mysteriously popular career in old movies), and he pens a special song – a hideously slurpy ballad called "Life Can Be Beautiful." Dispensing with the cowboy routine, hubby sings the song on his radio show one night and become an overnight success, a teen idol – this, of course, is a time when teen idols *weren't* teenagers themselves. He gets hooked up with a management company, and acquires an assistant, a little minx named Martha, wickedly played by Marsha Hunt. Little Martha takes over many aspects of hubby's life, rendering Angelica useless, except as a milk machine for the baby. A few little drinkee-winkees help ease the pain ("It puts *poise* in apathetic people," she tells us), but with the drinkees come the attendant drunken dramas and Angelica becomes an embarrassment to her pop star husband. Martha happily manipulates the situation, making sure that Angelica knows that she's no longer needed in every way possible. This culminates in a drunken slapfest at a party, resulting in hubby moving out. Proved to be an unfit mother, Angelica loses custody of her child and naturally dives deeply into the bottle. Drunkenly deciding to kidnap her child, she does so, and nearly kills the child by setting the house on fire with a cigarette. This brings Angelica and hubby back together again, Martha admits there was never anything between them – she just wanted Angelica to *think* so, and everything works out perfectly, with hubby understanding that his wife's alcoholism was caused by his lack of attention to her. Life can be beautiful. Indeed.