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5.4/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 5.4/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. Those Beautiful Dames remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
If you like vintage, grainy oddities where things just happen without much logic, maybe. If you need a plot that actually goes somewhere, stay far away. This isn't really a movie so much as a weird, musical hallucination that someone captured on film in the 1930s.
The whole thing starts with a girl living in a shack that looks like it might collapse if you breathed on it too hard. Then, suddenly, dolls start dancing. It’s the kind of logic only a pre-war short film could get away with.
Everything in the shop window is stiff, but once the toys are in the shack, they’re moving with this strange, jerky energy. It reminded me a bit of the frantic pacing in Makers of Melody, though this has way more glitter and significantly less sense.
The girl wakes up and the shack is suddenly fancy. Why? Because the toys felt like it. There’s no explanation. Just a lot of singing and people moving around in costumes that look like they were made of leftover curtains and sheer optimism. 💃
It’s barely a movie. It’s more like a musical stage show that got lost on its way to a theater and ended up on a film strip. You can tell they were trying to be whimsical, but there’s this weird, underlying sadness to the whole thing. Or maybe that’s just the film grain talking.
It doesn't reach the heights of something like The Phantom Carriage, obviously, but then again, nothing here is trying to be deep. It just wants to throw a party for a kid who clearly needed a better housing situation. A strange, dusty 10 minutes of cinema. 🧸