Year of Ann Dvorak: Day 26

I’m probably starting to sound like a broken record, but Cafe Hostess is another Dvorak film where the quality of the copy I have is so poor that it’s almost impossible to sit through. Much like Sky Devils, I have only watched Cafe Hostess twice. The first time was probably around 1o years ago and the second time was a few months back when I had to view the film in order to write about it for the book.

However, unlike Sky Devils which I really detested during both viewings, I actually enjoyed Cafe Hostess the second time. Well, I enjoyed it as much as I could with my bad VHS copy. As a nightclub “hostess” who falls for a customer (Preston Foster) and then tries to break away from her caged life, the film really belongs to Ann and it’s one of the bigger roles of her career, something that escaped me during that first viewing. Her scenes with Wynne Gibson are especially effective and leaves ones wishing they would have been paired up more often, which is how I feel after watching Ann and Joan Blondell together.

Likelihood of an Official DVD Release: This is another Columbia film, so the chances are about the same as Girls of the Road, which I wrote about yesterday.