Four Jills in a Jeep

The embedded video at the bottom of this post consists of an entire feature-length film titled Four Jills in A Jeep. It recounts the based-on-truth activities of four female stars on the USO circuit during WWII. You are kindly invited to watch the whole thing if you wish: there's some good singing, and a few laughs amidst the corn. But if you only have three minutes to spare, please do this:

1) Allow the whole video to load, with the sound off if you wish. It'll take a little bit, depending on your connection, natch.

2) Push the slider to the one-hour-and-nine-minutes mark. That's when our gals arrive at a North African village.

3) Wait patiently until, at the mark of 1:11:27, Kay Francis says "They brought us in on a camel caravan."



There's only one problem. Francis had a famous lisp, so the line becomes: "They brought us in on a camoo cawavan."

Watching this at home, we almost fell out of our seats, and had to replay the line several times to make sure we had heard right, laughing harder each time. I can guarantee you will not witness a funnier line-reading for a long time.

What makes it better is knowing something about Kay Francis's offscreen life. As we learn from this site:

A combination clotheshorse/workhorse, Kay Francis made 67 films from 1929 to 1946. Her life and career are a splurging record of indulgent consumption and extravagant dissipation....She usually drank a tumbler of gin for breakfast, got bored very easily, and slept around indiscriminately [with both men and women], racking up a high number of abortions... Kear and Rossman's book quotes liberally from Francis' diary, even using pull quotes from it on many of the pages, so that you feel their subject is talking directly to you. Kay repeatedly calls herself a bitch and a slut, proclaims her pooped-out boredom, and runs down her list of conquests. "Had merciless afternoon with Maurice (Chevalier)," she reports. "Four times in two hours." Her taste ran to talented directors too, like Goulding, Mamoulian, Lang, and Preminger. She could be generous: "Had to sleep with her because she wanted me," says one entry.

Four Jills in a Jeep