The story told in Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947) was invented by Dorothy Parker and Frank Cavett, but Parker did not write or co-write the script; John Howard Lawson did. All the same, Parker resembled the alcoholic wife and mother, Angie, depicted in the film; and it is doubtless as personal a fiction as Parker’s good story, “Big Blonde.”
Angie is a vulnerable ex-nightclub singer married to another performer, Ken (Lee Bowman). She starts drinking way too much, and losses pile up. It is, by now, a very conventional but perceptively written picture, which is even sympathetic to the unattached woman (Marsha Hunt) who secretly loves Ken. Apparently Miss Hunt was not very fond of Susan Hayward‘s attitude toward her co-workers (a pity), but as Angie, Hayward is a superlative thespian. There is no phoniness in those drunk scenes. . . Smash-Up, directed by Stuart Heisler, eventually turns pretty powerful. The positive ending is a bit easier to accept, though only a bit, than the finis of The Lost Weekend.
