Cinema: Canned Burlesque

Some strange new names were glowing on movie marquees last week—Betty ("Ball of Fire") Rowland, Genii Young, Deenah Prince—and there were stranger things inside. In such films as International Burlesque, a New York outfit named Jewel Productions was profitably peddling a-brand-new movie line: old-fashioned flesh-and-spangle shows straight from the burlesque stage, converted to the screen with slight additions to the costumes and subtractions from the gags.

Costing only $50,000 apiece, the canned-burlesque films seemed to be just the answer in towns deprived of the real article. The two versions of International Burlesque—the "cold" one for strict towns, the "hot" or "farm" one...