‘Grave Robbing ’ or ‘Career Comeback’? On the Digital Resurrection of Dead Screen Stars

When blonde American screen star, Jean Harlow, suddenly fell ill and died of uremic poisoning during the film-ing of Saratoga in 1937, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer felt it would be prudent to shelve the film, as 10 % of her scenes remained unshot. However, fan petitions and newspaper polls demanded Saratoga’s completion and release. Audi-ences wanted, in their mourning or morbid curiousity, to have one final glimpse of the star before she disappeared forever from their screens. In this time before TV re-runs, festival retrospectives, VHS and DVD, audiences must have genuinely felt that this would be the last they ever saw of Harlow’s luminosity in motion. The studio soon relented and the film was completed using the labour of three women to simulate the actress’s continuing screen presence: a body-double, a voice-double, and a bit-player, Mary Dees, who was shot mainly from behind or from a distance, her face obscured by big hats and binoculars. By many accounts the resulting comedy is a disquieting text whose surface morbid viewers scour for signs of Harlow’s impending death. In one cotemporaneous and melancholic review for The New York Times, Frank S. Nugent expresses his inability to see the film as “just a film. ” Knowledge of Harlow’s death continually intrudes upon his enjoyment of the narrative and characters as, watching her flounce across the screen, he cannot help but realize that “this image is an insubstantial shadow ” (1937a, 16). Returning to the film in his column a few days later he states that the film gave him “the shivers ” and that “death and comedy don’t mix ” (Nugent, 1937b