Based on my admittedly incomplete exposure to her, it's hard for me to stay away from the conclusion that Marion Davies was, in her soul, a clown. She possesses an incredible gift for mimicry, a deceptively mobile face, and an absence of on-screen ego that allows her to throw herself into anything, no matter how foolish or potentially embarrassing, with all of her considerable energy. And it's those ridiculous moments that are almost always her best — she can be vulnerable, sure, but so can nearly everyone else. And she can be romantic, certainly, but her romantic side is always more compelling when it's blended with silliness, whether it's physical comedy, mistaken identities or, I dunno, pretending to be a super hot dude.And so, for me, Show People only comes fully to life when we get to watch Davies clown. The first laugh-out-loud funny scene in the movie comes when her character, new, idealistic actress Peggy Pepper, finds herself unable to cry on cue (despite facial expression revealing considerable strain). Desperate to unlock the tears needed to find success in real, dramatic acting, her first thought is to bang her head on a strut backstage and, when that doesn't work, she tries to stub her toe. The determination on Davies' face as Peggy gamely chases the tears she needs is just delightful, and it's a vision of Davies completely in her element, transcending everything around her to embrace her gifts.Later, when low comedian Peggy Pepper becomes posh Actress-with-a-capital-A Patricia Pepoire, Davies is unleashed, tearing apart the trappings of self-conscious society with palpable delight as she twitches her nose and bares her teeth like an anxious rabbit, putting on what Patricia believes is the look of wealth and class. The falseness of her new persona infuses every inch of Patricia's presence, from the way she holds her head, to the careful way she arranges her body to look 'careless'; from the way she moves her hands awkwardly around her face to approximate 'grace', to the car-wreck way her face transitions from genuine shock about the lies people are swallowing about her back to the anxious bunny of elitism.Like the best of clowns, Davies gracefully sends up both her own presence and that of the people she's aping, joyfully embracing the contrived, aimless ridiculous of Patricia as a means of slickly undercutting Hollywood's nose-in-the-air upper crust. Many members of that upper crust appear in the movie as themselves, no doubt in an effort to show that it's not them Davies is teasing — they are the ones who can laugh at themselves, she's making fun of those other folks, the ones who take themselves so seriously.
