Saturdays with the Stars Season 4 Finale

Two of our stars this year, Lucille Ball & Ann Sothern

We ended the year on a Saturday (a first for our series), so I wasn't able to get this recap out in 2022 like we normally do, but I didn't want to finish our fourth season of Saturdays with the Stars without our annual recap.  While we are headed into a new season this coming Saturday focusing on western stars, I would be remiss if we didn't take a moment to talk through actors in television, and what I learned from our fourth season.

This year was really interesting for me for a couple of reasons.  For starters, it was really the first season where I didn't have "stars" at the center, and of course it was our first season with men.  As a result, there were actors this year where I was watching a movie where they barely showed up, character actors in Old Hollywood being harder to track their "most significant" roles.  As a result, our annual discussion below of "favorite performances" I ended up in some cases having less options.

But I also kind of loved that, as it underlined the main thesis of this year: that television gave these performers an opportunity that movies simply couldn't.  Some of these actors had great potential, but the public (or the studio heads) couldn't see it for what it was, and TV brought that talent out in them.  Others, quite frankly, needed the banality of television compared to the "make an impact every time" culture of movies because their star personas weren't as curated.  We'll be getting back to star culture in 2023 (while they might occasionally take supporting parts depending on our film, all 12 of our stars this year are generally considered to be "leading players"), I won't forget that lesson as I continue to watch the twelve stars we watched this past year in other films in the decades to come.  Below, I have created a little list celebrating the best of this year's stars.  Thank you so much to everyone who joined us for part or all of this year's season-I'm excited to have you back for season five's "When Cowboys Ruled Hollywood"!: 

Favorite Performance from Each Star 

January: Lucille Ball-Dance. Girl. Dance.

February: Jack Benny-George Washington Slept Here

March: Eve Arden-Comrade X

April: Ann Sothern-Lady in a Cage

May: Robert Young-They Won't Believe Me

June: Spring Byington-BF's Daughter

July: Loretta Young-Midnight Mary

August: John Payne-Silver Lode

September: Ward Bond-The Wings of Eagles

October: Walter Brennan-Come and Get It

November: Donna Reed-The Last Time I Saw Paris

December: Barbara Stanwyck-Baby Face

5 Favorite Performers (Alphabetical, and based solely on the films we watched as a collective & not on the rest of their careers)

Eve Arden

Lucille Ball

Jack Benny

Ann Sothern

Barbara Stanwyck

5 Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Lucille Ball, Dance. Girl. Dance.

Barbara Stanwyck, Baby Face

Barbara Stanwyck, The Furies

Ann Sothern, Lady in a Cage

Loretta Young, Midnight Mary

10 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

Baby Face

Dance. Girl. Dance.

Forty Guns

The Furies

George Washington Slept Here

Lady in a Cage

Rio Bravo

The Stranger

They Were Expendable

They Won't Believe Me

Top 10 Performances of the Year (Not By Our Stars...and Yes, Alphabetical)

Judith Anderson, The Furies

James Caan, Lady in a Cage

Charles Coburn, George Washington Slept Here

Olivia de Havilland, Lady in a Cage

Susan Hayward, They Won't Believe Me

Walter Huston, The Furies

Percy Kilbride, George Washington Slept Here

Edward G. Robinson, The Stranger

John Wayne, Rio Bravo

Orson Welles, The Stranger

Lady in a Cage (1964)

Film: Lady in a Cage (1964)

Stars: Olivia de Havilland, James Caan, Jennifer Billingsley, Jeff Corey, Ann Sothern

Director: Walter Grauman

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Ann Sothern: click here to learn more about Ms. Sothern (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week, we left our star Ann Sothern broke, her career nearly over, and drowning in medical bills after a three-year fight with hepatitis.  Thankfully, this is not where we're going to leave her in our final film devoted to our April star.  Sothern, a few months after The Blue Gardenia, signed a contract for a television show called Private Secretary for CBS.  Sothern, like Lucille Ball & Jack Benny before her, had made her name in movies but never quite caught on as a name-brand star in the way that she would be throughout the 1950's as a television headliner.  Private Secretary would run for five seasons, regularly be a Top 10 smash, and would get Sothern four Emmy nominations for Best Actress.  After it finished, she went on to do three seasons of The Ann Sothern Show, also a hit (after a rocky start) which would win her a Golden Globe.

This was the height of Sothern's stardom-she finally became the household name that the 1940's hadn't really afforded her beyond Maisie, but when The Ann Sothern Show ended its run in 1961, she was in her fifties, and a return to leading work in movies didn't feel like an option.  Instead, she took on the guise of a character actress, and had quite a bit of success in 1964 for two roles, both of which got her serious Oscar buzz: Gore Vidal's The Best Man and the famed hagsploitation film Lady in a Cage.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place largely in one house, and focuses on Cornelia Hilyard (de Havilland), a wealthy widow whose son is leaving for the weekend.  Cornelia's hip has broken, and so she uses an elevator to get up-and-down the stairs.  When the elevator is stuck, she realizes that she's trapped.  Initially, she waits & rings an alarm to an oblivious public, and then a drunk (Corey) comes, bringing with him a former prostitute Sade (Sothern) who both start to ransack the house.  They are soon superseded by a group of delinquents (meant to play as sociopaths), lead by Randall (Caan, in his first credited film role), who eventually kill the alcoholic, lock Sade in a closet, & began to torture Cornelia, first with threats of death, and then in a late-stage twist, when she realizes that her (apparently gay) son has decided to kill himself.  The film ends violently, with Caan being blinded by Cornelia as she tries to escape, and finally the ugliness of Caan's bloodied eyes stops passersby, who eventually arrest all of the intruders and leave a distraught Cornelia behind, the fate of her son unknown.

The movie was part of a very brief period after the smash success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? where actresses of the 1940's & 50's suddenly had work playing aged versions of themselves titillating the audience by showing yesterday's glamour girls in horrifying, violent displays.  De Havilland did two such films in 1964, both successfully (though she wasn't the original choice to play the lead in Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte, a part originally intended for Joan Crawford, but that's a fantastic story for a different day).  Lady in a Cage was a hit, partially because of the sheer curiosity of arguably the most dignified leading lady of the 1940's being put in truly shocking scenes of sex & violence.

At the time, the film (and de Havilland herself) were heavily criticized for being involved with such a project, and even today, reviews are mixed on the movie but count me as a fan.  It's not a campy sort of fun like Baby Jane or some of the other Grand Guignol movies of the era, but it's really solid as a genuinely terrifying horror movie.  Caan's character is nasty, with the actor doing his best version of Brando crossed with Alex DeStrange, and de Havilland plays her character at just the right hilt.  Cornelia is certainly not the film's villain, but she's also meant to be obtuse & not a particularly good person.  Her ignorance of other people's feelings, particularly her son's, and the way she behaves quite ridiculously (to use modern parlance, she is decidedly "extra") all create a great deal of depth to her performance.  I liked what she did here, what can I say?

Ann Sothern is also excellent, and gives the film its most well-rounded performance.  Unlike Caan's Randall, her villain gets a proper arch, going from greedy-by-circumstance to genuinely horrified by the brutality she's unleashed by invading this woman's home.  The role got her loads of Oscar buzz, as I mentioned above, but it didn't get her an Oscar nomination, and she quickly found herself back in television, primarily as Lucille Ball's frequent costar on The Lucy Show.  It would be another 23 years before she'd finally get her date with Oscar, nominated for her final film The Whales of August opposite two other aging screen legends, Lillian Gish & Bette Davis.  Always just a hair's breadth away from bigger stardom, Sothern couldn't get that final moment of glory & lost to Olympia Dukakis.  Next month we will take a look at an actor who like Sothern spent much of the 1940's & 50's getting to play opposite bigger stars, letting them take the glory...until television provided him with not one but two roles that would define his career.

The Blue Gardenia (1953)

Film: The Blue Gardenia (1953)

Stars: Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Ann Sothern, Raymond Burr, Jeff Donnell, Nat King Cole

Director: Fritz Lang

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Ann Sothern: click here to learn more about Ms. Sothern (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week when we talked about Ann Sothern's career with Words and Music, I noted that her celebrity was starting to wane with the Maisie films no longer in production.  However, Sothern's career would hit its low point in the next few years.  Despite critical hosannas for A Letter to Three Wives, arguably her magnum opus as an actress (she wasn't nominated for an Oscar but should've been), coming out to critical acclaim & commercial success in 1949, her health overcame any possibility at a comeback.  Sothern battled hepatitis for three years, causing MGM to cancel her contract (which was legal to do at the time), and leaving her flat broke.  During that time frame, Sothern barely worked, and by 1953 was in desperate need of money, only doing supporting work in films like today's The Blue Gardenia because she needed to pay her mounting debts.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about three women who live together, including Crystal (Sothern), a flirtatious girl-about-town and her primmer friend Norah (Baxter), who is pining for her soldier fiancé to return from the Korean War.  When it turns out that her soldier will not return, and has in fact run off with another woman, Norah decides to spend the night being romanced by a known playboy Harry Prebble (Burr).  After getting drunk with Harry, she goes back to his place, and he attempts to rape her, at which point she hits him over the head.  The story blacks out from there, but the next morning Harry is dead, and Norah assumes that she killed him.  So do the cops, who find her shoes at the place, and along with reporter Casey Mayo (Conte), look for the shoes' owner in a macabre twist on the Cinderella story.  Wracked with guilt, eventually Norah comes forward, but as we learn in the film's final moments, it was another scorned love (whom the censors wouldn't be able to say was pregnant out-of-wedlock, but any viewer can see that's the case in plain sight based on her dialogue), who killed Harry when he refused to marry her, with a passed out Norah nearby to take the blame.  The film ends with Norah & Casey both free to pursue a romance themselves, Norah moving on.

As you can tell from that description, this is not Ann Sothern's movie-she is very much the supporting player in this picture, though you'd be forgiven for wishing she wasn't.  Sothern's work is the best of the bunch, giving a sass from the sidelines that was her trademark.  Baxter at its center, never a subtle actress, cannot handle the weight of playing the bereft Norah, portraying her as nearly inhuman as the movie movies on, certainly not someone that would plausibly stay under the radar of the police as they frequently find their way in her path.

Therefore I don't subscribe to the critical reclamation of this particular movie.  In 1953, this film received lousy reviews but many have credited it in the years since as a dark noir, one that feels like a solid indictment of the McCarthy era...but I don't buy it.  Baxter, an actress occasionally capable of greatness (specifically her two Oscar-nominated roles), is too stylized to land her part, and the movie is too realistic to be camp...as a result it comes across as a lousy melodrama.  Unfortunately for our star this month, this meant that Ann Sothern would not get a big film comeback...but within a few months, television would prove that she wouldn't need one to get back into the spotlight.

Words and Music (1948)

Picture: Words and Music (1948)

Stars: June Allyson, Perry Como, Judy Garland, Lena Horne, Gene Kelly, Mickey Rooney, Ann Sothern, Tom Drake, Cyd Charisse, Betty Garrett, Janet Leigh, Marshall Thompson, Mel Torme, Vera-Ellen

Director: Norman Taurog

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Ann Sothern: click here to learn more about Ms. Sothern (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By the late 1940's, about the time that Ann Sothern would be soon entering her forties (she was born in 1909), her career had hit a decided slump.  The Maisie pictures ended in 1947, and while she had consistently made movies throughout the decade, other than Maisie the movies hadn't really caught on in the same way-she wasn't an established star like Judy Garland or Gene Tierney, not the kind who could demand respect & acclaim & Oscar nominations, and as a result her contract was in peril with MGM.  In 1948, she tried to jump-start her career with two musicals, April Showers, which was a poorly-reviewed musical for Warner Brothers, and then Words and Music. Words and Music was a weird film for Sothern because by most standards, it was a hit, wildly popular both domestically & abroad...but due to exorbitant costs (including giving Judy Garland a fortune for what amounts to little more than a cameo), the film couldn't break even, and as a result, Sothern's star continued to diminish.  Today we'll look at Words and Music which, despite an all-star lineup of MGM talent, is listless & forgettable.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a semi-autobiographical look at the creative partnership between Richard Rodgers (Drake) and Lorenz Hart (Rooney), two of the bigger names of the early 20th Century for musical theater.  Most modern audiences know Rodgers for his partnership with Oscar Hammerstein, which produced classics like Oklahoma, The Sound of Music, and South Pacific, but his time with Hart was very successful.  American songbook classics like "The Lady is a Tramp," "Manhattan," and "Blue Moon" came out of their partnership.  Throughout the film, we see how Rodgers wooed his eventual wife (played by Janet Leigh here) while Hart's stature causes him to suffer with women, and tumble into a deep depression.  This is interspersed with "cameos" from much of the biggest names in the cast doing musical number versions of classic Rodgers & Hart numbers.

The film's biggest problem is that, even for an MGM musical, the plot is pretty thin.  Rodgers' life seems idyllic & pretty much an overnight success (in a fourth-wall break in the opening scenes of the movie, he basically admits as such), which might make for fine domesticity in real life, but isn't great for a movie.  Hart's life was much more complicated, but it was his homosexuality (and the homophobic culture of the 1940's) that caused his alcoholism, self-hatred, and eventual friction with Rodgers that led the partnership to break up.  No one in the film can pull off him simply being upset about being short work (since him being gay in an MGM movie would've been unthinkable), particularly Mickey Rooney.  Forget for a fact that Rooney is about as good of an example as you can come up with for a short guy whose success led to romantic touchdowns (the man married Ava Gardner, for crying out loud); Rooney is simply not a good enough actor to play a part this subtle, and his histrionics totally derail the movie.

The film's best part are the musical cameos, though our star Sothern hardly stands out in this regard.  Admittedly, Sothern is a fine singer but her skill-set is best used in comedy & dialogue.  When you put her next to Lena Horne, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, & June Allyson, all four troupers whose biggest talent was as musical-comedy stars...you just can't compete.  Garland had $100,000 worth of medical bills at the time & used her cameo here to get them all paid off, but honestly the real highlight of the movie is Lena Horne, singing the hell out of "The Lady is a Tramp" in what is the most-remembered sequence in Words and Music.  Alas, Horne was too much of a financial risk in Southern theaters at the time, and so we don't get enough of her...and the rest of the movie can't compare.

Panama Hattie (1942)

Film: Panama Hattie (1942)

Stars: Red Skelton, Ann Sothern, Rags Ragland, Ben Blue, Marsha Hunt, Virginia O'Brien, Dan Dailey, Lena Horne

Director: Norman Z. McLeod

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Ann Sothern: click here to learn more about Ms. Sothern (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

After Maisie, Ann Sothern's career definitely entered a strange era.  Similar to an actor today like Melissa McCarthy or Jon Hamm, who has a hit TV series and then tries to experiment with other options in their film career, seeing if lightning strikes to bring them to the next level she alternated between her moneymaking series & trying to find a less typecast niche.  For Sothern, Panama Hattie, which was made during the midway point of her Maisie-bolstered career (her last film for the series was in 1947), both was & wasn't that movie.  The film was a hit, a pretty big one by the standards of Sothern's career, but it was not a critical success.  Originally starring Ethel Mermen when the musical it was inspired from was playing on Broadway, the translation was lambasted by critics, and the production was troubled.  When it comes to Saturdays with the Stars, this kind of recipe (where critical & commercial success differ) is frequently my favorite combination-getting to go into a movie trying to understand if it was the critics or the public that got it wrong usually yields some of the most interesting movies.  Unfortunately, the critics were the correct ones in this scenario.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on Hattie (Sothern), a nightclub singer who is in love with a moneyed naval officer named Dick Bulliard (Dailey).  Dick's ex Leila Tree (Hunt) has designs on him, and she might have a shot at him as Hattie keeps screwing up her relationship with Dick's daughter, who has recently started staying with him.  What starts as a frosty relationship blossoms into a friendship, and soon his daughter Gerry is helping Hattie, along with three of her naval buddies, including one played by Red Skelton, who get into a series of shenanigans that eventually (inexplicably) involve a bed of hungry crocodiles.  The movie ends with Hattie & Dick together, though it actually concludes with a patriotic rendition of "The Son of a Gun Who Picks on Uncle Sam," to close things out.

The movie is strange for a variety of reasons, and perhaps one of the biggest, and why it failed in its translation, is that a lot of the musical numbers from the original production are not in the movie.  Only three songs made it to the film version, and while there are times that's okay (specifically the two Lena Horne numbers, which are the highlight of the movie), most of the time the additions are silly filler, and not successful.  The closing "Uncle Sam" number, in particular, feels like wartime propaganda that falls completely flat, and like it misread the movie entirely.

The cast doesn't help much.  Sothern works fine here (she's a pro for a rom-com), but she's saddled with playing a ridiculous woman, and that's hard if the script doesn't acknowledge it.  It's a key plot point that Hattie behaves like a child in front of Gerry rather than just brush off a little girl laughing at her outfit, and yet that takes up like a third of the movie, and we're meant to believe that a nightclub singer could be so ruffled by a little girl.  Sothern is better than most of her costars, though.  The entire subplot involving Skelton, Ragland, & Blue as interchangeable sailors feels like such a bizarrely-handled scenario (they read like a comedic Rosencrantz & Guildenstern) that you'll be forgiven for forgetting what their actual connection to Hattie is at all.  And Dan Dailey continues to be one of the dullest leading men in Classical Hollywood, his Dick about as charming as lead paint.  The only saving grace on the call sheet is Horne, in immaculate vocal range during her years at MGM where she was relegated to just doing musical numbers that could easily be lifted in Southern theaters.  Despite being a hit for Sothern at the time, this movie is a giant miss for me.

Maisie (1939)

Film: Maisie (1939)

Stars: Ann Sothern, Robert Young, Ruth Hussey, Ian Hunter, Cliff Edwards, John Hubbard

Director: Edwin L. Marin

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Ann Sothern: click here to learn more about Ms. Sothern (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Ann Sothern spent most of her early career, after moving from Minneapolis to Los Angeles after dropping out of college, jumping from studio to studio with none of them feeling like a good fit.  RKO, Columbia, & finally MGM were her home throughout the 1930's and it honestly looked like Sothern at the age of thirty was going to be one of those actors who got a chance at Hollywood but couldn't graduate to proper stardom.  That was until Maisie came along.  Originally intended as a vehicle for Jean Harlow (who had starred in a different Wilson Collison property, Red Dust, to legendary success), when Harlow died unexpectedly the movie went to Sothern.  To the surprise of many, it was a smash hit for the studio, and Sothern quickly signed a star contract with MGM making in total ten Maisie pictures for the studio over the following decade.  We're going to do just one of the films this month, the first one, which starred Sothern opposite Robert Young, another future TV star.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Maisie (Sothern), a burlesque dancer lured out to Wyoming under the pretense of being the star in a new show there, only to find out that the show has already closed, leaving her penniless in the middle-of-nowhere.  She meets a guy named Slim (Young), who has no use for women, but thanks to tagging along with him she finds work as a maid for Slim's employer Cliff's (Hunter) wife Sybil (Hussey), who is having an affair despite promising her husband she'd be more faithful.  Slowly Slim & Maisie fall for each other, their initial dislike turning into attraction, but a tragic car accident leads Cliff to find out his wife is still having an affair, and in the process, he kills himself.  Meanwhile, Sybil, prior to Cliff's death, tricks Slim into thinking that it's Maisie having the affair (with Cliff) and after he confronts her she storms off, only to return when Slim is tried for Cliff's murder.  In the end, Slim & Maisie end up together after Cliff's death is ruled a suicide, and find out that Cliff left the two of them the ranch in his will so they can have a proper happily ever after.

The movie is cute, if predictable, and it's easy to see why audiences fell for Sothern in this role.  Up until this point in her career, a lot of her work had been in the wrong genre, but Sothern was made for romantic comedy, and this fits her like a glove.  She gets a lot of the great one-liners off here, playing Maisie as a sassy broad, perhaps in a way that better suits the role than even Harlow would've been able to achieve.  While Harlow was always a damaged blonde star, frequently in her best roles feeling like she's got a little bit of desperation behind the bottle blonde look (I'm such a fan of hers, she was a previous star in this series and was mesmerizing in Red Dust and Dinner at Eight), this material needs someone to play it more broadly, and Sothern understands that.  This isn't breaking new ground, but it's harmless & fun.

The Maisie films would become Sothern's calling card until her turn in television.  Over the coming weeks we'll continue to look at her work in film, but I wanted to point out that she is a weird entry in this year's series.  Unlike someone like Lucille Ball, she wasn't unsuccessful in this era-the Maisie films kept some of MGM's more prestigious, expensive-and-less-profitable classic dramas of the era from bankrupting the studio.  But she wasn't really a seriously-considered actress, not in the way that women like Joan Crawford & Greta Garbo had been for the studio, and despite her successes isn't really thought of today for her work during this era.  Keep that in mind in the coming weeks; Sothern isn't the tale of a woman who couldn't make it in pictures, but instead was a star who always felt like she got the short end of the stick until television gave her a second chance.

Saturdays with the Stars: Ann Sothern

Each month of 2022 we will be taking a look at one-time film actors who became foundational figures in the early days of television, stretching from the early 1950's into the mid-1960's.  Last month we talked about character actress Eve Arden, who went from playing second bananas to bigger stars throughout the 1940's to becoming a true leading lady on television with Our Miss Brooks.  This month, we're going to talk about a woman who did lead a number of movies throughout the 1930's & 40's, and some might argue was too big of a success for this series' theme.  However, it was in television that she truly graduated from being a B-movie headliner and instead became a true industry name.  This month's star is Ann Sothern.

Sothern grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and from an early age showed promise as a musician, specializing in the piano.  This led her to do numerous stage productions in her high school, and when her mother moved to Los Angeles after Sothern's graduation, her daughter came with and got a job working for Warner Brothers as a vocal coach.  A short-term contract with MGM eventually came about, but it was in vaudeville & theater that Sothern had her early successes, working for Florenz Ziegfeld in his follies.

Sothern didn't take off in movies (she had unsuccessful contracts with RKO & Columbia before landing another contract with MGM) until 1939's Maisie.  Originally intended for Jean Harlow, the Maisie movies were given to Sothern after Harlow's death, and were big moneymakers for the studio.  Sothern, therefore, was under contract to the studio for most of the decade specifically to make the popular Maisie movies (she'd make ten in all, as well as a radio program inspired by the series).

Outside of Maisie, though, Sothern never really took off in the same way other MGM stars like Judy Garland or Joan Crawford had.  She was largely typecast in the part, and though she'd enjoy arguably the most important role of her film career in 1949 (the Oscar-winning A Letter to Three Wives, which she's marvelous in), a bout with hepatitis caused MGM to cancel her contract for health reasons, and by the early 1950's what success she had been able to amass in movies had been taken over by small roles in forgettable pictures.

Broke and with a waning film career, Sothern turned to television, which her longtime best friend Lucille Ball had recently had a big success with, starring in the CBS program Private Secretary.  The show was a big hit, and Sothern finally was able to step out of the shadow of Maisie and her tumultuous film career to have a proper star run.  This month, we're going to look back at that career, including watching one of the Maisie movies, as well as take a peak into why Sothern, whom Ball would once describe as "the best comedian in the business" never became a truly award-worthy actress until television gave her a venue for her talents to be respected.

OVP: A Letter to Three Wives (1949)

Film: A Letter to Three Wives (1949)
Stars: Jeanne Crain, Linda Darnell, Ann Sothern, Jeffrey Lynn, Paul Douglas, Kirk Douglas, Thelma Ritter
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Oscar History: 3 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture, Director*, Adapted Screenplay*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Linda Darnell-click here to learn more about Ms. Darnell (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

It's occasionally difficult to know where to end our months with each star-do we go with their final major success, as we did with Ann Sheridan & Alice Faye, or do we go to the depths of their film careers like Virginia Mayo and Cyd Charisse?  Considering how tragic Linda Darnell's life ended up being, with her eventually going into bouts of alcoholism and being burned alive in one of Hollywood's most horrific deaths, it felt wrong to wade through the final stages of her career, when she would have the occasional lead role, but was perhaps most well-known in the 1950's for the part she didn't get (despite a love affair with Jopeph L. Mankiewicz, it was Ava Gardner who won the lead in The Barefoot Contessa even though Darnell was certain she would be its star and her life may have profoundly changed if she'd gotten the part in the picture which was a smash hit for United Artists).  We will instead leave her at arguably the professional peak of her career, the Best Picture-nominated A Letter to Three Wives, featuring what many consider to be her finest performance.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers around the lives of three friends: Lora Mae (Darnell), Deborah (Crain), and Rita (Sothern), all of whom are frenemies with a woman who is never seen but has made passes at each of their husbands at some point named Addie Ross (an uncredited Celeste Holm does the narration, recalling in many ways Mankiewicz's magnum opus All About Eve).  All three women are chaperoning a school field trip when they receive a letter from Addie Ross, cattily pointing out to them that she has decided to skip town...and is taking one of their husbands with her.  The movie progresses with each woman wondering, silently, on the trip whether or not their husband is the one who ran away with the woman, and recalling scenes from their marriage that could have led to such infidelity.  Rita, after all, is a career woman (considering it's 1949, this is handled with less sexism than you'd think though it's obviously still there), Deborah is a bit dowdy & doesn't fit in with her husband's friends, and Lora Mae's husband thinks she's just a gold-digger, waiting for her chance at his fortune.  None of the marriages seem to be in particularly strong shape, though it's pretty clear that Rita's to George (Kirk Douglas, when he was still taking supporting roles of a sort) is in the best shape, and they lay down the cards pretty quickly that he isn't the culprit.  It turns out that, despite Deborah's husband not showing up at the country club dance, it was Lora Mae's Porter (Paul Douglas, who was only in his first year of moviemaking at the time despite being 42) that had run off with Addie, only to change his mind.  The film ends with Lora Mae & Porter admitting that they love each other, and a happy ending, with Addie saying "good night" to the audience as they all dance.

The movie is charming from start-to-finish.  It's hard not to make easy comparisons to All About Eve, not only because it shares several cast members (Holm, of course, and Thelma Ritter in a role so early in her career she didn't even get onscreen billing despite a substantial part that might have won her an Oscar nomination a few years later), but because it's the rare classic Hollywood movie that genuinely just puts women out in front, with all of the male actors relegated to supporting roles.  Eve is better, but that's an impossible bar to compare to, and this is a rich screenplay filled with witty asides (Darnell, Sothern, Ritter, & Holm all bat the one-liners out of the park), and is equally funny and dramatic.  The movie never shies away from the stakes here-the women all are in troubled marriages, and all don't want their marriages to end, but are aware that this isn't an ideal situation.  I liked that Mankiewicz didn't just go around blaming these three women for the problems in their partnerships, having the men own up to such things as well as the female characters, and while it just missed the Best Picture win to All the King's Men, it certainly would have made a worthy capper to the 1940's.

It's impossible not to compare the three lead actresses.  At first, I liked Sothern the best, as she was having the most fun with Mankiewicz's dialogue and in the first half it's hard to tell why Darnell's Lora Mae seemed so distant compared to the other actresses' closeness.  As the film goes on, though, we find that Lora Mae is the most interesting part of the three, and Darnell (in the best performance we've chronicled from her all month) aces it.  Lora Mae isn't a gold digger, but she is someone whom men just see as cheap and there "for a good time."  Ravishingly beautiful, but a poor girl, she's someone Porter thinks can be had for a steak dinner or a promotion, but in fact she wants something real and isn't afraid to lose him to get it.  That's what makes the stakes of the ending so great-Lora Mae is the only one of the three women who hasn't admitted to herself how much she loves her husband (and how much she loves him), and as a result is the only one of the three women you could see being abandoned before the curtain ends in a melodrama.  That she doesn't isn't a fault of the film, and actually to its aid, and one has to assume that Darnell was close to an Oscar nomination for this part, perhaps only missing out because she was splitting the vote with her costars (surely she would have campaigned correctly as a lead, but in our era of category fraud, she now would've gone supporting).  Darnell proved here with her superb comic timing & strong dramatic work that she was more than just a pretty face, and should be remembered not just for her beauty, but for being a damn fine actress.

OVP: Lady Be Good (1941)

Film: Lady Be Good (1941)
Stars: Robert Young, Ann Sothern, Eleanor Powell, John Carroll, Red Skelton, Virginia O'Brien, Lionel Barrymore
Director: Norman Z. McLeod
Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Original Song-"The Last Time I Saw Paris")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

I think one of the strangest things about the Oscar Viewing Project (and there are a lot of strange things about seeking out truly random films from each year, realizing what the Wonder or Marshall of 1941 is), is that you learn some of the truly bizarre "footnotes" of Oscar history, perhaps one of the stranger ones being Lady Be Good.  A romantic comedy-musical from the early 1940's, it's pretty standard fare, with some truly memorable numbers (including Eleanor Powell's spellbinding "Fascinating Rhythm"), but the film's only claim to fame with Oscar was its song "The Last Time I Saw Paris," a staple of the era that has been recorded by everyone from Dinah Shore to Connie Francis to (inevitably) Tony Bennett.  The problem is, though, it's not an original, and wasn't written with this movie in mind.

(Spoilers Ahead) The song, in fact, was written by Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein II, but had become a radio staple circa 1940, with Kate Smith's version being the most popular cover.  However, MGM, smelling a way they could take advantage of a hit song for their new musical, included the movie in the picture, a fitting ode to a movie that regularly praises Kern specifically (the two lead characters Dixie Donegan and Eddie Crane, played by Ann Sothern & Robert Young, respectively, are both songwriters).  Sothern performs the song in tight closeup (unusually tight for a film of the era), and because the rules at the time for the Oscars more mandated that a film use a song, rather than it be original, the film won the Oscar.  Kern so hated that he won for a song that he hadn't originally intended for the picture that we got the very stringent usage rules we have today (which has cost numerous songs, including "Come What May," their chances at the Oscars).

The song itself is hardly special in the film, and while Sothern does a lovely job at it, honestly this is the rare musical film that doesn't really need music (the dancing's the best part, anyway).  The movie follows Dixie & Eddie as they marry and attempt to divorce twice, realizing that the chemistry of their relationship fizzles when they mix marriage with work, but that they clearly love each other.  A kindly judge (Barrymore) overhears much of the story (which is told by Sothern as part of her divorce testimony), and doesn't grant them a divorce at the end because he sees that they clearly belong together.  It's a cute movie, and while it is very predictable, there are some game performances in the film that make it charming.

Sothern, for example, a finely gifted comedienne, is charming and winning in the lead.  Robert Young, whom I have developed an allergy to through the OVP (every era has a few performers I cannot get behind at all, and he's one of them), is mercifully quiet for most of the film, as it's really Sothern's show and he's along for the ride, so he doesn't distract like I suspect he would have otherwise.  Skelton is a genuine supporting part, and great with Virginia O'Brien (whom I want to see a lot more of, fast, as her schtick is quite modern and reminds me of Kristen Schaal in a lot of ways).  Best of all is Eleanor Powell, dynamite as Sothern's best friend (Powell gets top billing for the picture, but she's most definitely a supporting player), who is flirty & deadpan with a hapless John Carroll, and an absolute marvel in two dance numbers, one with a dog (who two-steps along with her!), and a scene that has to be watched to be believed, where she tap dances for four straight minutes alongside a sea of dueling grand pianos.  Powell, who really doesn't get her due these days, has become a favorite of mine in the OVP (a reverse Robert Young), and this may well be my favorite performance of hers yet.