No Sad Songs for Me (1950)

No Sad Songs for Me is an atypical postwar Hollywood tearjerker. A woman learns she is dying of cancer and decides to withhold her prognosis from her family, while secretly encouraging the woman she hopes will eventually take her place.

What makes this movie so atypical is the presence of the leading lady, Margaret Sullavan, a sublime actress of exceptional skill, who has nevertheless been forgotten over the years by the general public. Her life was tempestuous: married four times (including a 60-day stint with Henry Fonda), torn between Los Angeles and Broadway, and often both severely physically ill and mentally depressed. Sullavan never enjoyed the stability of one able to choose a coast and settle there. She’d give birth to three children, two of whom would eventually commit suicide, though neither would do so while Sullavan herself was still living. The troubled and unhappy actress would die of a barbiturate overdose in 1960 at the age of fifty-one.

In spite of making only sixteen films, she was as highly regarded as any actress in the business. Unlike most, she left Hollywood on her own terms. Other aging actresses faded from the film scene for a variety of reasons, but Hollywood always had a part waiting for Sullavan. Her performances are nuanced and damned smart—and she was gifted with an extraordinary voice. She starred opposite Jimmy Stewart in three bona fide classics: The Shopworn Angel (1938), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), and The Mortal Storm (1940). Her best performance, in Three Comrades (1938), with Robert Taylor and Franchot Tone, earned her only Oscar nomination. She made No Sad Songs for Me after a seven-year breather, and it would end up being the final film of her career. For the remaining decade of her life, she confined her efforts to the stage and an occasional television appearance.

Although No Sad Songs for Me has the same melodramatic honeycomb as a Douglas Sirk picture, it’s saved by subtle and clever casting—and not just in Sullavan's case. Each of Columbia boss Harry Cohn and director Rudolph Maté’s choices keeps the film from straying into histrionics. Wendell Corey plays Sullavan’s husband. Most often utilized as a foil to a more charismatic and romantic male star, Corey’s sensitive, wry screen persona is perfect here. You could argue that his limited range mars the picture in one crucial moment, when he finally learns the truth about his wife’s condition, but on the whole his presence is a lesson in inspired, slow-burn restraint. The movie's other woman is Swedish actress Viveca Lindfors, who plays Corey’s co-worker, and isn’t so beautiful or glamorous that you can’t imagine her ending up with him. Little Natalie Wood plays the kid.

The film benefits from a well-constructed script, tight as a drum from start to finish. It favors the romantic triangle over Sullavan’s struggle to come to grips with her illness and her relationship with her daughter, but it’s entertaining enough that you won’t care. Although there are some routine elements of 1950s scandal / gossip present, the film doesn’t linger on them. No Sad Songs for Me is worthwhile for softening the tired Depression-era cliché of the dying wife and mother. Sullavan herself had already starred in one the preeminent such films of the 1930s, Three Comrades. It’s clear that by the early 1950s (and in the wake of the war) filmmakers were less concerned with Greek tragedy and more aware that life moves on the wake of death.

No Sad Songs for Me (1950)

Grade: B+

Directed by Rudolph Maté

Starring Margaret Sullavan, Wendell Corey, Natalie Wood

Released by Columbia Pictures

Running time: 88 minutes

Availability: Airs on TCM.

There’s Always Tomorrow (1956)

In Douglas Sirk’s 1956 soaper There’s Always Tomorrow, Fred MacMurray’s perfect family learns the hard way that fathers need attention too. MacMurray plays Los Angeles toy manufacturer Clifford Groves, father of three and married these twenty years to his high school sweetheart, Marion (Joan Bennett, lovely once again after the disaster of Highway Dragnet).  As the movie unfolds, we meet a man who is taken utterly for granted by his wife and children. The kids treat him as little more than a cash machine, without pausing to consider where the money actually comes from and what their father has to put up with to earn it, while his wife is so wrapped up in the comings and goings of the kids that she’s often too busy or too tired to spend time alone with her spouse.

The Groves seem to be comfortable in their familial rut until Clifford chances into a former employee while at a business meeting in Palm Springs. Barbara Stanwyck plays Norma Vale, once a toy company employee before unrequited love forced her to flee the west coast for Manhattan and a wildly successful career as a fashion designer. She’s been carrying a torch for Clifford ever since, and the pair spend the balance of their time at the desert resort innocently reminiscing. Things go wrong when Clifford’s son Vinnie (Bill Reynolds) spies the pair having a good time and assumes the worst. Before long, the other Groves children are suspicious of their father, who moment by moment seems at risk of tipping for his old flame. So in the end it is left to Stanwyck, one of filmdom’s greatest martyrs, to do the right thing and save the Grove family from certain disaster.

It almost goes without saying that There’s Always Tomorrow props up the postwar notion of the perfect, patriarchal family unit, and that the dramatic tension (of this and countless other films just like it) springs from an external threat to the harmony of that unit. And while the outcome here is predictable, the film is interesting in the sense that it makes only the children aware of the peril to their family — the wife and mother carries on blissfully unaware. Certainly one might suggest that Joan Bennett’s Marion couldn’t be that naïve, but the movie makes no overt suggestion that anyone other than Grove children are aware that their father’s eyes are wandering. In this way the picture utilizes the vagaries of the ersatz affair to focus on the various wrong interpretations of the situation the Norma, Clifford, and most importantly, the children themselves. In this way There’s Always Tomorrow is quite successful.

In their fourth and final film together, Stanwyck and MacMurray impress — though she has the better role and does a little more with it. MacMurray’s chief task is to play a robotic family man (there’s a great piece of Sirkian symbolism for this in the film) brought back to human emotion through contact with another woman, while Stanwyck gets to sacrifice love for likely spinsterhood in an effort to save him — in exchange Sirk famously gives her the tears through the rainy window treatment. While this isn’t as soapy and outrageous as some of Sirk’s technicolor melodramas (this one is black and white) it instead favors believable scenarios and underplayed performances. At 84 minutes it is over much too quickly, but it remains a solid, entertaining, and even thoughtful outing from Sirk and company.

A note about the poster: Poor Joan, relegated to a black and white tip-in, which seems ironic in that it its placement is indicative of her standing not only in this picture, but in the business as well. In the wake of her 1951 scandal, this seems about as much as she could manage; set apart, looking longingly up at her peers. 

There’s Always Tomorrow (1956)

Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Joan Bennett

Directed by Douglas Sirk

Released by Universal International

Running time: 84 minutes

Availability: widely on DVD, airs on TCM.

Grade: B+

Women in War (1940)

Republic’s 1940 feature Women in War is rare enough that you won’t ever happen upon it on television, and are unlikely to see it at all short of a concentrated effort to do so. It tallies a mere 15 votes on IMDb, alongside three user reviews, two of which are by fellow completist Arne Anderson — one of which reports that the film is utterly unavailable, the second written after he managed to track it down — as I recently did. After years of wistfully staring at this title on my to-see lists, I was awfully disappointed by it when I finally got the chance.

Set in Britain in the heady early days of the conflict, Women in War tells the story of Pamela Starr (Wendy Barrie), a party girl charged with manslaughter after shoving a drunken RAF pilot over a balcony. Pamela’s long-lost mother, Matron O’Neil (familiar-face Elsie Janis), now in charge of the nurses’ corps, secretly engineers a deal with the courts in the hope that by taking her tough-cookie daughter into the war effort, she can provide the affection and discipline needed to allow her to turn the corner. But the chip on Pamela’s shoulder just grows larger after the other new nurses, who remember only the newspaper gossip from her trial, spurn her. Pamela copes by striking up a casual romance with another flier, Larry (Patric Knowles), which only makes things even worse for her in the barracks — he’s already engaged to Gail (Mae Clarke), one of her fellow nurses. Isolated and bitter, Pamela’s refuses to stop seeing Larry, and their relationship grows to the point that he decides to leave Gail, who retaliates by trying to kill Pamela during a midnight trip to the front lines. Huddled underneath an intense artillery barrage (the filming of which earned an Academy Award nomination for Special Effects), the two women retreat to the cellar of a church, while O’Neil searches frantically for them amidst the cascading shells…

Women in War is emblematic of the naïvely casual and overly romanticized outlook the movie-going public had in those months of 1939 and early 1940 that historians now refer to as the “phony war,” before Dunkirk, when the situation changed dramatically. During the very same week that this film was released to theatres, global newspaper headlines told the horrific story of the British Expeditionary Force’s chaotic evacuation from France, which forced the public to reformulate its attitude and its commitment to the total war effort. It’s unlikely that a film such as this, which employs a wartime milieu without the gravity it demanded, would have even been made had it been scheduled for production just a few months later. The spate of nursing pictures — even the overtly romantic ones — that would soon issue from the studios went out of their way to not only demonstrate the value of nurses, but also the incredible risk and toil required to be one.

The film does lip service to realities of war, as early on O’Neil tells her recruits: 

“I hope none of you have come here with the beautiful notion that war is noble and romantic. Some of you dewy-eyed creatures may be under the impression that it will be your function to soothe the fevered brows of handsome young men when on duty, and to philander with the convalescents when you’re off. Unfortunately, war isn’t like that.”

Yet that seems to be precisely the notion that all of the nurses have, and the film does nothing to dispel them. There are no wounded soldiers to tend to, no tragedies along the way, and no sour news from other fronts. The war seems terribly far away, if it’s even happening at all. All our nurses have time to do is chase fliers, and all they have to be concerned with are the most immature aspects of their schoolgirl romances. The film’s finale is its most damning sequence: When the nurses are ordered to drive desperately needed medical supplies to the front, Gail — our ‘woman scorned’ — childishly forsakes her duty in order to exact revenge on Pamela. She diverts their vehicle into an evacuated French village that is under heavy bombardment, hoping to get them both killed. When O’Neil realizes what has happened, she too drives her truck into the village — showing audiences that as far as these nurses are concerned, the needs of the wounded on the front lines finish a distant second to their own personal drama. And when the shells really start dropping, too many of the nurses lapse into hysterics.

In June 1940 the Battle of Britain was in the offing, and the terrifying nights of the Blitz would then follow. It was a time when English and Canadians — and soon Americans — of all ages and from all walks of life were asked to make extraordinary sacrifices on behalf of their nations and one another. Women in War is a shallow film that fails to measure up to the requirements of its time. Its women are shallow, silly, and incompetent rather than confident, devoted, and strong. When inspiration was needed, it stooped merely to entertain. 

Women in War (1940)

Directed by John Auer

Starring Wendy Barrie, Mae Clarke, and Elsie Janis

Released by Republic Pictures

Running time: 71 minutes

Availability: very rare

Grade: D

Private Worlds (1935)

The most avid classic film enthusiasts all have something in common: they can’t tell you how many times they’ve gnashed their teeth upon visiting IMDb and reading this dreaded phrase concerning a sought-after film:

One of over 700 Paramount Productions, filmed between 1929 and 1949, which were sold to MCA/Universal in 1958 for television distribution, and have been owned and controlled by Universal ever since.

Such is the case with the 1935 film Private Worlds, starring Claudette Colbert, Charles Boyer, Joel McCrea, and Joan Bennett. With such a cast it is easy to understand why Private Worlds would be in demand — even more so for a devotee of the Academy Awards like me: Claudette Colbert earned a Best Actress nomination for her work in the film. Many of these 700 films were shown regularly by American Movie Classics back in its heyday, when host Bob Dorian offered the Pepsi to Robert Osbourne’s Coca-Cola across the dial at Turner Classic Movies.

And although AMC, thanks to Mad Men and other original television programs, has redeemed itself in the eyes of many, it still stings that their rather broad idea of an “American Movie Classic” starts and stops with pictures like Steven Seagal’s Marked for Death.

Those of you with a long memory may recall that in the wake of their format change, AMC attempted to spin out a new network, AMC’s Hollywood Classics, that would have maintained their original format, but the channel never materialized. Maybe such a venture is once again possible? I don’t know the ins and outs of cable television, but it’s surprising to me given the phenomenal success of TCM, that there isn’t room for AMC to somehow return to its roots and rebroadcast their vintage film library. Certainly with the ever-growing number of super-specialized networks doing business today there has to be room for another classic film outlet. If nothing else, why not cut a streaming deal with Netflix? Until then, anyone in search of such a film has to do just that: search. Doing so led me to purchase a bootleg copy of Private Worlds from the web, as I have often done in the past. The quality is universally poor, and the running time are almost always a minute or two shy of what’s listed on IMDb — but the films are watchable and, at least, available.

Without actually seeing the film it would be easy to dismiss Private Worlds as merely a romantic melodrama set in a mental hospital (the poster certainly suggests as much), but there is much more happening in the movie to make it worth seeking out. Here’s the story in a nutshell: Claudette Colbert plays Dr. Jane Everest, a psychiatrist in charge of the male ward at The Brentwood clinic, a progressive mental hospital. Her partner is Dr. Alex MacGregor (Joel McCrea), with whom she has partnered for many years. Despite their professional relationship the pair are not involved romantically — MacGregor is already married to Sally (Joan Bennett), an innocent and trusting girl who adores Jane and trusts Alex — until he gives here reason not to, while Jane pines for a love lost during the first world war. Things begin to go awry when a new hospital superintendant is appointed: Dr. Monet (Charles Boyer) who arrives with his sister Claire (Helen Vinson) in tow and begins to shake things up at the hospital. Monet believes there is no place for a woman in the upper echelons of the medical profession, and banishes Jane to the outpatient clinic. Claire is attracted to Alex, and easily pulls him in her direction, while Sally gradually becomes unglued. The consequences of Alex’s transgressions with Claire are the source of much of the film’s dramatic tension, and the final few reels are concerned with all of these entanglements sorting themselves out, with Colbert’s Jane the driving force behind everything.

Based on the novel by Phyllis Bottome (who more famously wrote the book that became the film The Mortal Storm), the film boasts the sort of meticulously interwoven plotting often found in book-to-movie-translations. The script itself is well constructed and progressive. Long before there are any notions of romance we are taken on a semi-documentary-style guided tour of the mental facility and shown firsthand exactly how well Colbert’s character knows her business. Colbert’s Jane Everest is a surprisingly modern breath of fresh air: She’s intelligent, witty, professional, and most importantly, respected as a superior physician by all of her male counterparts — even Boyer’s Monet, in his own time. She stands out against the stereotypically feminine and clichéd constructions of the movie’s other three women: Sally, the clinging and naïve wife; Claire, the manipulative and selfish home wrecker; and the dour, old-fashioned ward matron (Esther Dale), who rails against Jane’s presence in the hospital as anything other than a nurse. The film works hard to break various commonly held beliefs about mental institutions and the mentally ill, with entire scenes (and one character) dedicated to debunking myths. In a key moment that really typifies the movie’s point of view, McCrea’s character says, “I find very little difference between sanity and insanity.”

Gregory La Cava, who did most of his directorial work during the silent era (though he helmed such well remembered movies as My Man Godfrey and Stage Door, among others), does a fine job with this material. One scene in particular stands out and demonstrates how tight the narrative of the film is: early on we are introduced to two of Brentwood’s patients, a muscular man named Jerry who likes to see everything that is happening on the ward, and an dying, bed-ridden old man who murmurs constantly to himself in an unknown language. Late one night, shortly after joining the staff, Dr. Monet is called to the ward, where he looks in on the old man. He tells the nurse that the man is speaking Arabic and merely wants someone to pray for him. Dr. Monet grants the request, but not before placing screens around the gurney in an effort to spare the dying man’s dignity. This infuriates Jerry, who springs from his bed and attacks Monet, seconds after the old man finally succumbs. Jane, just entering the scene, shouts a warning just as Jerry attacks the doctor. The two men struggle while the other patients shout encouragement. La Cava’s camera pans in both directions and zooms in and out on the leering faces of the disturbed patients, as the soundtrack becomes a cacophony of screams and cackles. Combined with the near pitch-black setting the scene takes on an expressionistic feel very much out of character with other domestic films of the time. It’s a visually striking scene that reinforces the notion that Colbert’s Everest understands and manages the patients on the ward to a greater extent than her male counterparts, yet also softens the viewer’s impression of Boyer’s Monet. It culminates a few subtle instances of earlier foreshadowing and punctuates the middle of the film.

Admittedly, as much as I liked Private Worlds, it has its share of flaws. In general, it sells out too much to melodrama in its second half, but given the period and the mood of depression-era audiences it is difficult to hold it against the film. We are asked to accept American actress Helen Vinson as Charles Boyer’s sister, yet are given no explanations as to their vastly different accents. Colbert’s Jane Everest is a little too perfect as well. Self-sacrificing, medically infallible, even angelic at times (if it helps, it’s very easy to imagine Loretta Young in this part), it would have been nice if Colbert had been allowed to be a little more human here — again understandable given the movie’s goal of showing that a female doctor could hold her own, even thrive, in a male-dominated profession. Nonetheless this is a sparkling mid-thirties film that deserves to be seen again.

Private Worlds (1935)

Directed by Gregory La Cava

Starring Claudette Colbert, Charles Boyer, Joel McCrea, Joan Bennett

Released by Paramount Pictures

Running time: 84 minutes

Availability: Very Rare

The Other Side of Midnight (1977)

Billed as “The Romance of Passion and Power,” The Other Side of Midnight is one of the most stunningly asinine movies ever made — and widely known to be one of Andy Warhol’s favorites. It was also intended to be one of Fox’s biggest 1977 releases, with high hopes for a major run at that season’s Academy Awards. As a matter of fact, legend holds that Fox executives considered the film to be such a sure thing that studio chief Alan Ladd Jr. drew on the block-booking tradition of the previous era in order to force theaters to accept Midnight as a package deal with one of the studio’s B products — in this case a science fiction picture from a new director named George Lucas. While it is certain that, at least in this instance, theater owners ended up with nothing to grumble about, Midnight failed at the ticket booth and turned out to be a train wreck for everyone involved, except for costumer Irene Sharaff, who managed the film’s lone Oscar nomination — though the nod owes more to Sharaff’s reputation as a five time winner than it does her work in this film. Marie-France Pisier is a wonderful mannequin, but the costumes aren’t that good.

The sprawling three-hour adaptation of Sidney Sheldon’s trashy novel concerns a French girl named Noelle (Pisier) who flees her Marseilles home for Paris in the years just prior to the second world war. Just as it appears she’ll be devoured by the shadier aspects of the city of lights, Noelle is rescued by Larry Douglas (John Beck), an American RAF captain, who seduces her with dinner and the promise of a place to sleep. They couple enjoys a short-lived fairy tale romance, that ends abruptly when Larry is called back to the U.S. in order to train fighter pilots, leaving Noelle — now secretly pregnant (!) — jilted and alone. In a rather shocking bathtub abortion scene, jarringly out of character with the rest of the film, Noelle terminates how own pregnancy and vows to start a new life as a (wait for it!) … film star! Over the course of the next eight years, her career flourishes and eventually she becomes the trophy of a Greek shipping tycoon, who happens to be the world’s richest man. Meanwhile, Larry romances and weds Cathy (Susan Sarandon), a fresh-faced girl Friday to the chief of a Washington DC public relations firm. Unable to hold down a job as a commercial pilot in the years after the war, Larry bounces from job to job and his marriage slowly crumbles — that is until he’s hired to pilot the private plane of a certain Greek shipping tycoon. Old flames flare once again, and in true Postman Always Rings Twice fashion, plans of murder follow — though in this case the target isn’t the Greek, but the shrewish American wife. The film tries hard to take itself seriously, but the ending is so delightfully contrived and over the top — some might say bad, others, hilarious — that it almost makes the whole affair worth watching.

This is an awful film, in all of its late 70s Sheldon glory. It’s poorly executed, especially considering the narrative continuity and film editing. The story moves through time, but does little to help the viewer situate the story in a time or place, using only spoken dialog to do so. It fails to capture the flavor of the war years — barely addressing them at all — making only a half-hearted effort to authentically portray the French capital, expecting viewers to be held rapt by the movie’s melodrama. Even Leonard Maltin, that faithful friend of classic film, rates this as a bomb. Yet it somehow manages to maintain a shaky hold on your attention, though I’m certain that in the case of most male viewers, myself included, it’s the film’s abundant nudity that does the trick. Pisier is certainly beautiful, and Charles Jarrott (the same director responsible for previous big Oscar contenders Anne of the Thousand Days and Mary, Queen of Scots) gets her out of her clothing as often as possible. The requisite shot of a topless Susan Sarandon is to be found as well, but Pisier is clearly the film’s leading actress. The casting of John Beck is one of Midnight’s biggest flaws. Essentially a TV actor, and one of little note, Beck has neither the looks nor the chops to make good here. The film lives or dies on his ability to have believable, even if not smoldering, chemistry with both women, yet Beck just doesn’t deliver. His performance is awkward, clumsy, and shows that the actor was well out of his depth. Frankly, given Beck’s resume, one wonders how he got such a big part in such an important picture.

If this weren’t so unbelieveably long, I’d happily recommend it as a piece of fun camp along the same lines as Meyer’s Valley of the Dolls or even Jacqueline Suzanne’s Once is Not Enough, but in the case of The Other Side of Midnight once is plenty.

The Other Side of Midnight (1977)

Grade: F

Directed by Charles Jarrott

Starring Marie-France Pisier, Susan Sarandon, and John Beck

Released by Twentieth Century Fox

Running time: 165 minutes

Availability: DVD, Netflix

The Big Pond (1930)

“You even turned our song into a gum advertisement.”

The Big Pond is one of those super-rare early talkies from Paramount. I finally broke down and paid for a copy (along with a few other rare films I'll be posting about in the coming weeks). This has good sound but a washed out picture that looked as if it originated as an 8mm transfer to a thirty-year-old VHS. Nevertheless, it was happily watchable — and what a great poster!

Frenchman Maurice Chevalier plays Pierre, a tour guide in Venice who falls head over heels for chewing gum heiress Barbara Billings (Claudette Colbert). Her father is naturally against the pairing, so he schemes to bring the young man back to the states and puts him to work in the chewing gum factory, thinking the dapper continental will fold like taffy under the strain of real work. Pierre thrives instead, and in due time manages to become the son Mr. Billings never had. However, as he rises in the gum business, he craps out with the girl. He wants to succeed in business, while she craves the romance they shared in Italy. All’s well that ends well though, and even in 1930 Hollywood knew how to neatly package a romantic comedy.

For those of you (like me) who can only take Maurice Chevalier in small, infrequent doses, this is a pleasant surprise. There are a few modest musical numbers, fairly catchy, and the whole thing is so innocuous it’s hard to dislike. One interesting notion is that by 1930 when this was made the U.S. was in the throes of the depression, yet The Big Pond lacks much of the ostentatious, audience-pleasing glamour that would characterize the rags to riches comedies of the mid-thirties. Sure, Colbert is bejeweled in every scene, but the sets haven’t yet taken on the glimmering art deco trappings that would soon take over studio productions, and the script clearly focuses clearly on the value of hard work rather than the zany eccentricities of the wealthy. The Big Pond even takes its shots at the Volstead Act: Pierre finally scores with Mr. Billings when he develops a new line of liquor-flavored chewing gums: scotch, rye, bourbon … and champagne.

In only her fifth film, Claudette Colbert’s mature screen persona is solidly in place, and that unmistakable voice cut through the haziness of my poor copy like something soothingly familiar. Her role is smaller than I’d like, but the performance is exactly as you’d expect: competent, charming, and professional. Her on-screen father, played by first-timer George Barbier, manages to steal the show. Barbier is a delight as the chewing gum king, with a deft comic tough — his chemistry is as good with Chevalier as it is with Colbert. This was Barbier’s first film, though from 1931 to 1936 he would make a rather astonishing fifty more!

What a day it will be when Universal, which owns the rights to The Big Pond, and as many as 700 other Paramount products from the same era, decides to cut loose and either release these for television consumption, or push them out as DVDs on demand in the same fashion as the Warner Archive. We’re waiting.

The Big Pond (1930)

Directed by Hobart Henley

Starring Maurice Chevalier and Claudette Colbert

Released by Paramount Pictures

Running time: 72 minutes.

Availability: Almost impossible.

Personal Affair (1953)

Ah … scandal, that old time religion of the classic melodrama. The driving force behind so many of the silver screen’s great and not-so-great films, scandal is, almost undoubtedly, the most significant narrative theme abandoned by contemporary filmmakers. Yet scandal enjoyed its heyday in the 1950s, and it’s the driving force behind the 1953 British film Personal Affair.

Leo Genn stars as Mr. Barlow, a Latin teacher in an “experimental” (co-ed) British seconday school. He has a beautiful — but jealous — American wife, Kay (Gene Tierney), who can’t seen to adjust to English society and consequently wastes her days imagining all the ways in which her good looking and popular husband might be untrue. When he invites shy Barbara (Glynis Johns) to his home for extra tutoring, Kay recognizes what her husband doesn’t — that the young woman is carrying a torch for her teacher. In a fit of jealousy Kay accuses the confused young girl of making a play, and Barbara flees. When Mr. Barlow learns of this, he arranges to meet Barbara later in hopes of making things right. When Barbara fails to return home that night, or the following day, the small town becomes a hive of gossip, innuendo, and yes — scandal.

The movie offers a different, yet equally fascinating exploration of the same themes and academic setting of The Children’s Hour (and the equally wonderful earlier version, These Three); though Personal Affair explores the husband-wife relationship and exists almost entirely with the spaces of domesticity. There are moments where Barbara’s school friends spread rumors, and even go to the police, but it only serves to develop the theme of rampant gossip — and everyone in the town chips in. A woman’s picture from top to bottom, the film is nevertheless unkind to its female characters, possibly with the exception of Barbara. Gene Tierney is quite good as the disturbed wife whose emotions run the gamut from jealousy to fear to rage. Only Tierney, however unfortunately, could have played the part so well.

Personal Affair is a thoughtful drama, though it may be marred by an ending that cops out to the positive — somewhat surprising considering it isn’t a Hollywood production.

Personal Affair (1953)

Grade B+

Directed by Anthony Pellisier

Starring Gene Tierney, Leo Genn, Glynis Johns

Released by Two Cities Films

Running time: 82 minutes

Availabilty: VHS, has aired on TCM.

The Actress (1953)

In MGM’s 1953 film The Actress, Jean Simmons plays the star-struck daughter of old salt Spencer Tracy. Simmons is enamored of a Bostonian stage actress and decides she wants to follow in the woman's footsteps. She writes a fan letter and receives an encouraging response, which convinces her she's destined to be a star. The arc of the film is concerned with the relationship of the father and daughter, as each tries to come to grips with the other’s dreams. Simmons’ youthful idealism runs smack into Tracy’s New England practicality and fatherly hopes. Of course money is an important part of the story, as there’s little to go around and Simmons needs to move to New York in order to take her shot. Things are complicated by Harvard nice-guy Anthony Perkins (in his screen debut) who is ready, willing and more than able to take Simmons off Tracy's hands.

Set in the early 1910s (which isn't an era that I'm typically drawn to), I still found this to be an enjoyable film, primarily owing to the performances. Once acclimated to his somewhat affected characterization — feisty, talkative, irascible — Tracy dominates the film. Yet he somehow manages not to overshadow the other actors, and Simmons wisely downplays her performance in order to create functional screen chemistry between the two. Tracy's character softens over the course of the film — or rather becomes more human — so that by the end we see him less as a blowhard and more as a father who truly cares about his daughter’s dreams. One of the reasons Tracy's persona here is so unusual is that he had to find a way to differentiate his character from that of the warm and fuzzy dad in the Father of the Bride / Father’s Little Dividend films, which were his most recent hits at the time.

The film primarily exists in the realm of drama, but there are a few funny moments, and one particularly comedic scene — in which Tracy and his pals put on a “gymnastics display.” It’s worth tracking The Actress down for this scene alone.

As mentioned above, Anthony Perkins plays the fur-coat college boy who wants to marry Simmons, while her mother is played (surprisingly) by 34-year-old Teresa Wright, only a decade older than Simmons. Wright shines, as usual, but is almost unrecognizable as a middle-aged Massachusetts housewife. Look fast for Mary Wickes juggling bowling pins!

The Actress (1953)

Grade: B

Directed by George Cukor
Starring Specer Tracy, Jean Simmons and Teresa Wright.
Released by: MGM
Running time: 90 minutes.
Availability: Warner Archive DVD here.