A Stranger in My Arms (1959)

Film: A Stranger in My Arms (1959)

Stars: June Allyson, Jeff Chandler, Sandra Dee, Charles Coburn, Mary Astor, Peter Graves

Director: Helmut Kautner

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on June Allyson: click here to learn more about Ms. Allyson (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By the late-1950's, June Allyson's once unimpeachable box office record was more miss than hit.  She appeared in a Douglas Sirk film called Interlude (which I am dying to see as I am fascinated by what Sirk would do with Allyson's girl scout persona) and a remake of My Man Godfrey with David Niven, both of which bombed.  Her last leading role in a movie was in 1959's A Stranger in My Arms from Universal Pictures.  At the time, Allyson was 42, an age at which most actresses, especially those who bear the title of "America's Sweetheart" tend to fade from the public.  But Allyson would live for almost 50 more years after A Stranger in My Arms, and have an unusual second chapter in her career that, while perhaps lucrative, would become an unorthodox part of her legacy as an actress.

(Spoilers Ahead) Before we get into that, though, let's talk about A Stranger in My Arms, which is our movie today.  The film is about Major Pike Yarnell (Chandler), who is tortured by memories of his time on a raft during the Korean War with Donald Beasley (Graves), his fellow soldier.  Beasley's widow Christina (Allyson) comes to find him, and wants to hear more about her husband's final days, as does his family, specifically his mother Virginie (Astor).  As we find out, Donald is not a hero, and was not as enamored with his wife & mother as they were with him, as he bad-mouthed them, saying he hated his mother and never truly loved his wife.  Virginie, though, is pressuring Major Yarnell to help get Donald the Medal of Honor, but he refuses, even as he begins to fall in love with Christina, as we soon learn that Donald killed himself on the raft, and Major Yarnell had lied and said he'd fallen off the raft in a storm.  The film ends with Christina, finally breaking free of her in-laws and the memory of a man who never truly loved her, leaving with Major Yarnell, hopefully for a happier second chapter to her life.

The film walks the line between delicious campy melodrama and over-serious bore, and man do I wish it'd had the gaul to go with the former.  This is one of only two films that Helmut Kautner (who made films in Germany during World War II, but largely avoided some of the propaganda films that would plague other Germans who made films during the reign of Adolf Hitler) made in the United States, and came just three years after his picture The Captain from Kopenick was nominated for an Oscar.  The movie needed to have more indulgence, either leaning in on Mary Astor's gorgon mother or Sandra Dee's salacious debutante.  These are the best parts, as Allyson & Chandler are a snooze in the lead-he's too dour to be a romantic lead, and she's too old to be this naive.  It's the sort of film that in 1952 would've starred Joan Crawford, Kirk Douglas, & Gloria Grahame and been much more interesting.

As I said, Allyson never was the lead in a major studio film again after this movie-after two decades in the spotlight, this was probably more than she could've asked for.  She quickly did an eponymous TV series that she (and critics) hated, and would work on-and-off in theater, television, and film in the years that followed.  She also did a series of commercials throughout the 1980's for Depend undergarments, which are essentially a well-known brand of adult diapers in the United States for people with incontinence issues.  This was actually pretty brave for Allyson to link herself to-before this, no celebrity had talked about issues like this, which is a common issue, particularly for women.  But it made her something of a punchline.  My first encounter to Allyson was not in one of her movies, but through a joke made about her by Dixie Carter on Designing Women, where in one episode she says to an older woman she's annoyed with "I don't appreciate you leaving your big old box of June Allyson bladder pads on my nightstand!"  Like Lauren Bacall over enunciating about High Point Coffee or Ann Miller tap-dancing for Heinz, this is further proof that, no matter how many movies you make or how long you reign as a leading lady, nothing lasts quite as long as a TV commercial.

Next month, we're going to fully move into the 1950's, and we're going to talk about the only woman this season who wore the crown of America's Sweetheart...even though she was not born in America.