Slightly Scarlet (1956)

Film: Slightly Scarlet (1956)
Stars: John Payne, Rhonda Fleming, Arlene Dahl, Kent Taylor, Ted de Corsia
Director: Allan Dwan
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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 Rhonda Fleming-click here to learn more about Ms. Fleming (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

In the 1950's, there were essentially three women who could claim the title of "Queen of Technicolor" as the brief romance with that particular color motion process hit its heyday during that decade (despite being a part of cinema for some twenty years prior).  These three women claimed that by virtue of their red hair, and despite being major stars, none of them were nominated for Academy Awards.  Maureen O'Hara was one, but as I've seen most of O'Hara's chief work (thanks to having a mother and grandfather who were both fans of hers), so she wasn't part of this series.  Rhonda Fleming, one of the holders of this title, was another, but there was a third I toyed with adding to this series, potentially as a replacement for Fleming: Arlene Dahl.  Like Fleming, Dahl was a spellbinding redhead who was briefly a leading woman in the 1950's, noted more for her beauty and dazzling hair color than for her acting ability.  Both women were tabloid fixtures, going through husbands at a speed that Zsa Zsa Gabor would envy (Dahl is also from my home state of Minnesota), and both are still alive as of this publication.  This film, where the two sometime rivals teamed up, felt like a way to acknowledge Dahl in this series, while also of course continuing our look at the woman I chose to be our star of the month, Rhonda Fleming.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on two sisters June (Fleming) and Dorothy (Dahl), the former a good girl who works as a secretary for a mayoral candidate (Taylor) who is hopelessly in love with her (though the movie makes a concerted point to show that they haven't had sex yet) while the latter is a horny kleptomaniac.  The two both become involved with Ben Grace (Payne) a seemingly honorable man who makes his money on the wrong side of the law, working for a crime boss named Caspar (de Corsia) whom he runs out of town after the reforming candidate gets elected.  The problem is both that he continues to profit from Caspar's syndicate, and that both June & Dorothy are falling for him.  Dorothy gets herself into trouble with the law again, stealing a pearl necklace, but June uses the new mayor's connections to get her out, causing a friction in their relationship.  The movie ends with a shootout, as Dorothy has sex with Caspar, who then threatens to kill her sister (they've had a fight where they admitted their jealousies and frustrations with each other), and weirdly it's Ben, not Dorothy, who tries to save June, and in the process he's shot.  The film ends with us not knowing Ben's fate, and with June abandoning the mayor and her sister to be with him.

Slightly Scarlet is an unusual film right out the gate because it is clearly intended to be a film noir, but it's the rare one that's shot not just in color, but a really sophisticated Technicolor.  Legendary cinematographer John Alton (who won an Oscar for An American in Paris) plays with not only the beauty of his two leading ladies, but also with shadow, costume, and the elaborate set designs to create a really remarkable picture.  The oranges and pinks pop in your face, and I don't know that I've seen Fleming ever look so ravishing, with the shadow work highlighting her expressive face.  This is almost entirely the reason that this movie is remembered today, as otherwise it's a bit of a silly affair.  Jean-Luc Godard was a fan of the picture, proclaiming it one of the best films of 1956, but I feel like this is him indulging more in Alton's cinematography than trying to rescue a genre picture.  John Payne is a bit underwhelming in the lead, and the script is disjointed & usually more fun if you take the film as camp rather than a more grounded melodrama.

The two leading ladies achieve differing results.  The main reason that I picked Fleming as one of the 12 Stars of the Month this year (rather than someone like Dahl), was that she showed such promise in supporting parts, but largely dismissed her work as a leading woman, and critics did too.  There are no major scholarly articles about either of these women, but Fleming was more famous and worked with better directors so I figured she'd be the more interesting of the two to investigate.  I was right.  While she doesn't get as juicy of a part, she finds things to say about June that the script doesn't.  There's a pain in her eyes when she looks at the sister she has versus the one she knows she deserves, and you understand the betrayal of her sister better as the movie wears on.  Fleming was so good in short performances like Spellbound and Out of the Past, but she's also the best part of Slightly Scarlet, bringing a restrained glamour to June, someone who clearly never had to work for much in her life (men are going to hand it to her), but also grounded her decisions in a morality that feels innate, and not just a plot device.

Dahl, on the other hand, is kind of terrible, and only frequently in a fun way.  She plays Dorothy as an over-the-top vixen, unable to really contain herself, and her only really good acting opposite of Fleming in their big fight scene.  Dahl's career petered out almost completely after this, as she'd soon be suing Columbia for how she was depicted in 1956's Wicked as They Come (she'd have a second career act as a beauty guru years later), and I realized I'd only seen her in one other movie, 1964's Kisses for My President, where she was also laughably awful.  Dahl later bemoaned her career, but it's hard to blame Slightly Scarlet on a bad script alone-she's not adding anything of value to this movie other than glamour, and since she gets the most interesting character, it's hard to not fault her a bit for where the movie fails.  We'll continue on with Fleming next week, but I do want to acknowledge in the comments-if you have a favorite performance of Arlene Dahl's that could save my opinion of her, I'm all ears.

OVP: Kisses for My President (1964)

Film: Kisses for My President (1964)
Stars: Fred MacMurray, Polly Bergen, Eli Wallach, Arlene Dahl
Director: Curtis Bernhardt
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Costume)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars (if I could go lower I would-this is the worst kind of movie)

In 1964, Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine did something no woman had ever done before: she had her name put into nomination by a major political party's convention.  She wouldn't win, of course, but it was an incredible step forward for women in a time when few women held political office.  Sen. Smith had served in office since 1949, was the first woman to serve in both the House and the Senate, and as a fifteen year veteran of the upper chamber, would have been considered a serious contender regardless of her gender.  In fact, Smith was once considered for the vice presidential nomination in 1952 by General Eisenhower, and though she had a solid quip when asked in 1952 what she'd do if she ever woke up in the White House (she said, "I'd go to Mrs. Truman and apologize...then I'd go home"), she made it so that it wasn't a laughing matter for a woman to be considered for the highest office in the United States.

Fifty years after Sen. Smith's nomination, we still don't have a female president, but the concept is hardly alien to the United States.  Dozens of states have had female senators and governors, and it's not a matter of if but when the country will elect a female president.  Still, I can't help but feel, while I was watching the Fred MacMurray comedy Kisses for My President that some of the attitudes of the film still exist and how the film, which I found offensive, patronizing, and vomit-inducing, probably wouldn't make me want to throw my TV out the window so much if it didn't still have a nugget of truth regarding people's attitudes toward women in high office.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about the first female president, Leslie McCloud (Bergen) who was recently elected to the White House in large part due to the overwhelming support of the entire female populace, but it's more about her husband Thad (MacMurray) and his ability to cope with his wife being the most powerful person on earth.  The film follows Leslie as she must deal with a series of crises, including giving foreign aid to a dictator (Wallach) while balancing her husband's insecurities and occasionally wandering eye, as well as her children's well-being.  At the end of the film, it is not she but her husband who saves the day, and she ends up being pregnant and resigning the presidency to take care of her family.  The last line of the film, in fact, is a crack by her husband about the superiority of his gender since it took 40 million women to get her into the White House and only one man to get her out.

The entire film is, of course, incredibly dated, and I'm aware that the film was made in 1964 and attitudes have shifted greatly, but let's not pretend that the concept of a female president wasn't real (there's a reason I brought out the anecdote about Sen. Smith).  Women would continue to grow in stature and in 1972 three female House members (Bella Abzug, Patsy Mink, and Shirley Chisholm) would go on to run for the Democratic nomination.  The idea that a woman wouldn't be able to handle the presidency is pretty much on-display this entire film, and I found it appalling.  It's quite clear that the director only thinks of Polly Bergen's Leslie as a prop, someone that could play the part of the president but who couldn't actually do it.  The idea that a man would resign the presidency would be unthinkable in a movie of this era, much less to take care of his wife and children.  You also see that in the idiocy that Thad would continually be bothered by his wife's success-he would have been able to tell early on that she was going to win, and it's foolishness to think they wouldn't have discussed his role before the inauguration.  It's also foolishness to think that someone just "randomly" becomes president like it seems Leslie did, and if so, she wouldn't just resign it at the drop of a hat.  It takes hard work and determination to reach that high of an office, and the film is downright offensive in the way it treats its title character, and Fred MacMurray has never been more unlikable.  Arlene Dahl and Eli Wallach are both laughably bad in their supporting roles; honestly, the only person remotely resembling passable acting is Polly Bergen, and she gets nothing but grenades of awful chucked at her by the screenwriters.

The film earned one Oscar nomination, and I'm sad to say (considering the quality of the film) that the costume designs are pretty good.  The film is all modern clothing (there's no period aspects to this), but the clothing worn by Bergen is chic and elegant-a combination of Wallis Simpson and Jackie Kennedy-it looks like something Peggy Olson would have worn on Mad Men if she'd had the budget to buy Chanel.  Dahl's wardrobe is deliciously trampy, overtly feminine but with a hint of the gaudy.  I truly hope that The Night of the Iguana or Edith Head's A House is Not a Home manages to be something special, as I would hate to give the OVP title of Oscar-winning to such garbage.

Have you seen this film?  Are you just as appalled as I am by the plot and characters (and especially that corny ending)?  Do you feel that these stigmas still exist about women running for higher office?  And where do Howard Shoup's designs fall in your opinion in regard to the Best Costume category?  Share in the comments!