OVP: The Joker is Wild (1957)

Film: The Joker is Wild (1957)
Stars: Frank Sinatra, Mitzi Gaynor, Jeanne Crain, Eddie Albert
Director: Charles Vidor
Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Original Song-"All the Way"*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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 Mitzi Gaynor-click here to learn more about Ms. Gaynor (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Throughout this series, I've been struck by the studio system's occasionally gimmicky use of top-line billing.  Frequently actresses (rarely the male leads) get top billing on a picture but don't actually have what we'd consider to be "leading" parts.  I thought I'd met my match for this back in January when we reviewed Kings Row, where our star Ann Sheridan got top billing but wasn't in the film until 64 minutes into the picture, but The Joker is Wild is an even bigger stretch, with Mitzi Gaynor not getting her first spoken line until 71 minutes into the movie (to the point where I googled several times wondering if she was actually in the film during the picture's first half).  Joker is instead very much Frank Sinatra's movie, a film where he gets one of his most iconic songs and one of the better parts in his career as singer-turned-comedian Joe E. Lewis.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers around Joe E. Lewis (a real-life figure), who is a golden-voiced singer trying to get his big break.  He does, but the mob-run joint where he currently sings won't let him out of his engagement there.  When he defies the mob, they maim him, cutting his throat and injuring him so that his singing career is essentially finished.  Years later, his accompanist Austin (Albert) gets him a break during a show (which includes a cameo from legendary performer Sophie Tucker as herself), and instead of singing like he used to, he does a comedy act about his struggles.  He soon after meets both success and a girl, Letty (Crain), a high society dame who falls for him despite his self-hate and alcoholism.  Letty eventually leaves him, though, when he keeps picking the bottle over her.  He marries one of his chorus girls, Martha (Gaynor, also playing a real-life figure in Martha Stewart, a supporting player in the classic In a Lonely Place whom we discussed in June), but she too can't convince him to give up alcoholism even though it's killing him and hurting everyone around him.  The film ends with basically everyone in his life leaving him, including Martha & Austin, but a conversation with himself in a window front shows to the audience that he'll be fine, and indeed, in real life Lewis would become a successful TV personality after his divorce from Stewart, as well as a bestselling author, and a real-life friend to Frank Sinatra.

The film is good, and manages to largely stay out of the "faded glory" cliche of musical biopics by not having a traditional rise-and-fall-and-rise narrative.  Instead, we start out with one of the darkest openings I can remember from a 1950's film, with Frank Sinatra at the peak of his vocal prowess singing "All the Way" before watching his dreams be crushed, us never getting to hear such a performance again in the film.  1957 was a very good year for Best Original Song (not just this film but the title tracks to Wild is the Wind and An Affair to Remember were among the also-rans, both classics in their own right), but it's not hard to see why this movie ended up with the trophy with how tenderly Sinatra sings this at first, and how broken it feels when he can't get to the notes later in the picture.  Sinatra, who can't sound "bad" even when he's supposed to, still manages to be fine in later vocal performances, but his work in the original number is so breathtaking you don't begrudge him a bit of ego later in the picture.  1957 had a lot of very solid Best Actor contenders as well, but considering his popularity at the time it seems odd he didn't also score a citation for this film.

I didn't get out a stopwatch for it, but it does seem like Gaynor was onscreen for a shorter run than Jeanne Crain, despite the higher billing.  Gaynor, though, gives the better performance.  Her Martha is sweet, the kind of girl who falls in love in her heart before she's willing to admit it might be a mistake in her head, and she gets a couple of great scenes at the end of the film.  Gaynor at this point (remember we are picking up five years after we last discussed Mitzi in our series) had had moderate success in a number of films though never breaking out in a seismic way, and perhaps the most notable moment in her career up until this point might have been her marriage to talent agent Jack Bean, which would last 52 years until Bean's death.  It's thrilling to see her play against type, and she's damn good wondering (drunkenly) aloud "why when I do it does everyone feel sorry for me, but when Joe does it everyone laughs."  Gaynor would talk in future interviews about how she had to be lifted out of parts of the climactic casino scene because she had an audition with Oscar Hammerstein at the time (Sinatra helped her out as the bigger star by forcing Charles Vidor's hand in filming around her...Gaynor & Sinatra would go on to be lifelong friends), and that she didn't really have the talent to be a "movie star."  I'd argue after watching the ending of The Joker is Wild that you couldn't tell it was trimmed, and that Gaynor surely could have been a fascinating dramatic actress given more substantial roles.  The next two weeks we'll return to Gaynor in singing-and-dancing form, but I'm excited that we took this dramatic detour with the actress, even if it was in a "lead" part.