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

The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)

Film: The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954)

Stars: Elizabeth Taylor, Van Johnson, Walter Pidgeon, Donna Reed, Eva Gabor, Roger Moore

Director: Richard Brooks

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 Donna Reed: click here to learn more about Ms. Reed (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We are going to conclude our month-long look at the career of Donna Reed with the twilight of her film career.  Reed would stop making theatrical movies by the mid-1950's, when she was essentially shooting bargain basement flicks for Columbia, and one could argue that today's movie The Last Time I Saw Paris was the last really high-budget movie she'd make, though the budget has less to do with her coming off of an Oscar win and more because she was starring opposite one of the biggest emerging stars of the era, Elizabeth Taylor.  Given that motion pictures were doing nothing for her, she decided to move to television, where her long history of big-screen projects and her Oscar win were enough to get her an eponymous TV series called The Donna Reed Show which would run for eight years on ABC.  Initially a flop (Reed was up against Milton Berle & the show was nearly cancelled in its first season), moving the series to Thursday nights earned the show a following, but it also accrued quite a bit of infamy.  We're going to talk about what happened to Reed's show, both during & after its run, in a second, but first I want to make sure we pay attention to the movie at-hand today, The Last Time I Saw Paris.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is told in retrospect, and it's got a lot of plot (based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald it also has a lot of booze & tragedy).  Essentially the gist of the movie is that we have Charles Willis (Johnson), a war correspondent who is accosted by a woman on the street that we learn is Helen (Taylor), a carefree younger sister of a woman who has also made Charles' acquaintance Marion (Reed).  Both sisters are obviously in love with Charles, but it's Helen that he prefers, her carefree spirit & more conventional attractiveness making her impossible to deny.  Charles & Marion are a terrible pairing, with the former an unsuccessful writer who is practical, the latter a free spirit who indulges in spending money she doesn't have.  Their lives are torn asunder when the barren oil fields that Charles got as a dowry from his equally cavalier father-in-law (Pidgeon) actually strike oil, making them momentarily rich.  The couple start to grow apart, with them both starting up affairs (with a young Eva Gabor & Roger Moore), hurting their relationship, and leading Charles to become an alcoholic.  One night, Helen tries to return in the rain to their house, but Charles, drunk, cannot get to the door, and so Helen goes to Marion's in the cold...and promptly dies from pneumonia.  Charles cannot forgive himself, and neither can Marion, who holds a grudge for him not choosing her initially, and for a while she keeps his daughter with Helen from her, but in the end they are reunited, trying to live their lives in the wake of Helen's death.

The movie should work but it doesn't.  There's a compelling story, and Taylor is fire here (she looks great).  But the story doesn't really know what to do with the main characters, who don't really have much chemistry with each other or with Gabor/Moore.  Honestly, I always struggle with Van Johnson when he's doing drama...my favorite role for him is the curmudgeon in Brigadoon, but I've never loved him in anything else.  Honestly, Donna Reed is really good here in a role that is vastly underwritten-her late-breaking adoration of Charles is only etched in her eyes, not in the script, and I spent most of the movie wanting to see things from her perspective.  After a month of Reed getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop, at least here she earns the star power she wasn't given in other movies we've profiled.

Reed, as I mentioned, moved to television after this.  The Donna Reed Show was the first major broadcast show in the United States to feature a mother as the most important character in a family sitcom, rather than the father or the children.  The show launched the singing careers of Shelley Fabares ("Johnny Angel") & Paul Petersen ("My Dad"), who played Reed's children.  The show, though, attracted criticism of feminists, who thought the show depicted Reed's character Donna Stone as a submissive housewife who wore ballgowns while washing windows; this would be mocked decades later in a Gilmore Girls episode where Rory would dress as Donna Reed on a date with her boyfriend Dean.  Reed did not take well to her character being criticized by the women's liberation movement of the 1970's, and engaged in public statements against women in film & TV of the era that we would now consider to be "slut shaming" referring to them as "kooky, amoral, & sick."  

Reed's politics were more complicated, though, than you'd think.  While she was a longtime Republican, which leans into much of what we associate with her today as being synonymous with her fictional Donna Stone character, I was surprised to find out in researching her this month that she went from endorsing Barry Goldwater in 1964 to supporting Eugene McCarthy in 1968, a shift driven entirely by her views on Vietnam, which she vehemently opposed.  Reed would rarely work after The Donna Reed Show (though she attempted a comeback in Dallas to replace Barbara bel Geddes that would ultimately result in Reed successfully suing CBS for breach-of-contract when bel Geddes changed her mind and returned to the show).  She died in 1986 at the age of 64 of pancreatic cancer.  Next month, for our last month focused on "Film-to-TV," we are going to talk about an actress who, unlike the eleven figures we profiled before this, was one of the biggest stars of the Classical Hollywood era, not needing to indulge in television as a way to cement her celebrity.  That she did anyway in the 1960's indicated just how important television had become, permanently linked to the Hollywood machinery.

OVP: The Caddy (1953)

Film: The Caddy (1953)

Stars: Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Donna Reed, Barbara Bates

Director: Norman Taurog

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"That's Amore")

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 Donna Reed: click here to learn more about Ms. Reed (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We talked last week about how Donna Reed's career throughout the 1940's was a struggle, with her getting one iconic part (It's a Wonderful Life) to go with a series of forgettable westerns & dramas.  This week, though, we're going to talk about what was the most successful chapter, both commercially & critically, during Reed's career (while it was happening-lest we forget, It's a Wonderful Life became a holiday landmark in the decades that followed, not at the time).  In 1953, during her time at Columbia, she had two films that were released days apart: the first of the two was The Caddy, a movie that she was on loan to Paramount for that brought her into the company of Martin & Lewis in a huge hit...hence it being our movie today.  The bigger deal, though, was that she also had an even bigger hit coming out for her home studio of Columbia, Fred Zinnemann's landmark epic From Here to Eternity.  Playing the role of Lorene Burke in the film, Reed got the best notices of her career, and quickly found herself competing for an award she'd had to watch others try for for decades: the Oscar.  Up against impressive competition (including Grace Kelly & Geraldine Page), Reed won the trophy, her first and only Oscar nomination/win. As we'll see today, though, while her career was arguably in the best state it'd been in in a while, From Here to Eternity (where, it has to be noted, she won a supporting Oscar despite having spent a decade attempting to achieve leading lady status) was more fluke than the rule.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Joe Anthony (Martin) and Harvey Miller, Jr. (Lewis), who are at the beginning of the film a noted comedy duo who are telling the story of their lives before a big show. We see their humble beginnings, with both men struggling to find their place in the world until we discover that Joe is an excellent, even pro-worthy golfer.  He initially does this in partnership with Harvey, who is a superb caddy, but Joe lets the fame go to his head, particularly as he attempts to woo a wealthy socialite Kathy Taylor (Reed), and mistreats his friend.  In the end, they find their friendship & their unorthodox families are worth more than the pro circuit...and instead launch a successful career in show business, where they are openers for another legendary comedy duo: Martin & Lewis (playing themselves).

I've seen a few Martin & Lewis films, and while I generally love their banter, I always think they work better when they're doing a schtick onstage than pulling along a story.  Neither of these men are great actors, and the plots are so formulaic they make an Astaire & Rogers musical look original.  The calling card in the movies is frequently the cameos, which here are a series of legendary golfers (including Ben Hogan & Sam Snead) playing themselves.  This would be indistinguishable from their other movies were it not for one of the musical numbers they throw in about a third through the musical.  Martin sings (for the first time) one of his signature numbers, the ridiculous & romantic "That's Amore!"  This is not a good song lyrically (it was infamously mocked on the Dean Martin Roasts by Orson Welles), but it works so well.  Here, it's sung by both Martin & Lewis, but it's really Dean who keeps it alive.  That flawless, lazy baritone feels so warm & inviting, you honestly feel surrounded by the pasta he's crooning over.

The film features Donna Reed as another indistinguishable love interest.  The Caddy in conjunction with From Here to Eternity should've been a big deal for Reed.  Obviously one won her an Oscar, but The Caddy was also a huge hit, particularly internationally (this is one of the films that cemented Jerry Lewis's legendary status in France, where he was hailed as a comedic genius).  But Martin & Lewis got the credit there, and James Jones got the credit for From Here to Eternity.  Reed was soon getting upstaged by bigger stars like Elizabeth Taylor & Dana Andrews in her later pictures.  We'll talk about that later today when we profile one of those films, and what ultimately led to the TV show that would cement Donna Reed's legend, for better or worse.

Hangman's Knot (1952)

Film: Hangman's Knot (1952)

Stars: Randolph Scott, Donna Reed, Claude Jarman, Jr., Frank Faylen, Lee Marvin

Director: Roy Huggins

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 Donna Reed: click here to learn more about Ms. Reed (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Today we're going to continue our journey with Donna Reed oddly with another western (this was not intentional, as this wasn't exactly a staple of Reed's filmography, but last week's first choice became unavailable so I had to pinch hit with Apache Trail to hit our deadline): Hangman's Knot.  It is filmed a decade after last week, and a lot happened between the two films.  For starters, Reed made during this time the most famous film of her career It's a Wonderful Life, which was nominated for multiple Oscars including Best Picture and Best Actor, but wasn't something that Reed herself would gain a citation for despite it being probably the best role of her career.  This wasn't a hit for MGM, where she was under contract, though (It's a Wonderful Life was made when she was on loan to RKO), and the quality of her roles didn't improve, perhaps in part because the movie was not commercially successful at the time (it gained much of its popularity when it fell into public domain & became a Christmas classic in the years ahead).  Eventually, tired of playing the same wife & girlfriend roles, Reed moved to Columbia, and made a number of lower-tier films (and one classic we'll discuss next week which would become her other signature film role), one of which was Hangman's Knot.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a group of confederate soldiers who find out in Nevada in 1865 that the war has ended (and they lost).  They also have intercepted a large amount of gold, which their commanding officer Major Matt Stewart (Scott) thinks they should give back to the Confederacy to help rebuild, while his compatriots, specifically Rolph Bainter (Marvin) thinks it would be better in his pocket.  As they are headed back, they come across both a group of bandits who are looking for the gold thieves (and more importantly, the gold), and a stagecoach that's carrying two people (unmarried), including a war nurse for the Union, Molly Hull (Reed).  They take the two, along with a station agent & his daughter, hostage while they hole up in a small building, trying to stave off the bandits who return & are looking for the gold.  This results in a showdown not just outside, but in, as Rolph wants to take the gold & Molly for himself, even though Matt Stewart has similar designs.  In the end, the bigger name on the marquee wins, and Matt Stewart gets the girl and brings the gold back to Virginia.

The movie is honestly pretty good.  I have always struggled with Randolph Scott as an actor (I have heard his movies with Budd Boetticher are what will change your mind about him, and they're on the list but I haven't gotten there yet), but you don't really need him to be good to enjoy this movie.  The Technicolor is beautiful, gorgeous vistas shot in the famed Corriganville Movie Ranch (most-noted for being where the John Ford classic Fort Apache was made).  Our Star of the Month Donna Reed doesn't get a lot to do, it's worth noting.  She kind of just serves as the love interest once again, not a lot different from her days at MGM, and I suspect looking into 1953 she was hoping for different (as we'll discuss next week, she both did & didn't get that).

The best performance in the movie is from Claude Jarman, Jr., who plays the young twink who has never killed a man despite being in the war for years.  Jarman, who was a child star in the 1940's for MGM (he's best known as the boy in The Yearling), was making his first foray into adult film roles with Hangman's Knot, and he has a sensitivity here that stands out.  He wouldn't last as an adult star, though.  He'd make his final film role four years later is Disney's The Great Locomotive Chase, and would soon run the San Francisco International Film Festival and work behind-the-scenes in movies.  At the age of 88, he's one of the last living contract players from MGM in the 1940's.

Apache Trail (1942)

Film: Apache Trail (1942)

Stars: Lloyd Nolan, Donna Reed, William Lundigan, Ann Ayars, Connie Gilchrist

Directors: Richard Thorpe & Richard Rosson

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 Donna Reed: click here to learn more about Ms. Reed (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Donna Reed's career at its beginnings was unusual because while she started out playing significant parts, she never really graduated to the kind of film stardom we generally associate her with.  We'll talk about this more next week, but when you think about Donna Reed's film career, you don't necessarily think about her as having a lack of success.  She won an Oscar, after all, and she starred in two undisputed classics of Hollywood's Golden Age (It's a Wonderful Life and From Here to Eternity).  But in her early years before she took on Mary Bailey, she largely was a disposable love interest in a number of different films for MGM, the studio she signed a star contract with in 1941.  Though she appeared in a lot of movies during this era, none of them stand out with the exception of It's a Wonderful Life in retrospect, largely because Reed was a minor character, just a pretty girl-next-door love interest.  Weirdly I've seen a lot of these films for other projects on the blog, so to signify this era, we're going to talk about Apache Trail, one of the few westerns that Reed appeared in, and one of her first higher-billed roles (she was rarely "top" billed).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie starts with the honorable Tom O'Folliard (Lundigan) getting out of jail for a crime that we learn eventually was largely the result of his brother Trigger Bill's (Nolan) involvement.  Tom is given a tough job, managing a remote stagecoach stop that is frequently under attack by Apaches.  There he meets a woman named Rosalia (Reed), whom he knew in her youth but has grown up to be a beautiful young woman, and also comes across Constance Selden (Ayars), a wealthy woman with a mysterious past (that, quite honestly, we don't get enough of and feels like a giant plothole given she gets a pretty pleasant sendoff for a woman who might've murdered her husband or at least cheated on him).  We also have the return of Trigger Bill, who comes fleeing the Apaches, who want him dead, and after a fraternal showdown over a valuable lock box that Bill wants, the entire stagecoach has to decide whether or not they want to give Trigger Bill up to the Apaches to save their own lives.  They vote no, with Tom the deciding vote, but Bill leaves to join the Apaches anyway, understanding his time is over.  Tom & Rosalia kiss, and we get our happy ending.

This is a pretty standard-issue western, and would be fine (westerns & film noirs are generally my favorite genres so I'm more generous in my ratings with them) were it not for the pretty overt racism that runs through it.  We don't actually see any Native American characters, but they are referenced often, and rarely in flattering terms.  The best performance in the movie (by far) is Nolan's, who gets top billing as the villain precisely because he's the only thing of interest to look at, and when the film gets off of his evil quest, particularly in the last twenty minutes when he's largely sidelined, it loses focus.  It doesn't help that O'Folliard, a notorious outlaw who ran in real life with Billy the Kid, is portrayed in this movie as a handsome wet blanket by Lundigan.

As for Reed, get your cringe meters on, because this is definitely a low point in her career.  Reed plays Rosalia Martinez, and yes, she's supposed to be Latino (which the lily white Donna Reed was not), and plays the part with a thick, stagnated accent.  She has very little chemistry with Lundigan (Ayars as the other woman has the better time of it), and her character's entire journey is to stare moon-eyed at him in every scene.  This is not the brilliance that Reed would bring to Mary Bailey, but based on my experience with Reed playing window dressing love interests during this time, is far more indicative of the kind of roles she was getting from her studio.

Saturdays with the Stars: Donna Reed

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 three-time Oscar winner Walter Brennan, who went from decades as a character actor to becoming a chart-topping singer in his late sixties.  This month, we're going to look at another Oscar winner, one who made two screen classics that overshadowed the fact that her film career was, as a whole, somewhat of a disappointment given her beauty & age when she was signed to MGM and Columbia.  It wasn't until ABC produced her eponymous television show that her celebrity finally was fulfilled...though it came at a price.  This month's star is Donna Reed.

Born Donna Belle Mullenger in Denison, Iowa, Reed was raised a conservative Methodist, and moved to Los Angeles for college.  It was there that, after courting several studios, she eventually signed with MGM, who relatively quickly changed her name to "Reed" due to anti-German sentiment in the wake of World War II (Reed famously hated her new moniker).  During her years at MGM, she struggled to find a footing despite being put opposite a number of high-profile costars, most frequently Mickey Rooney.  It wasn't until MGM lent her on assignment to RKO that she finally got what appeared to be her big break, playing Mary Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life.

Despite being a Best Picture nominee & now being one of the most widely-watched films of its era, It's a Wonderful Life didn't really do a lot for Reed's career.  She got lead roles on occasion, but almost always in B-material and never anything beyond "love interest" in her mind, so she moved to Columbia.  There, she got more of the same, with the exception of From Here to Eternity, which won the Best Picture trophy in 1953 and got Reed her only Oscar.  By 1958, she was nearing forty and had never been a leading woman in the way of someone like Bette Davis or Olivia de Havilland...and then came along The Donna Reed Show.

Despite starring in two undisputed classics, if you hear the name "Donna Reed" you probably think of her TV show, and not necessarily because you've seen it.  Reed's show, a big success for ABC during its eight-year run, has become shorthand for a brand of conservative domesticity, of a woman who devotes herself to her husband & family but never moves beyond that as her life's ambitions.  Reed was handsomely rewarded for the series at the time (winning a Golden Globe and four Emmy nominations), but spent decades after its run facing criticism for being the antithesis of the woman's movement that came in the latter half of the 1960's.  This month, we're going to take a look at Reed's film career, but also discuss her show's legacy, and Reed's own politics, which were far more complicated than her TV persona would suggest.

OVP: They Were Expendable (1945)

Film: They Were Expendable (1945)

Stars: Robert Montgomery, John Wayne, Donna Reed, Jack Holt, Ward Bond

Director: John Ford

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Sound Recording, Effects)

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 Ward Bond: click here to learn more about Mr. Bond (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

All right, I'm aware I skipped the first week of Ward Bond (in the US last weekend was Labor Day and I had family in town & in the year of 2022 we focus on spending time with loved ones at the expense of our responsibilities-that's just the rules), but we won't be skimping on him today, as we're going to do our first ever double-feature so that he gets a full month of movies.  As a result, we're going to talk about a huge chapter of Ward Bond's career in the next few hours.  Bond started as a character actor, and largely stayed there.  Working in B-Grade films in the early 1930's, he did eventually graduate to A-Grade pictures, but almost always as a random "friend of the hero" or a villain of some sorts.  I watched They Were Expendable with my parents last weekend while they were in town, and at one point my mom said "why does he look so familiar?" and it's because Bond's real claim to fame is the breadth of his filmography, and just how many movies he's made.  Bringing Up Baby, Gone with the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath, The Maltese Falcon, It's a Wonderful Life, The Searchers...he is somehow in all of these landmark classics, but always as a bit player or side part.  I have seen all of these movies so I can't watch them for this project, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention them as we kick off our month devoted to Bond, as he's a true character actor, though one who is familiar to virtually any person who has ever watched a classic film.

(Spoilers Ahead) Made in the waning days of World War II, They Were Expendable is the story of a team of men who command a squadron of US Navy PT Boats in the South Pacific.  Lt. John "Brick" Brickley (Montgomery) is sure that they will be an asset to the navy, but his commanding officers remain skeptical, and his friend Lt. JG "Rusty" Ryan (Wayne) is hoping to get his own command, and nearly goes for it when Pearl Harbor is bombed, throwing his entire world into chaos.  The film that follows shows the divergent paths these two men's careers take, with Brick becoming a war hero, his PT boat experience used to sink a Japanese cruiser, while Rusty (sidelined with blood poisoning) falls in love with a nurse named Sandy (Reed) on land, their romance doomed to failure both because it's impossible to fall into a longterm relationship while at war and because the evacuation of Bataan leaves Sandy behind, certain to die in the process.

This is where the title comes from, and where the most powerful scene in the movie is.  The war is not subtle about the "have's and have not's" of battle, with a large section of the film's middle devoted to the evacuation of General MacArthur into Australia while men around him perish to get him there.  The final scenes of the movie show that Brick & Rusty escape, but others, like Chief Mulcahey (Bond, who has a small part that is most notable for him crooning to Donna Reed through an open window...which he also more famously did in It's a Wonderful Life) are left to die.  Brick & Rusty are too valuable to the war effort to be left behind, even if the unmarried Rusty tries to switch with one of the married infantryman when there are not enough seats in the end of the movie.  It's a killer, rough ending particularly in an era where most WWII films were just populist propaganda, and on top of astounding cinematography and unreal visual effects, a really great forgotten epic.

The film was a critically-important one in the career of John Wayne, which I'd be remiss to not mention before we leave.  Wayne is the most famous WWII Hollywood draft dodger less because he was the only one to do it, and more because Wayne's onscreen persona frequently had him wearing a military uniform, thus making an odd juxtaposition to a man who never actually served.  This came to a head when director John Ford would berate Wayne, his longtime friend whom he thought a coward for skipping out on his patriotic duty, in front of the entire cast & crew of They Were Expendable.  Particularly when juxtaposed with his fellow leading man Robert Montgomery (who had been an ambulance driver at Dunkirk and rose to the level of lieutenant commander in the US Navy), Wayne made for easy mockery by Ford, and it took Montgomery eventually stepping in for the two men to finally make peace.  They would do so in the coming years alongside our star Ward Bond, who would make multiple movies with Ford & Wayne, one of which we'll discuss next week.

OVP: Green Dolphin Street (1947)

Film: Green Dolphin Street (1947)
Stars: Lana Turner, Van Heflin, Donna Reed, Richard Hart, Frank Morgan, Edmund Gwenn, May Whitty, Gladys Cooper
Director: Victor Saville
Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Cinematography, Special Effects*, Sound, Film Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Lana Turner-click here to learn more about Ms. Turner (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we talked about the film that graduated Lana Turner from playing the "random beautiful love interest" to a proper leading lady, someone who might be able to handle meatier roles after her triumph in The Postman Always Rings Twice.  This lasted only for a little while, but it did result in a number of high-profile films (and hits) in Turner's career, one of which we're going to talk about today.   A year after Postman, Turner emerged in one of the new, "more quality" roles that was now being afforded her, Green Dolphin Street, which would prove that she was at her peak in terms of financial viability for the studio (the movie was MGM's highest-grossing picture of 1947), but it also showed some of the limitations of Turner's acting ability, never quite understanding the woman who had sizzled across movie screens the year earlier.

(Spoilers Ahead) At 142 minutes, Green Dolphin Street (it gets the name from the ship in the film and a street in the town where the film is set) is a long movie, so I'll try and summarize the plot in a paragraph but might gloss over some points.  Essentially, you have two sisters, Marguerite (Reed) and Marianne (Turner), who fall in love with the same man William (Hart), who happens to be the son of their mother's former lover, played here by Frank Morgan (Edmund Gwenn is their father, Gladys Cooper their mother, and Dame May Whitty a Mother Superior in a pretty star-studded supporting cast).  The two sisters similar names get them in trouble when William, after being branded a deserter in the navy (he fell for an Asian prostitute in a problematic scene in the film, as she then robs him & leaves him out-in-the-cold to die), gets drunk and proposes to Marianne, when he means to propose to Marguerite, whom he claims is his true love.  Marianne goes, and convinced by his friend Tim (Heflin), who is in love with Marianne & doesn't want her dishonored, William proposes to her.  You can see where this is going-Marguerite becomes a nun, Tim shares his love for Marianne, but she rejects him because she loves William, and William realizes in the end that it was Marianne he was meant for.  Oh, and there's an earthquake.

That earthquake is what the film is most famous for.  The film was nominated for four Oscars, and won one, and boy did it deserve it.  In an era prior to computer-generated effects (and location shooting, apparently because that could not look more like California if it tried), the film manages to have a gigantic earthquake sequence that shows the ground shifting, trees crashing, and then follows it with a spectacular flash flood that nearly drowns Richard Hart (I left quite petrified, and it was said in reviews of the film at the time that the audience could practically feel the earth shake from the movie).  The Oscar is richly-deserved, but it's the only nomination I'm getting behind.  The cinematography is fine (it's nice to be outdoors, I guess), but not all that compelling (mood lighting on a woman as beautiful as Lana Turner isn't groundbreaking), the editing is clumsy (the film drags on too long, and they use at least one shot twice during the earthquake scene), and the sound, outside of the earthquake scene, isn't important at all (also, it's not entirely clear during that scene who is screaming).

This is all to say that Green Dolphin Street is probably the type of movie that Turner was hoping for, but it's not what she wanted.  She's taken seriously as an actress here-it's easy to see a more storied thespian like Bette Davis in the role that Turner plays here, and she gets big, meaty speeches.  But the movie doesn't care much about defining her Marianne, and she doesn't either.  This is a woman who is strong, but also needs to be taken down a peg according to the script...but is constantly credited for being strong.  Turner gets off better than Reed, who is just there to look pious, and it's never clear exactly why Hart's William is in love with her since they barely spent any time together, and it's obviously Marianne who challenges & intrigues him.  Heflin is the best part of the film (and let's be honest, the best actor of the main four quartet in general), but he's inconsequential to the plot, and it's never clear again why he's fallen for Marianne, since an early scene shows he doesn't like strong women.  All-in-all, this is a lousy film with one truly great sequence in its center, the kind of "important" film that scoops up awards & box office, but feels utterly disposable afterward.  Turner was better off with the lower-budget but higher-quality Postman.