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.

OVP: Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

Film: Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
Stars: Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, Jeanne Crain, Vincent Price, Mary Philips
Director: John M. Stahl
Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Actress-Gene Tierney, Art Direction, Cinematography*, Sound)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Ooph, I frequently take a random week off each summer to catch up on my life and get it in order, but quite frankly I should really reconsider moving that to February each year, as between the Oscars, the thrill of watching awards season, Turner Classic Movies' 31 Days of Oscars, and my general urge to move as fast as lightning through my goals in the first third of the year, I find myself most in need of time in the month made for lovers and presidents.  I am continuing to sail through as many of the TCM classics as possible to keep my DVR from brimming over (I will find myself unsuccessful in the next couple of days, admittedly, as there's no way I can maintain this pace with a weirdly busy social life for me), but I will try my best and continue to give you as many lovely and random pictures as I can find from this most heavenly of channels.

(Spoilers Ahead) It is, of course, Valentine's Day today but since I'm single I thought it would be fun to watch a noir movie, which of course ended up about as close to Fatal Attraction as one can get from a 1940's film, so it goes along well with my jaded heart on such a day (kidding, kidding...kind of).  The film is the tale of one Ellen Berent (Tierney) a woman desperately in love with an author she meets on a train named Richard (Wilde), who marries her quite impetuously and watches as her entire world crumbles.  The film is a melodrama as much as it is a noir, with the final third of the film turning into a pretty staid and eye-rolling courtroom drama as Ellen, after going on a bit of a murderer's spree (killing both Richard's disabled brother and her unborn son) offs herself to frame her sister Ruth (Crain) of the murder after she suspects Richard has fallen in love with her.

However, up until that point the film has a couple of really great scenes amidst some soggy melodrama.  Gene Tierney won her only Oscar nomination for this mammoth hit for FOX (it was the studio's highest-earning picture of the 1940's), and you can see what the draw is.  The film is not shy about first making you almost cower in fear at her beauty (I texted my brother as the film started, "Cornel Wilde is cute and all, but Gene Tierney is so gorgeous she genuinely looks like a cartoon"), and then spend the rest of the film subliminally making excuses for her as she continues to be worse and worse of a human being.  Tierney will always be one of my favorite performers (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, which we recently visited, as well as The Razor's Edge or especially my beloved Laura, all being treats in my opinion), but I will admit that I was a bit flummoxed for the first half of the film as to why Tierney was nominated, and part of me wondered if she was getting it simply because she was (at the time) one of Hollywood's biggest stars and this was such a big picture that it felt like she had to have it, in a similar way to say Doris Day in Pillow Talk or Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side.  However, I will admit that the scene where she watches a young Darryl Hickman drown in broad daylight is bone-chilling, and played to perfection in a method that rivals Barbara Stanwyck waiting at the train in Double Indemnity.  Tierney's performance never again matches Stanwyck's (she's too full of clenched glares and doesn't have the ease that this role requires in scenes with other people to make her seem convincingly manipulative), but there's power in her Ellen and the drowning scene alone probably mandated this nomination.

The mention of broad daylight is an interesting look at the cinematography, which actually won the Oscar.  The film is shot beautifully, all gorgeous shadows like we're in a Douglas Sirk film, but the real trick of Leon Shamroy's work in Leave Her to Heaven is the way he throws typical noir on its head by having the most heinous of actions take place not at night, but during the day.  Look at how brightly-lit something like the drowning sequence is in the film-you almost certainly assume Tierney will dive into the water and save Hickman at the last minute, and that he'll die later on in the evening, but here (like when she forces her miscarriage) Shamroy and director John Stahl play with our expectations and force us to realize that even in the safest of settings we cannot trust Ellen.  The film was also nominated for Art Direction (the set is fine, but the backdrops look unusually fake even for a 1940's picture, particularly an early scene where Cornel Wilde somehow manages to step in front of a series of mountains in just a ten-foot jaunt) and Sound (a strange nomination, quite frankly, and one that feels like it was earned in the courtroom scene for getting Vincent Price's voice to be as loud as possible, but the movie's score work in compliment with the film and the rather clumsy way that noise=passion makes me think this is the least of the citations), but it's the cinematography that stands out: gorgeously-lit, beautifully subtle, a sort of precursor to the grandness that something like Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes would soon perfect in the hands of Jack Cardiff.

Those are my thoughts on Leave Her to Heaven, a film I have long wanted to see thanks to my devotion to Tierney.  Do you have any thoughts on the picture?  What is your favorite Gene Tierney film?  What is your favorite of Leon Shamroy's eighteen nominated films?  Share your thoughts in the comments!