Saturdays with the Stars: Season 1 Recap

Ida Lupino & Ann Sheridan, two of our
stars kicking their heels!

With yesterday's sojourn into the South Pacific, we have finished our first season of "Saturday with the Stars!"  I'm not much for naval-gazing (mostly because I am aware this blog is not read by swaths of people), but I am really, really proud of this past season.  When I came up with this idea, I mostly wanted to see if I could do it for a year, and with one exception (you won't be able to tell this unless you were paying really close attention because I pre-dated the article, but when I was suffering from a 103-fever & pneumonia, I published one article on a Sunday), I did!

This year has taught me about the careers of twelve amazing artists, and I hope you learned some things about them too.  I had never really done something like this with actors, focusing instead on genre or something arbitrary like Oscar nominations, but getting to see the progressions in these women's careers was eye-opening, noting the similarities as well as the differences in their journeys.  I am struck by how expansive the universe of classic film is still to me some 25 years after I first started to delve into it. This year we watched movies that I'd never even heard of until I included them in the project, and made a bunch of "deep cut" discoveries.

We'll begin our second season in a few days (click here if you want to learn more about it), but before we go I am a lover of lists, and wanted to rank a few of the movies we watched this year.  I'm appreciative to all of these actresses for the education & cinematic pleasure they gave me during this journey, so I'm only focusing on the positives (no "worst of" lists).  If you have enjoyed this series, please feel free to comment or tweet this post-I'd love to have more people joining us in Season 2.  And if you have opinions on these actresses (or further research I should do), share in the comments as well!

Favorite Performances from Each Star
January: Ann Sheridan-Woman on the Run
February: Virginia Mayo-Along the Great Divide
March: Cyd Charisse-The Band Wagon
April: Alice Faye-Hello Frisco Hello
May: Linda Darnell-A Letter to Three Wives
June: Lizabeth Scott-Too Late for Tears
July: Rhonda Fleming-While the City Sleeps
August: Ruth Roman-Lightning Strikes Twice
September: Esther Williams-Bathing Beauty
October: Hedy Lamarr-Ecstasy
November: Ida Lupino-The Hard Way
December: Mitzi Gaynor-Les Girls

5 Favorite Actresses of the Year (Alphabetical)

Linda Darnell
Alice Faye
Rhonda Fleming
Ida Lupino
Lizabeth Scott

5 Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Linda Darnell, A Letter to Three Wives
Alice Faye, Hello Frisco Hello
Ida Lupino, The Bigamist
Ida Lupino, The Hard Way
Lizabeth Scott, Too Late for Tears

10 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

The Band Wagon
The Bigamist
Brigadoon
It's Always Fair Weather
Les Girls
A Letter to Three Wives
The Man Who Came to Dinner
My Darling Clementine
Strangers on a Train
Too Late for Tears

10 Favorite Performances of the Year in these Films (Not By Our Leading Ladies)

Humphrey Bogart, High Sierra
Kirk Douglas, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
Nanette Fabray, The Band Wagon
Patricia Hitchcock, Strangers on a Train
Van Johnson, Brigadoon
Kay Kendall, Les Girls
Janis Paige, Silk Stockings
Ann Sothern, A Letter to Three Wives
Robert Walker, Strangers on a Train
Monty Woolley, The Man Who Came to Dinner

OVP: A Letter to Three Wives (1949)

Film: A Letter to Three Wives (1949)
Stars: Jeanne Crain, Linda Darnell, Ann Sothern, Jeffrey Lynn, Paul Douglas, Kirk Douglas, Thelma Ritter
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Oscar History: 3 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture, Director*, Adapted Screenplay*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 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 Linda Darnell-click here to learn more about Ms. Darnell (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

It's occasionally difficult to know where to end our months with each star-do we go with their final major success, as we did with Ann Sheridan & Alice Faye, or do we go to the depths of their film careers like Virginia Mayo and Cyd Charisse?  Considering how tragic Linda Darnell's life ended up being, with her eventually going into bouts of alcoholism and being burned alive in one of Hollywood's most horrific deaths, it felt wrong to wade through the final stages of her career, when she would have the occasional lead role, but was perhaps most well-known in the 1950's for the part she didn't get (despite a love affair with Jopeph L. Mankiewicz, it was Ava Gardner who won the lead in The Barefoot Contessa even though Darnell was certain she would be its star and her life may have profoundly changed if she'd gotten the part in the picture which was a smash hit for United Artists).  We will instead leave her at arguably the professional peak of her career, the Best Picture-nominated A Letter to Three Wives, featuring what many consider to be her finest performance.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers around the lives of three friends: Lora Mae (Darnell), Deborah (Crain), and Rita (Sothern), all of whom are frenemies with a woman who is never seen but has made passes at each of their husbands at some point named Addie Ross (an uncredited Celeste Holm does the narration, recalling in many ways Mankiewicz's magnum opus All About Eve).  All three women are chaperoning a school field trip when they receive a letter from Addie Ross, cattily pointing out to them that she has decided to skip town...and is taking one of their husbands with her.  The movie progresses with each woman wondering, silently, on the trip whether or not their husband is the one who ran away with the woman, and recalling scenes from their marriage that could have led to such infidelity.  Rita, after all, is a career woman (considering it's 1949, this is handled with less sexism than you'd think though it's obviously still there), Deborah is a bit dowdy & doesn't fit in with her husband's friends, and Lora Mae's husband thinks she's just a gold-digger, waiting for her chance at his fortune.  None of the marriages seem to be in particularly strong shape, though it's pretty clear that Rita's to George (Kirk Douglas, when he was still taking supporting roles of a sort) is in the best shape, and they lay down the cards pretty quickly that he isn't the culprit.  It turns out that, despite Deborah's husband not showing up at the country club dance, it was Lora Mae's Porter (Paul Douglas, who was only in his first year of moviemaking at the time despite being 42) that had run off with Addie, only to change his mind.  The film ends with Lora Mae & Porter admitting that they love each other, and a happy ending, with Addie saying "good night" to the audience as they all dance.

The movie is charming from start-to-finish.  It's hard not to make easy comparisons to All About Eve, not only because it shares several cast members (Holm, of course, and Thelma Ritter in a role so early in her career she didn't even get onscreen billing despite a substantial part that might have won her an Oscar nomination a few years later), but because it's the rare classic Hollywood movie that genuinely just puts women out in front, with all of the male actors relegated to supporting roles.  Eve is better, but that's an impossible bar to compare to, and this is a rich screenplay filled with witty asides (Darnell, Sothern, Ritter, & Holm all bat the one-liners out of the park), and is equally funny and dramatic.  The movie never shies away from the stakes here-the women all are in troubled marriages, and all don't want their marriages to end, but are aware that this isn't an ideal situation.  I liked that Mankiewicz didn't just go around blaming these three women for the problems in their partnerships, having the men own up to such things as well as the female characters, and while it just missed the Best Picture win to All the King's Men, it certainly would have made a worthy capper to the 1940's.

It's impossible not to compare the three lead actresses.  At first, I liked Sothern the best, as she was having the most fun with Mankiewicz's dialogue and in the first half it's hard to tell why Darnell's Lora Mae seemed so distant compared to the other actresses' closeness.  As the film goes on, though, we find that Lora Mae is the most interesting part of the three, and Darnell (in the best performance we've chronicled from her all month) aces it.  Lora Mae isn't a gold digger, but she is someone whom men just see as cheap and there "for a good time."  Ravishingly beautiful, but a poor girl, she's someone Porter thinks can be had for a steak dinner or a promotion, but in fact she wants something real and isn't afraid to lose him to get it.  That's what makes the stakes of the ending so great-Lora Mae is the only one of the three women who hasn't admitted to herself how much she loves her husband (and how much she loves him), and as a result is the only one of the three women you could see being abandoned before the curtain ends in a melodrama.  That she doesn't isn't a fault of the film, and actually to its aid, and one has to assume that Darnell was close to an Oscar nomination for this part, perhaps only missing out because she was splitting the vote with her costars (surely she would have campaigned correctly as a lead, but in our era of category fraud, she now would've gone supporting).  Darnell proved here with her superb comic timing & strong dramatic work that she was more than just a pretty face, and should be remembered not just for her beauty, but for being a damn fine actress.

My Darling Clementine (1946)

Film: My Darling Clementine (1946)
Stars: Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell, Victor Mature, Cathy Downs, Walter Brennan
Director: John Ford
Oscar History: Despite the iconic nature of this film and Ford's clear fanbase at the Academy, this wasn't nominated a single Oscar.
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 Linda Darnell-click here to learn more about Ms. Darnell (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I had hoped to have our Linda Darnell picture this week be Forever Amber, the ill-fated 1947 movie that featured Darnell in full Scarlett O'Hara-mode.  The movie could have been a breaking point in Darnell's career, but it wasn't and she followed up with some of her best-regarded work (plus, that movie is so infamous that it's one I'm going to have to see eventually, if only for the OVP).  Unfortunately, my DVR filmed that in the middle of a blizzard, and as a result I only got 28 minutes of the movie, and because we live in a world where "streaming is replacing everything, but somehow the movies you want are never on streaming" I didn't have another way to catch it.  So we're going to go to a considerably better-regarded Darnell picture, possibly the most well-known and well-loved movie in her filmography, though one I was skipping because I suspected, like most John Ford westerns, that the men would get the heavy lifting in terms of performances, and I was right.  Still, even if this feels a bit unfair to put in a month celebrating Linda Darnell, it's a damn good picture.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on Wyatt Earp (Fonda), a legendary lawman from Dodge City who comes to Tombstone, Arizona, and is made the marshall after throwing out a drunk man who is trying to shoot the town up.  He takes this job because his sensitive brother was just murdered, the necklace he bought for his sweetheart stolen in the process.  He soon meets Doc Holliday (Mature), an outlaw who is haunted by personal demons (he's clearly ill) and used to be a surgeon.  Two women surround Doc's life, his hot-tempered singing lover Chihuahua (Darnell) and the recently-arrived Clementine (Downs), who used to be his love but is now being pursued by Wyatt Earp.  The film follows their burgeoning friendship until one of Earp's other brothers is killed by Old Man Clanton (Brennan), who also killed Earp's first dead brother.  This results in the legendary "Shootout at the OK Corral," where all of the Clanton's die, as well as Doc Holliday (Chihuahua has already died from a stray bullet from the Clantons, in a movie with a high body count).  The movie ends not with a pursued relationship between Clementine & Earp, but with him riding into the sunset while she stays behind to run a school, letting him pass into legend.

The movie is really good.  It doesn't resemble history even a little bit (Earp wasn't actually the central figure in the shootout despite popular culture making him the star-his brother Virgil was the most important figure in the shootout).  This wouldn't even be worth mentioning in a movie of this era (factual accuracy wouldn't be en vogue for a few more decades), but for the random trivia that John Ford once met the real-life Wyatt Earp, and actually discussed the shootout with him years before this film was made, and used some of the facts of the shootout in the picture.  It's a thrilling scene regardless of its relation to the truth, as Ford does some really marvelous long shots where other directors would have done closeups, and considering how central closeups were to the rest of the movie, I was stunned that this wasn't the case.  The movie is a fun western from start-to-finish; it's not treading new territory, or finding some of the darkness that Ford's westerns like The Searchers or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance would eventually contain, but Fonda & Mature are both great in the lead roles, and the movie comes along briskly (just under 100 minutes).

As for our star of the month, sadly, she's relegated to basically a supporting part despite her leading lady billing.  The film's stereotypes about Latina women are pretty egregious (she's referred to as a "wildcat" multiple times), and there's nothing here for her to do but be jealous of Clementine, lust after Mature, and then die beautifully, her entire life made more worthy by looking gorgeous while she's on the operating table.  She's so ancillary to the plot that she doesn't even get a proper death scene, and one could argue that Downs gets the bigger role.  At the time, Darnell was a major star in the middle of a comeback while Downs was a nobody who was about to enjoy a very brief period as a leading woman (that ended when, according to Hollywood gossip, she wouldn't sleep with Darryl Zanuck); she'd eventually get rediscovered by film audiences decades later when the Poverty Row films she made in the 1950's (schlocky Sci Fi pictures), were discovered by camp film fans.  So much of Darnell's film career was spent with her playing the beautiful love interest, which is why I was bummed we couldn't put her center stage with Forever Amber this week.  Thankfully, next week (our final film with Darnell), we'll get a treat as she'll be giving her best performance by far we've profiled, and it will be the gentlemen taking the backseat.

OVP: Blood and Sand (1941)

Film: Blood and Sand (1941)
Stars: Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Rita Hayworth, Alla Nazimova, Anthony Quinn, J. Carrol Naish, Lynn Bari, John Carradine, Laird Cregar
Director: Rouben Mamoulian
Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Cinematography-Color*, Best Art Direction)
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 Linda Darnell-click here to learn more about Ms. Darnell (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As we spoke through in the kickoff to Linda Darnell month, Ms. Darnell's career essentially had two acts, one from 1940-43 where she was instantly praised for her unrivaled beauty and given little else to do in films but be ravenous, and then after a hiatus that nearly ended her career, she reclaimed her throne as a matinee idol in the late 1940's when she was given significantly better parts in pictures like Fallen Angel and A Letter to Three Wives before her personal demons made it impossible for any future comebacks.  Due to these gaps, I decided to spread our month into two halves as well, with our first two pictures coming from the fledgling years of Darnell's career, and the final two from after she mounted a comeback.  This week we take a look at another pairing of Darnell with Tyrone Power (whom we saw her with in The Mark of Zorro last Saturday), their final onscreen pairing after four successful pictures, and also a movie with her starring opposite one of the biggest icons of the 1940's, who at that point wasn't famous enough yet to get billing over Darnell, but would soon eclipse her career in pretty much every way imaginable: Rita Hayworth.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is unique in its subject matter in a lot of ways, as it's the rare giant epic that also is clearly a message picture.  We follow Juan Gallardo (Power) from his years as a young child, defending his slain father who was once the greatest bullfighter in Spain.  As he ages, a cocky Juan Gallardo learns to in fact take his father's place, and subsumes him in the national consciousness as one of the greatest matadors of his era.  The movie counters this rise with Juan Gallardo's interactions with women, including his housemaid mother (Nazimova) and bratty sister (Bari, always playing the villainous role, and with three films now in our Saturdays with the Stars series, the unofficial "Forgotten Star" on a series about "forgotten stars" as she won't be getting her own month but probably should have at this point).  He also has two major romantic pursuits Carmen (Darnell), a pious woman whom he marries and has loved since they were children, and Dona Sol (Hayworth), a gorgeous heiress who seems to bounce from man-to-man and has a thing for matadors.

The film is really Power's, and probably shouldn't have been included in this series though technically he shares above-the-line billing with Darnell in virtually every poster I could find.  It was an important picture for both, a huge hit and one that kept them at the top of matinee screens for a few more years, but Power owns the picture in terms of screentime, and Darnell is given little to do.  Even in the ending of the movie, when Power's character dies in a surprisingly solemn finale (we see Anthony Quinn as the next successor to Juan Gallardo, certain to also die at the hands of a bull the same way his former friend did), Carmen has little to do but mourn and weep, and while some would argue that playing a pious woman was a nice change of pace compared to the latter aspects of Darnell's career, it's hard to think of this as her picture, and quite frankly it's not even banking that much on her looks, which was Darnell's complaint at the time.  Certainly when you compare her to Hayworth, given a seedier role but landing it with much more aplomb and glamour.  Hayworth, the superior actress, steals the movie in every conceivable way, and was clearly destined for stardom.  A few months later she'd appear in the massively successful You'll Never Get Rich with Fred Astaire, and wouldn't be relegated to third billing in a movie again for two decades.

The movie received a pair of well-earned Academy Award nominations that year, neither of which were reliant on the staid acting and repetitive screenwriting (though like I said-strong ending).  The cinematography is gorgeous-shot in Technicolor, the bullfight scenes gave me chills and though shot at wide angle (there's no plausible way you'd assume Power was actually onscreen with the dangerous bulls), it works brilliantly.  The love scenes are lensed compellingly, great melodramatic stuff, and honestly even the gaudy touches work with the film.  The same could be said for the art direction-it's terrific to watch all of the stadiums recreated, and you don't really feel like you're on a Hollywood sound stage even when you are.  It's obvious that Blood and Sand was borrowed by other epic directors years later, as the giant, expansive sets of the 1940's/50's are borrowing from this film as much as early DeMille, so there's clear influence going on here, and I loved the cavernous effect they occasionally make to imply Juan Gallardo's life is empty.  Technically the film is very impressive (sound work's great too), but aside from Hayworth the substance of the film is weirdly lacking.

OVP: The Mark of Zorro (1940)

Film: The Mark of Zorro (1940)
Stars: Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Basil Rathbone, Gale Sondergaard, J. Edward Bromberg
Director: Rouben Mamoulian
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Score)
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 Linda Darnell-click here to learn more about Ms. Darnell (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

The career of Linda Darnell can be broken up into two parts, largely before-and-after her work in Fallen Angel, which we profiled last week as the final starring role in the career of Alice Faye.  We’ll also split our series about Darnell into two parts, with a pair of films from the first half of her career pre-Fallen Angel, and then two post Fallen Angel when her career as a proper leading woman (rather than just “the love interest”) took off, with her landing critically-lauded and more important pictures before her career derailed permanently in the early 1950’s.  This week, we will profile her work with her most famous costar, Tyrone Power, in a massive hit for FOX that was seen at the time as a reaction to Warner Brothers success with The Adventures of Robin Hood.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film tells the story of Don Diego Vega (Power), a wealthy young man who returns to California from Spain to find that his father is no longer in charge of Los Angeles, and instead he is being backed by a corrupt mayor (Bromberg), whose true muscle in office is the cruel Captain Esteban (Rathbone).  Don Diego comes across as a dandy (and quite frankly, there’s a LOT of coded language implying that he’s pretending to be gay), but it’s all an act-he’s actually Zorro, the masked bandit who steals from the rich and gives back to the poor. Zorro comes across a beautiful woman Lolita (Darnell), who at first is disgusted by Don Diego even though she’s smitten with Zorro, and then eventually falls for them both, realizing they are one in the same.  Don Diego fights Esteban to the death toward the end of the film, sending the corrupt mayor back to Spain & getting the girl while saving the city, a fitting & quick ending to a surprisingly brisk film.

The movie is a remake of a Douglas Fairbanks picture from 1920, and you can kind of see the lines from the Silent Era into the sound.  The most thrilling aspects of the movie are all action that could have worked without dialogue, with my favorite being an incredible jump from a bridge where Zorro, mounted on a horse, jumps into a real river and somehow stays atop the animal (it’s hard to imagine anyone, much less Power, doing this stunt in the era before CGI).  However, the movie’s actual scripted parts fall flat, even with Bromberg & character actress Gale Sondergaard as his horny-for-Power wife providing some comic relief.  Even the Oscar-nominated score fails to impress, frequently feeling rather banal & while bouncy, not particularly memorable or in aid to the film itself.

Darnell’s major complaint about her earliest starring films was that she didn’t have anything to do except look beautiful…this feels like a pretty valid criticism of The Mark of Zorro.  Darnell’s performance here is nothing above ordinary, with her looking beautiful but given little to do except be commented upon.  There’s a scene where she’s talking with Zorro dressed as a monk (she doesn’t know it’s Zorro or Don Diego at this point), and she seems stunned that someone thinks she’s pretty since she’s only ever heard that from her maid, which feels vaguely absurd as she clearly has access to a mirror.  Power is considerably better, dashing and funny and occasionally a bit more camp than you’d expect a film to be self-aware enough to achieve in 1940. This is the third of the four films I’m profiling of Darnell’s that I’ll be seeing this month, so I know she’s capable of more, and it’s a pity she’s mostly an ornament for Zorro to win here rather than adding much else to the picture.

Saturdays with the Stars: Linda Darnell

Each month of 2019 we will be looking at the careers of leading ladies of Classical Hollywood who were never nominated for an Academy Award as part of our "Saturdays with the Stars" series.  Last month, our focus was on Alice Faye, a major star at Fox during the late 1930's/early 1940's well-known for her work in musicals (whom I fell in love with so go back if you need to catch up).  This month we're going to take a look at the woman whose presence in the Faye vehicle Fallen Angel (where she took over as the star under the watchful eye of Darryl Zanuck) caused Faye to leave show business, Linda Darnell.

Darnell was forced at a young age by an aggressive stage mother to pursue a career in entertainment.  She began modeling at the age of 11, and was acting on the stage as she started puberty.  She fancied herself a stage actress, but her mother was intent on making her daughter into a screen star, and at the age of only 15 got her first starring role when Loretta Young dropped out of Hotel for Women.  Darnell lied about her age early in her career to appear older to get better parts, so it's always hard to tell how much Fox was letting slip by because they had this actress they saw potential in or whether they didn't know that they were partnering a 17-year-old Darnell opposite a nine-years-her-senior Tyrone Power in Brigham Young.  However, Brigham Young was a big hit, and made Darnell a proper star.

Darnell's career had two peaks and plenty of valleys.  From 1940 to about 1943, she was being groomed for stardom, but the young actress didn't like the attention as it seemed like she was only getting praised for her unrivaled looks.  She nearly got dropped from show business (her career was heading down the path of second leads & supporting parts) when she was cast in Fallen Angel, and suddenly everyone took notice of her again.  Fallen Angel was a huge hit, and that lead to movies like My Darling Clementine, Anna and the King of Siam, and the infamous Forever Amber, a movie that we'll highlight as one of our Saturday features this month, and was seen as a potential Gone with the Wind (but went the way of pretty much every film that tried to mirror Gone with the Wind for the next sixty years or so).  Perhaps best of all was her turn in the Oscar-winning movie A Letter to Three Wives, which Darnell was widely expected to receive an Academy Award nomination for but didn't (and if she had, she wouldn't be in our series).

It's impossible to talk about Darnell without also bringing up the misfortune of her off-screen existence.  She had a messy love life (including a doomed affair with Joe Mankiewicz), struggled with alcohol and weight problems, and attempted suicide more than once.  Her death is one of the most horrifying in the history of Hollywood scandals, as she was essentially burned alive when her house caught fire, and rumors have persisted for years that Darnell started the fire as another suicide attempt (the coroner's inquest ruled the death an accident caused by a cigarette not being properly extinguished).  Hollywood is sadly filled with stories of impossibly beautiful women living lives of incredible sadness and despair, but few approach the tragedy of Linda Darnell.  This month, we will examine the artistic output she left behind, her lasting legacy in cinema.

Fallen Angel (1945)

Film: Fallen Angel (1945)
Stars: Alice Faye, Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell, Charles Bickford, Anne Revere, John Carradine, Percy Kilbride
Director: Otto Preminger
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 Alice Faye-click here to learn more about Ms. Faye (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

And so we conclude our short time with Alice Faye as our Star of the Month, largely where Ms. Faye herself ended her career.  We profiled a bit in our overview of Alice Faye's career (see the link above) why Fallen Angel was such a big moment in her career, and largely ended it (long story short-Faye caught on to Darryl Zanuck trying to screw her over to give a better part to Linda Darnell, and she wasn't having it so she left show business, leaving Zanuck without one of his biggest stars).  Faye would work again decades later, most notably in 1962's State Fair (where she had to play second fiddle to Pat Boone, Bobby Darin, & Ann-Margret, a new generation of musical stars), but this was it for her time as a headliner.  Considering the director here is better than any we've profiled so far in Faye's career (real talk-Otto Preminger may be the finest director we've hit for any Saturday with the Stars articles, give or take Vincente Minnelli), I was curious if Faye had overreacted, or if she indeed gets screwed over by Zanuck.  What I found was that Faye, if she had assumed she'd get the better part, was justified in her storm off, but neither actress is saving a particularly strong picture with Fallen Angel.

(Spoilers Ahead) Fallen Angel is about a love triangle in a small town between a conman of sorts Eric Stanton (Andrews), a "loose" waitress at a local diner Stella (Darnell), and the prim organist who happens to be a wealthy heiress June Mills (Faye).  Eric is intent on marrying Stella by any means necessary, but she won't go with him unless he has some money, so he tries to steal it from June, first by tricking her into giving it to him and then by marrying her to get to hers and her sister Clara's (Revere) inheritance.  This doesn't entirely work, though, because June is genuinely in love with Eric and Stella soon finds herself dead, with us assuming Eric didn't do it, but we aren't entirely sure who did.  The movie follows with Eric confessing to being a cad and then slowly falling for June (for real this time), trying to prove his innocence.  At the end of the movie, yet another guy obsessed with Stella, the detective investigating her murder (Bickford), turns out to be the killer, with Eric & June going off into the sunset together.


The film has a lot of great makings of a movie, including reuniting Andrews & Preminger, who just a year earlier had made the cinematic masterpiece Laura, which this film was clearly trying to duplicate both creatively and financially.  While it was a modest hit, it never really approaches Laura in terms of its quality.  Everyone was right to single out Darnell's Stella, who is given less screen time than I would've assumed considering her billing and star status at the time, but she's the best part about the movie.  Her Stella is dangerous, nasty, and clearly the sort of film noir character that, nowadays, would be having sex with guys just to mess with them.  She works every guy in the film, either to get what she wants or occasionally just to screw up their lives, and she looks great doing it.  The movie's best parts are all Darnell, and it falls to pieces in the back half when she disappears, and we're left with a relatively lousy mystery.  Even with a really great supporting cast (John Carradine as a conman medium! Anne Revere as an enigmatic spinster! Percy Kilbride as a lovelorn cook!) giving solid work, its script just isn't that good, and feels hollow when you compare it to the heights that Laura achieved.

Faye, for the first time this month, feels out of her element.  I wonder what the additional scenes would have been like, if they would have added some depth to her work or if this wasn't a genre that she could pull off, but she feels too mousy to be interesting compared to the stellar work that Darnell is playing.  We're meant to root for June, but what is there to root for other than she seems like a nice girl?  Her previous iterations were so compelling because they took seemingly "gold-hearted gals" and made them interesting.  Here, though, she's left with little to do other than be upstaged, and though it's a bummer that she didn't make any major movies again, perhaps the lesson of Alice Faye is that she was never given a proper shake to begin with.  Despite clear talent, beauty, and incredible star charisma, none of her movies that we profiled this month ever felt worthy of her.  One has to wonder what, a decade later, someone like Gene Kelly or Stanley Donen could have made of such a rare talent.  At the very least, while she didn't get the decades of star legend that some of her peers would get, she did seem to have a genuinely happy life with her husband Phil Harris for the next fifty years.  Unfortunately, as you'll soon see, our May Star of the Month wasn't so lucky.