Whirlpool (1950)

Film: Whirlpool (1950)

Stars: Gene Tierney, Richard Conte, Jose Ferrer, Charles Bickford

Director: Otto Preminger

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

Few film noirs are as storied as Laura, perhaps the greatest film noir of all time if we want to get right down to it.  Both director Otto Preminger and star Gene Tierney would go on to make a name for themselves in the genre.  Preminger would have great success the following year with Fallen Angel (review for it at the bottom of this page), the movie that would make Linda Darnell's career (and end Alice Faye's), while Tierney would go on to become one of the few women nominated for an Academy Award for inhabiting a femme fatale role in Leave Her to Heaven, the most financially successful film that Fox made in the 1940's (again, review at the bottom of this page).  By 1950, though, both of them needed some of that Laura magic back.  Preminger had recently made one of the decade's highest-profile flops, Forever Amber, and while his follow-up Daisy Kenyon (for a third time, review at the bottom of the page) was well-regarded, it wasn't as big of a hit as its Joan Crawford/Henry Fonda double-billing would've implied.  Tierney, meanwhile, was in the middle of her messy, multi-year divorce to fashion designer Oleg Cassini, and had also had a brief (and for Tierney, heartbreaking) affair with a young John F. Kennedy years before his time in the White House.  Actress & director reunited in 1950 for not one but two films, and as I've seen Where the Sidewalk Ends before (no review at bottom of the page, you'll have to rely upon my Letterboxd) I figured it made sense to go with my final missing gap in their combined filmography, Whirlpool.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie honestly has a really cool plot, even if it makes no sense when it's being executed.  We have Ann Sutton (Tierney), the wealthy wife of a famous psychoanalyst named Bill (Conte), who has a bit of a problem with kleptomania, and is nearly arrested until a fellow therapist David Korvo (Ferrer) saves her from embarrassment.  He begins to treat her, without her husband knowing, for her issues with insomnia, but in a hypnotic trance, she shows up in the apartment of a dead woman, one who had been threatening her over an implied infatuation she had with Dr. Korvo.  She, in the trance, confesses to the murder, but Bill, along with a detective (Bickford) start to investigate, with Bill convinced that his wife couldn't have been the killer because people who are hypnotized would only do something they'd do in real life.  It turns out he is right (about her innocence at least) as it's Dr. Korvo who was the real killer, and he perishes in the film's closing scene, bleeding to death while professing Ann's innocence.

Whirlpool would make a decent amount for what it was at the box office, and for both of its stars it did allow something of a jump into the next decade.  This sort of "mousy femme fatale" routine would be a big part of Tierney's career for when she'd work the next decade (offscreen she would have more ill-timed romances, including with Aly Khan, and eventually have a suicide attempt before finally getting better outside of the Hollywood glare), while Preminger would go on to make major movies like The Moon is Blue, Carmen Jones, and Anatomy of a Murder, the latter two winning him Oscar nominations.

But it's not very good.  The movie rarely makes sense, and even when it does, it's far too dry.  Tierney, once such a vibrant onscreen performer, really struggled with her offscreen troubles to not bring that to the theatergoers, and not in an interesting way (that sounds gauche...but it's real).  She's too staid in this, and she's honestly offscreen for far too long.  Conte & Bickford are boring, and Ferrer is a bad over-actor.  The script also makes very little sense (Ferrer's approach to psychiatry reads less like genius and more like a voodoo spell you'd find in a Poverty Row film with Bela Lugosi).  The movie is not good, and a personal love of Tierney is the only thing keeping me from going 1-star on this picture.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Born to Kill, Brighton Rock, Brute Force, Call Northside 777, Caught, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Cry Wolf, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, The Naked City, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Secret Beyond the Door, Side Street, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Stranger on the Third Floor, They Drive By Night, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach, A Woman's Secret

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, Julie, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Lightning Strikes Twice, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, Lost Highway, Night Moves, Nightcrawler, Le Samourai

Daisy Kenyon (1947)

Film: Daisy Kenyon (1947)

Stars: Joan Crawford, Dana Andrews, Henry Fonda, Ruth Warrick, Peggy Ann Garner

Director: Otto Preminger

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Throughout the month of June, in honor of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

We're looking at film noir throughout the month, but with that, we're going to occasionally veer into areas that aren't really film noir.  Usually when you think of noir, you think of something to do with crime, likely murder, and there's at least one antihero detective at the center, and probably a couple of glamorous women who might be bad news (or might be there to save the antihero before the count is done).  Daisy Kenyon is not a film noir, but it is frequently billed as one (hence why it's part of this series).  During inarguably the most creative period of Joan Crawford's stardom (coming off of her Oscar win for Mildred Pierce, for much of the rest of the 1940's & early 1950's Crawford made most of her best movies, and got the remainder of her Oscar nominations), she made several films, including some noirs, but Daisy Kenyon by my definition is not a noir-it doesn't have a crime element, and while its center is certainly a glamorous woman, she's not really dangerous.  That being said, it is a fascinating film, and so I'm glad it randomly came up for this series.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Daisy Kenyon (Crawford), who is having an affair with Dan O'Mara (Andrews), a married lawyer.  After he stiffs her one too many times, she goes on a date with Peter Lapham (Fonda), a widower who recently got back from the war.  This sets in motion a bizarre love triangle, where it's not entirely clear whether or not Daisy loves Dan or Peter more (or, in a weird twist, which one is better for her given their marital status and this being 1947), nor is it clear which of the two men truly love Daisy.  Dan has deep feelings for her, but doesn't want to disrupt his life, and Peter seems at times to be more in love with his dead wife than with Daisy, dating her more because he expected to be married than because she's the one he wants to end up with.

Daisy Kenyon is famous today for its approach to its material.  Dan's eventual divorce in most films of this nature would be handled through melodrama, with his long-suffering wife Lucille (Warrick) likely killing herself or looking out longing windows rather than actually getting revenge on him, but Daisy Kenyon plays this straight.  It's a bit jarring to watch, and kind of hard to explain, but treating divorce, adultery, & romance in a level-headed (rather than overtly cinematic) way is very unusual to watch, and the film reads more like something you'd see in the 1970's or 80's than out of Tinseltown's heyday.  The realism, though, hurts the ending, because it's clear by the end of the movie that neither of these men are good enough for Daisy, or particularly good for her in general, and it'd be best if she just ended up alone.

As a result, I liked it, but didn't love it.  I think it's a fascinating thought experiment, though not everyone seems to understand the assignment.  Fonda is badly miscast here, bizarre as Peter & honestly making him feel too abrupt to believably pair with the confident Crawford.  Despite arguably being the least of the three (very talented) leads, Andrews comes across the best of the crew, giving Dan a realism that you wouldn't expect.  Dan is obviously in love with Daisy, but wishes she'd be less-complicated, and be the sex goddess he clearly initially fell for; he's obviously mad at himself for falling in love with her & not being able to move on to the next woman, but toxic masculinity is never going to allow him to blame himself for having feelings.  Sadly, even in 1947 this movie doesn't quite have the foresight to explore such complicated work from Andrews, and I think while this is good, it's not the reappraised classic some describe it as.

Previous Films in the Series: Murder My Sweet, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, The Killers, The Big Sleep, Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, Night and the City, They Live By Night, Gun Crazy, In a Lonely Place, Sweet Smell of Success, The Big Heat, Pickup on South Street, The Killing, The Long Goodbye, Body Heat

OVP: The Pied Piper (1942)

Film: The Pied Piper (1942)

Stars: Monty Woolley, Roddy McDowall, Anne Baxter, Otto Preminger, J. Carrol Naish, Peggy Ann Garner

Director: Irving Pichel

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Picture, Actor-Monty Woolley, Cinematography)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Anne Baxter-click here to learn more about Ms. Baxter (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Anne Baxter got into movies pretty quickly and with quite a bit of success early on.  She was only a teenager when she started to get star billing at Fox, first with the 1941 film noir Swamp Water.  A year later, she would appear in two Best Picture nominees, one of which would later be considered one of the great films of the era, The Magnificent Ambersons (which she made on loan to RKO), but that is a film I have seen (and loved) of Baxter's several times, and the goal with this series is always for me to watch (hopefully signature) films I hadn't seen of a performer for the first time.  As a result, we're going to focus today on the other Best Picture contender that Anne Baxter was in from 1942, a hit film that helped add luster to her growing leading lady status, but for which she is definitely playing second billing to another breakout star of 1942, Monty Woolley.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is focused on Howard (Woolley), a curmudgeonly old British man who detests being corrected & being around children.  When war breaks out, and Howard decides it is important for him to return to Britain in solidarity, he is asked to bring two children (McDowall & Garner) with him, as their parents are joining the war effort.  They venture forward, and soon we find that Howard is a bit of a pied piper (hence the title) leading a half dozen children out of war-torn Europe toward America.  Along the way he meets Nicole (Baxter), a French woman who romanced Howard's now-dead son, and they form an alliance that is nearly disrupted when Major Diessen (Preminger, in a rare acting role), a Nazi commander, imprisons them, but after finally believing that Howard truly is trying to save the children, he adds one of his own (a young girl who is half-German and half-Jewish), knowing what awaits her in Hitler's Germany.  The film ends with Howard finally embracing his grandfatherly position, excited to help these children get to safety.

The film is meant to be a happy wartime effort, and it is.  I always find movies about World War II made during World War II (the most famous being Casablanca) to be fascinating, mostly because it's essentially Hollywood making well-constructed propaganda, not ultimately knowing what will happen.  We take for granted years later that a film like The Pied Piper has a happy ending, but this wasn't something that was known in 1942-the ending has a degree of uncertainty even if it's hopeful.  This contradiction (where Hollywood doesn't know how to end the movie fully) is one of the more interesting things about The Pied Piper.

This is because the film itself is quite dull.  Woolley is terrific in his other star-making role of 1942 in the Christmas classic The Man Who Came to Dinner, but while he's wearing a similar routine here, it's a bit tired & doesn't really work.  Woolley is great at playing erudite snobs, but he's not as strong as playing obstinate men who fight the war effort, and while it's fun to think of him being this man who will stand up to the entire Third Reich, the film's relationship between he & Preminger's Nazi suspends belief so high you're going to need to a telescope.  Combined with him not really being able to pull off the film's schlockier moments, the movie falls apart, and Woolley, though a treat in his best scenes, is totally unprepared for this character, which probably needed someone better at straight drama.

Baxter's role is secondary-this is most definitely a supporting part, and not a well-drawn one at that.  The Indiana-born actress does a decent French accent (kudos for trying-most stars of that era wouldn't have), but that's about all she is asked to do.  Baxter's strength is melodrama, but the tonal shifts in this film (and Woolley's inability to roll with them) doesn't allow her to really capitalize on the film's weightiest moments.

Top 10 Films of 2020 (that aren't from 2020)

All right-we will be this week (likely on Tuesday if my plans are correct) unveiling my Top 10 of 2020.  However, in every year but this year especially, I see a lot of movies, and not just ones from the 2020 calendar.  In 2020 I saw 288 movies, some repeat viewings but many classics (or not so much) that I had never seen before, and I don't want to let something like chronology get in the way of celebrating great cinema.  As a result, I've included below my Top 10 films of 2020 that I saw for the first time (that didn't come out in 2020).  Enjoy (titles are listed alphabetically)!

Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

dir. Otto Preminger

A complicated look at sexual assault (and a surprisingly modern take considering its Classical Hollywood roots), this is a 3-hour film that never feels long, and has amazing work from Jimmy Stewart & Lee Remick.

Cabin in the Sky (1943)

dir. Vincente Minnelli

Ethel Waters steals the show in Vincente Minnelli's first musical, a landmark musical featuring an all-Black cast, and a picture that proves that "happiness is just a thing called Joe."

Honeyland (2019)

dir. Tamara Kotevska & Ljubomir Stefanov

A hands-off documentary that is so rich you almost feel it's a narrative feature; it's a challenging look at poverty, loss, & our ill treatment of the planet.

if... (1968)

dir. Lindsay Anderson

Malcolm McDowell shows early shadows of Alex DeLarge in this boarding school drama, a movie that even 50 years later is shocking in its frankness about sex & violence.

Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)

dir. Max Ophuls

Impossibly romantic, Joan Fontaine & Louis Jourdan are iconic as two lovers who alternate between passion & indifference in this forgotten masterwork.

The Misfits (1961)

dir. John Huston

A more avant-garde western than you'd expect given the stars, The Misfits is a look at the faded west & its fight against modernity.  Career-best work from Marilyn Monroe & (dare I say it?) Clark Gable.

Paper Moon (1973)

dir. Peter Bogdonavich

A gemlike father-and-daughter buddy film (on screen & off), that gives both of the O'Neal's their best work.  Proof that A+ chemistry, writing, & cinematography can always sell a picture.

Paths of Glory (1957)

dir. Stanley Kubrick

Kubrick gives us one of the best "war is hell" examples brought to cinema, with a look at the cruel politics of battle (and the finest performance from Kirk Douglas I've ever seen).

The Red Shoes (1948)

dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

One of those films that is spoken about in near reverent tones by cinephiles, Powell & Pressburger's magnum opus lives up to the hype: a modern, gorgeous tale of tragedy.

The Wind (1928)

dir. Victor Sjostrom

One of the greatest silent films I've ever seen, Lillian Gish gives the performance of a lifetime as a woman driven near mad by the harsh winds of the prairie.

OVP: Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

Film: Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Stars: James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, Arthur O'Connell, Eve Arden, Kathryn Grant, George C. Scott, Joseph N. Welch
Director: Otto Preminger
Oscar History: 7 nominations (Best Picture, Actor-James Stewart, Supporting Actor-George C. Scott, Supporting Actor-Arthur O'Connell, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Film Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

All right, we are on Day 2 of our week devoted to Best Supporting Actor.  One of my favorite things about doing reviews this way (where there's a common Oscar theme, but generally the films have little else in common, hopefully proving both the depth of each category within the Academy and forcing me to have a little bit more structure to knocking out some more great movies) is that when a movie gets a lot of nominations, you don't necessarily think of it first as a nominee in a category like Best Supporting Actor.  This is especially true for Anatomy of a Murder.  If you think of this movie today, it's obviously going to be as a "classic courtroom drama" one of the harbingers of eventual hit television series like The Defenders.  If you think of it in relation to Oscar, it's almost certainly going to be for its Best Picture nomination (weirdly the split in 1959 that meant Otto Preminger wasn't nominated was that Billy Wilder was for Some Like It Hot) or for being Jimmy Stewart's final nomination for Best Actor, which he lost to Charlton Heston during the Ben-Hur sweep.  However, Anatomy of a Murder is the only film we're going to profile this week that received two nominations for Best Supporting Actor, one for steady character actor Arthur O'Connell and the first nomination for a man who would one day turn down the Oscar: George C. Scott.

(Spoilers Ahead) Anatomy of a Murder has a lot of characters, but I'll attempt to summarize here.  At the center of the story is Paul Biegler (Stewart), a down-on-his-luck lawyer who recently lost his race for district attorney, and as a result is cash-strapped, unable to pay his secretary Madge (Arden) as he spends most of his time with his drinking buddy Parnell (O'Connell).  A case lands in his lap of a man  named Frederick Manion (Gazzara), a war veteran accused of murdering the man who raped his wife Laura (Remick).  Biegler tries the case on temporary insanity, as unlike a lot of dramas we would have seen at the time (where the defendant would be truly not guilty), there's never any question that Manion killed the man who raped his wife.  The film's central storyline largely unfolds in the courtroom, with Stewart and the prosecuting attorney Claude Dancer (Scott) going against each other in a series of rapid fire questioning rounds with witness after witness, until finally it's Mary Pilant (Grant, in one of the only roles she'd do after her marriage to Bing Crosby) provides enough evidence to the fact that her father raped Laura that they dismiss the charges against her husband.

There are a lot of things to unpack with a movie like Anatomy of a Murder, which at nearly three hours long (though it never feels like that, and indeed I was having so much fun I would have happily gone on for another hour) has a lot of plot.  The film at the time was landmark.  It was banned for a period in Chicago because it spoke so frankly about sex (this is the earliest chronologically I've ever seen a film use the word "sperm," for example), and is not shy about the realities of what happened to Laura Manion.  It's particularly interesting because of the way that Laura Manion is depicted in the film.  In Classic Hollywood, rape victims were almost always played as virginal saints (think of Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda or Hope Lange in Peyton Place)-Laura Manion is not a virgin (she's been married twice) and is not shy about clearly liking sex & liking that men are attracted to her.  That the film manages to show a woman of her proclivity as being a rape victim (that it shouldn't matter what a woman looks like, "no means no means no" is always right) is really progressive, and something I wasn't expecting going into this picture.

This boldness really hits well with the film though-this is a movie that cares about detail, cares about telling a complicated story.  We leave not really knowing if Fred Manion is guilty or not, or whether Stewart's Biegler (who gave him the idea of temporary insanity in what bordered on witness tampering) simply let a guilty man off by trying a different case (essentially stating that the man he killed wasn't worth a war veteran going to jail).  We also don't have a sense that the Manions live happily ever after-the ending heavily implies that Laura & Fred had a violent squabble, and that they are headed into another town to start over, but with the same character defects they had here.  It is only Biegler who has learned from this that he can move on past his election loss, and start helping he, Madge, and Parnell continue to make a living going forward.  It's the sort of open-ended finale you'd struggle to find even in modern day movies, and the ease with which it happens is enviable.

The Oscar nominations were uniformly strong-lots of strong competition when we eventually get to this year in the OVP, but know that Anatomy is coming with a winning hand.  Stewart is charming, but finds a rascal in his Paul that is fantastic, and proof that his career-best work in Vertigo the year before was no fluke-he was on a role.  The Cinematography is splendid, as is the editing, with the moving camera of the courtroom scenes working overtime to give us looks at being, in turn, the witnesses, the jury, the judge, and the lawyers.  I loved the screenplay too-it's hard to pull off a legal thriller and have people curious what will happen in the end, but they did just that, and the care that they handled the sensitive nature of the movie (but didn't handle it with kid gloves) is brilliant.

And as for our Supporting Actors?  Honestly, it's hard to tell which one's better.  Scott gets the showier role-the first hour or so you're going to wonder how he was nominated, but once you get into the film, you see his power and gravitas, particularly in his cross-examination of Lee Remick's Laura (Remick, who was cited by the Globes, had to have just missed with Oscar and it's disappointing she wasn't cited even in a strong field, as she's sensational & maybe the best performance in the movie, give or take Stewart), and suddenly you're wondering how he didn't win the Oscar, as this is the sort of performance that wins.  O'Connell's isn't the type that wins, but it's wonderful to watch his chemistry with Stewart, and the laid-back approach of his character.  There's layers in his work as it unfolds.  He's a drunk who was perhaps saved from being a lost cause by his friendship with Biegler, and the potential he saw in him, though O'Connell never gets the "I'll give up the booze!" sort of scene that would normally be required of an actor playing an alcoholic to get nominated.  Oscar wisely picked these two men as his nominees rather than the Globe-cited Joseph Welch, who portrays the judge.  Welch would have been an understandable if gimmicky choice that Oscar might have eaten up-he had been Chief Counsel for the Army during the McCarthy hearings, and was seen as the most important figure in taking down Sen. McCarthy (whose crusade, of course, had destroyed the careers of dozens of Hollywood figures).  This was his only role, and one he took on a lark-he's fine, if not particularly impressive in a plum role, and I'm glad if they were only going to give two citations to Anatomy, they went with O'Connell & Scott.

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.