They Won't Believe Me (1947)

Film: They Won't Believe Me (1947)

Stars: Susan Hayward, Robert Young, Jane Greer, Rita Johnson

Director: Irving Pichel

Oscar History: No nominations

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

As we've mentioned a couple of times this month, Robert Young never became an iconic star despite decades of leading roles in the movies.  However, in the late 1940's he become something of a more interesting actor.  After his contract with MGM expired, Young turned into a freelance artist, and during this time frame he made arguably his best run of movies, including The Enchanted Cottage and Crossfire, both of which are movies that standup to modern scrutiny (you'll see if you click over to the reviews that I was a fan).  One of the movies during this period that he made was They Won't Believe Me, a gritty noir film from the era which had Young, atypical from his MGM days, playing a louse who regularly cheats on his wife.  Young would later say on The Dick Cavett Show that this was the one film where he got to play a "nasty character" and it resulted in a box office flop.  However, I'm a sucker for film noir (if you've read this blog a while you know it's my favorite genre), and was curious to see if Young, a rather limited actor, was better-suited for playing closer to the devil.

(Spoilers Ahead) Despite Hayward getting top-billing, this movie is very much Young's movie, with him playing Larry Ballentine, a mid-level employee at a brokerage firm who is able to enjoy a swanky lifestyle through his marriage to his wealthy wife Greta (Johnson).  Larry has regular affairs with Janice (Greer), whom he's been lying to about the state of his marriage in order to sleep with her.  When he tries to break things off with Greta (and run away with Janice), Greta essentially bribes him with a share in a high-scale brokerage firm, and he dumps Janice.  Once at the brokerage, he starts up an affair with a self-admitted gold-digger named Verna (Hayward), who is initially interested in him for his wife's money, but eventually falls in love with him.  Even after Greta once again tries to bribe Larry, it doesn't work, and he runs off with Verna, but before they can be married, they get into a car accident, killing Verna...whom the authorities assume is Greta.  Larry thinks he can take advantage of this situation by killing Greta when he gets home & disposing of her body, but when he gets there he finds that she's committed suicide.  As a result, he's gotten away with it-the money, and now he can pursue Janice once again, but it doesn't work.  When Greta's body is found, they assume he killed her, and while the jury gives a plea of "Not Guilty" (this entire story is told through flashback from the defense attorney's closing argument), Larry jumps out the window to his death before he can hear the verdict, already guilty of unforgivable crimes in his mind.

This, as I stated above, is a very atypical role for Young, who regularly played lighthearted romantic comedy roles during his MGM years, and even in movies like Crossfire and The Enchanted Cottage (both of which are heavier than his MGM fare) he's still a hero.  Young, though, given the opportunity to stretch his acting muscles, works really well here & this is easily the best I've seen him in a part.  His Larry is a cruel, callous man, and it juxtaposes well with Young's upstanding, upper-crust appearance & his longtime history as the good guy (even when he doesn't get the girl).  His rakish work here is admirable, and honestly I wish he'd been afforded more time to play parts like this.

Normally I'd be more gravitated toward his costars (film noirs are measured largely by how well the femme fatales show up, and here we have three of them), but somehow Young is best in show, even if Hayward comes close.  Hayward, another actor I don't always love, gives one of her best performances in this, her money-hungry beauty keeping the audience guessing as to her true motives (and true feelings about Larry) throughout the film's entire first half.  Greer & Johnson aren't quite as good as they could've been, a pity in particular for Greer, who was giving the greatest performance of her career in a different 1947 noir, Out of the Past.  But overall, this is excellent, and thankfully gave us a Young performance for me to finally champion.  Next week, we're going to conclude our month devoted to the actor with his final film role, in a movie that would serve as a blueprint for a picture that would later change the entire industry of Hollywood.

OVP: I Married a Witch (1942)

Film: I Married a Witch (1942)
Stars: Fredric March, Veronica Lake, Cecil Kellaway, Susan Hayward
Director: Rene Clair
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

With the Oscar Viewing Project, I do find that I am slowly but steadily losing my "viewing virginity" with a number of classic film stars that I had apparently never gotten around to watching, and that includes Veronica Lake.  Lake was a movie star for Paramount in the 1940's and while her most famous role remains Sullivan's Travels (still need to see that) she's probably better known today for being Kim Basinger's doppelganger in LA Confidential and for being one of the movie stars that ended up inspiring Jessica Rabbit. Like several other actors of her era (Betty Hutton, for example) Lake ended up having a weirdly compelling real life story, becoming one of Marlon Brando's many lovers and like Hutton eventually became a waitress when she had burned through all of her money.  She eventually ended up dying at age 50 of hepatitis.  This is an (albeit sad) interesting story.  Unfortunately for me, I Married a Witch is not.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Jennifer (Lake) and her father Daniel (Kellaway) who are burned alive during the Salem Witch Trials, but not before putting an evil curse on the Wooley men who accused the two, dooming the men to always end up marrying shrewish, cruel women.  We come back to the present (well, 1942) and the current Wallace Wooley (March) is about to get married and is on-track to become the next governor of Massachusetts.  His fiance Estelle (a young Susan Hayward) is constantly berating him and clearly only marrying him because her father is making her.

After lighting strikes the tree that Jennifer and Daniel have been hiding in, Jennifer plots to take revenge on the present Wooley by making him fall-in-love with her, ruining his life by showing him something that he can't have.  Unfortunately, she accidentally drinks the love potion and ends up falling in love with him.  The rest of the movie is a series of mishaps, with Wallace slowly falling for Jennifer but her father Daniel is constantly trying to keep them apart in a variety of ways (including a morbid suicide scene where he wants to send Wallace to the electric chair, and another scene where Jennifer fakes her own death).

The film courts macabre humor with more abandon than you would expect. I don't know if it's because I've been more sensitized to such things through the years, but you'd never be able to make a picture like this where a main character is so cavalier about ruining someone's life through sexual blackmail and murder (at least not and call it a comedy afterwards).  The film's side characters are all a bit stock for me.  I get that Hayward, for example, is playing a cartoon, but did she have to be such a harpy (the film's words, not mine)?  It gives little indication why Wallace, who is an affable enough chap, would have sold out so ferociously as to marry her just for a higher office he throws away rather cavalierly later in the picture.

That lack of reason may be the film's biggest problem.  The movie occasionally has Wallace falling in love with Jennifer through magic, but that's only fleeting.  The film relies heavily on Wallace actually falling in love with her, and there's really no reason he would outside of looks, which makes him a pretty horrible protagonist.  This is because Jennifer is a truly vapid and awful human being.  The film wants her desperately to be Susan Vance from Bringing Up Baby, or perhaps even an early incarnation Samantha Stephens, but Susan and Sam were both insanely likable.  Yes, they had their flaws, but you still wanted to love them.  Jennifer is constantly trying to ruin Wallace's life for her own selfish gains, and the school girl/naive aspect of her persona border on the creepy.  Lake is indeed beautiful in the role, but she adds nothing to it and if this is what she brings to a film, I can see why she never graduated into iconic status like Rita Hayworth or Lauren Bacall did as her peers.

The film received one nomination, one of those countless nominations for Best Score that emerged during this period.  I have to say that while it's cute, and would indeed eventually inspire Bewitched, there's nothing particularly excellent about it-it's just a playful little score.

Those are my thoughts-anyone want to disagree with me?  Has anyone out there seen I Married a Witch, and if so what did you think?  For those that haven't, is there a Veronica Lake performance I should look for to wash the stench off of this one?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

OVP: Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman

Film: Smash-Up (The Story of a Woman)
Stars: Susan Hayward, Lee Bowman, Eddie Albert, Marsha Hunt
Director: Stuart Heisler
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Susan Hayward, Best Original Story)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

The films of Susan Hayward tend toward the highest end of melodramatic, and this, a movie about a night club singer who indulges in the drink (to excess, obviously, or there would be no movie) is no exception.

The film tells the tale of Angie Evans (Hayward), a night club singer with a strong case of nerves that she quenches with a double before show time, who is soaring to success, but is also in love with a man named Ken Conway (Bowman) who is down-on-his-luck and she's supporting him (it's 1947, this is not remotely socially acceptable).  Angie encourages Ken, and he slowly becomes successful both at work and at home, with a wife and baby in the personal column and a burgeoning career as a singer and radio personality on the other hand.  Angie abandons her promising career to be a stay-at-home mom, and were this not a movie, you'd suspect that would be the end of it.

But this is a movie, and it's a Susan Hayward movie to boot, so you just know that she's going to turn to some sort of demon, and in this case, it's alcohol.  Angie begins to become bored, and feels restless in the face of her husband's overwhelming success (and persistent reliance on his assistant, played by Hunt, with whom Angie suspect he's having an affair), and slowly becomes an alcoholic.  The interesting thing, of course, is that alcoholism was in the process of being completely rethought around the time of this movie.  Bill Wilson's Twelve Step program was just under ten years old, and with films like The Lost Weekend gaining fame, there was a lot more focus on films dealing with alcoholism as not a comedic trope (think of Stagecoach, amongst others), but as a dramatic tool for a character.

Hayward borrows a lot from Ray Milland's Oscar-winning performance two years earlier (in fact, actors have been nominated for playing addicts for decades since The Lost Weekend, even this past year), slurring her speech, and truly finding a balance between being able to hide her addiction rather than the dramatic trap of constantly failing and failing and failing for the sake of drama (see La Vie En Rose for a lesser example).  This is a woman you can believe became successful even with her alcohol issues, and Hayward plays her as a real person.

The rest of the cast, and the rest of the film after her spiral, are a mess.  Bowman is severely out of his element trying to play dramatic, and Eddie Albert, usually so full of life and pizzazz, is relegated to such a background role that you aren't sure what the point of the character is except to serve as a scene partner for Angie and Ken's frustrated complaints.  The film ends on such a peach blossom of a note (Hayward, after nearly burning her daughter alive and being in bandages from the opening scene, is told that her face will completely heal, and that her daughter and home life will be fine).  I know it's the 1940's, but are we really going to buy that the issues just end there?  I know this is something I'm going to have to get over as I immerse myself more fully into the Golden Age and the code, but this film loses massive realism points as a result.

The film received a nomination for Original Story (someone, someday needs to explain to me exactly what the point of this category is, and how it differs from Original Screenplay), and if you're noticing a particular wryness in the dialogue ("I just remembered I have an appointment with a headache"), it's because legendary wit Dorothy Parker was one of the nominated writers behind this film.  However, the plot is so melodramatic and the writing suffers whenever it's not being uttered by Hayward or Hunt that I don't hold out much hope of it scoring well in the OVP, and I've graded it as such.

Hayward, on the other hand, is in a good position in one of the weakest Best Actress fields ever put together for the Oscars.  Once you get over her striking resemblance to Vivien Leigh, you see that this is a woman with extreme dramatic chops in front of the camera; all the melodramatic weighings-down of the plot cannot stifle the way that she yearns for her daughter, her husband, and the way she can capture unrest so well on screen.  Granted, there are times when she goes to the rafters for no reason (look at the way she flails while saving her daughter, or the way that she repeats the same "I'm drunk" facial expression over and over again), but there's some great moments to hang onto in this performance, in a year that featured Deborah Kerr, Rosalind Russell, Loretta Young, and Dorothy McGuire in roles in which none are highly celebrated.

And what about you-have you seen Smash-Up?  What are your thoughts on Hollywood's progressive views on alcoholism?  And where does Susan Hayward rank on your 1947 Best Actress ballot?