GIRLS TOWN 1959

 “There’s no such thing as a bad girl.” – Mother Veronica, head nun and CEO of Girls Town

Well, happily for me and producers of low-budget “girls reform school” exploitation flicks, the above is not altogether true. 

When I was growing up, late-night and weekend afternoon TV overflowed with 1950s juvenile delinquency movies (“black-&-white-shoe pictures” as they were known in our house, in reference to the two-tone saddle oxfords favored by bobbysoxers of the time). With their jazz/bop musical scores, sound-alike titles, and interchangeable casts of superannuated teenagers; these films were near-identical in their faux, anti-social emphasis—faux because no matter how extreme the civic insubordination, by fade-out you could be sure yet another blow had been struck for conformity and middle-class conservativism—and preoccupation with drag racing, leather jackets, tight sweaters, rock & roll, switchblade skirmishes, and beat generation slang.

Mainstream movies only occasionally touched on the phenomenon of 1950s youth culture. It was a time when population (the sheer number of teenagers), rock & roll music (anarchy with a beat), autonomy (car culture), and economic independence (postwar prosperity), all converged into a marketable and exploitable social force that Hollywood couldn't ignore.

In those rare instances when mainstream films paid attention to teen culture at all (1956s The Girl Can’t Help It, for example), young people and their distractions were either satirized or held in derision. Most films about teenagers were made with the adult gaze in mind. Only the Drive-In market (independent B-movies and exploitation films) made movies specifically FOR the teenage market that were intended to actually celebrate the teenage revolution. 

Ain't No Party Like A Girls Town Party

But even these films made middle-of-the-road concessions to propriety. Almost as a public service, these films took it upon themselves to prove that the national surge in juvenile delinquency was merely due to a few bad apples, and that outside of the need to occasionally blow off a little steam (growing up in the shadow of the Bomb and the Cold War was stressful, man), American teenagers were basically good, decent kids who wanted the same things their parent's wanted out of life.

The success of Marlon Brando’s The Wild One (1953) and Blackboard Jungle (1955) launched a spate of male-centric juvenile delinquent knockoffs, but movies about gangs of lawless teenage boys have been around since at least 1938 -- the year Spencer Tracy sought to prove to Mickey Rooney “There’s no such thing as a bad boy” in Boys Town. Far more interesting were those movies about girl gangs and female reprobates. A teen knockoff of the '40s Women's Prison picture, these films were not only a lot more fun, but given the narrow image of womanhood promoted in movies at the time (girlfriends, mothers, housewives, or objectified objects of the male gaze), the emergence of the tough-talking, no-nonsense gangster girl: choosing to live life on their own terms—flouting both authority and social mores—looked to me to be the only social archetype to genuinely embody the characteristics of the true rebel.
As I was raised in a household with one television set and four sisters, all of whom reveled in the feminist subtext of these low-rent opuses, I saw a great many women in prison/reform school girl flicks growing up. One of my enduring favorites is Girls Town.

Mamie Van Doren as Silver Morgan

Paul Anka as Jimmy Parlow

Margaret Hayes as Mother Veronica

Gigi Perreau as Serafina Garcia

Mel Torme as Fred Alger

Elinor Donahue as Mary Lee Morgan

After being falsely accused of the accidental death of a former boyfriend (a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him appearance by Harold Lloyd Jr.), overdeveloped and underachieving high school senior Silver Morgan (the name a gender-switch tip of the hat to Mickey Rooney’s Whitey March), a peroxide punkette with attitude to spare, is sent to Girls Town, a youth correctional facility run by stern but tender-hearted nuns.

Silver, precariously balancing a mountain of platinum hair and prodigious curves on a pair of high-heeled, open-toed mules, is a gum-popping, slang-spewing hellcat who doesn’t take well to authority figures or being told what to do. Although she resists rehabilitation at every turn and frequently butts heads with the nuns and several of the other, surprisingly compliant, Girls Town detainees; we all know that, at heart,  Silver is more a hard-luck case and victim of circumstance than a genuinely "bad" girl. 

Hulking, Big Ethel-ish Peggy Moffitt and B-movie queen Gloria Talbott play Flo and Vida,
the inseparable pair who maintain Girls Town order

Personally, I’d have been perfectly content were the film to consist solely of scenes devoted to Silver cooling her well-shaped heels at Girls Town, mouthing off to any and all, showering suggestively, getting into cat-fights, and instigating confrontations with the nuns (a la Hayley Mills in The Trouble With Angels). But the makers of Girls Town all-too-frequently shift the spotlight from Mamie van Doren (never a good idea) to follow through on a couple of subplots. 

Subplot #1 has Silver’s restless 15-year-old sister Mary Lee (Father Knows Best’s Elinor Donahue, decked out in a blond wig, tight sweater, and behaving in a very un-“Princess”-like fashion) blackmailed and potentially shipped off to Tijuana for her part in and knowledge of the real circumstances surrounding the death of Silver’s ex. Preposterously, these threats come from “The Velvet Fog” himself, diminutive, elder hot rod gang member Mel Tormé (whose character, despite looking well into his 30s, lives in fear of his father taking his car away).

Carrying on in the Family Tradition (click on photo to enlarge)
Although difficult to make out, that's Harold Lloyd Jr on the left clinging to a mountain cliffside in a pose recalling the iconic skyscraper sequence from his father's 1923 silent film Safety Last!

The other subplot—superfluous, but by far the most campily entertaining of the two— features another crooner, Paul Anka, as pop star Jimmy Parlow, upon whom Serafina, a lonely Girls Town orphan, is delusionally fixated. Teen sensation Paul Anka makes his film debut in Girls Town, singing almost as many songs as Olivia Newton-John did during the finale of Xanadu, and serving in practically the same magical capacity in this film’s plot. Indeed, Anka’s character swoops in to save the day so often, one wonders where he finds time to cut one of his many, sound-alike, loneliness-themed records.

Popular singing group The Platters make an appearance in a sequence set in a smart supper club (to which Silver wears the most laughably inappropriate outfit imaginable). The Platters was my father's favorite singing group so I practically grew up on their smooth sound. The group was known for its frequent changes of personnel, so perhaps that's why the face of the lead singer (the disembodied hand to the right)  is never shown

Meanwhile, as Silver manages to sneak in a date with a 36-year-old delivery boy (bandleader Ray Anthony, Van Doren’s husband at the time), Girls Town shoehorns nepotistic “guest star” appearances by: Harold Lloyd Jr, Charlie Chaplin Jr, Jim Mitchum (eldest son of Robert), Cathy Crosby (Bing’s niece), and pseudo-star cameos by the likes of Dick “Daddy-O” Contino, Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, and martial arts pioneer, Bruce Tegner.

In addition to all this, time is set aside for sexual assault, a potential suicide, human trafficking, social commentary, and the standard juvenile delinquent movie staples consisting of:

Make-Out Sessions

Cat Fights

Drag Races

Remarkably, all of these labyrinthine plot entanglements wind up being neatly resolved and expeditiously dispensed with by fade-out. Silver, while still maintaining her ostentatiously lewd clothing sense, learns respect for authority and finds religious redemption (of sorts) after Jimmy subjects her to a grueling rendition of “Ave Maria.” Mary Lee is saved from an involuntary run for the border, and lonely Serafina gives up stalking Canadian pop singers with hero complexes and becomes a Fangirl for Jesus. By all appearances, Girls Town ends with the scourge of teenage delinquency well and soundly vanquished.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

When I was a kid, afterschool TV consisted of reruns of programs like The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, and Leave it to Beaver. Although I enjoyed them all, each suffered from what felt like an unrelenting, almost propagandistic endorsement of a kind of bland suburban conformity so artificial it seemed beamed in from another planet. The one welcome deviation from this plastic norm was Leave it to Beaver’s Eddie Haskell, a refreshingly candid, wise-guy anarchist whose appearance on the show was practically subversive in its ability to make the program's promoted standards of middle-class “good citizenship” look absurd. 

All Revved Up
Fred corrals Mary Lee into taking part in a drag race. Jim Mitchum stands looking into the camera center frame in the dark clothing and glasses, Charles Chaplin Jr stands with his arms folded, and that's accordion maestro Dick Contino dressed like Tom Slick. 

It's that quality of defiance of the norm that I most love in ‘50s juvenile delinquency movies, and Girls Town is one of the most enjoyable of the lot. Lighter in approach than the social commentary JD movies like The Cool and the Crazy or High School Hellcats, Girls Town’s inconsequentiality (it exists primarily to showcase Van Doren’s assets and Anka’s music) makes it easy to be enjoyed purely as a camp timepiece.

I have no idea what teenagers thought of the film at the time, but it’s a laugh-riot from start to finish now. Even without the uproarious running commentary provided by the Mystery Science Theater 3000 team in the edited, most readily-available version of the film.

Vida & Flo share a secret glance (how did this get past the censors?) as Jimmy Parlow 
croons a love song to the wayward girls of Girls Town

William Claxton 1964

In a movie full of actors on the cusp of transition (Paul Anka not long after underwent a nose job, and Mamie Van Doren split from husband Ray Anthony the following year), none is as startling as that of 18-year-old Peggy Moffitt. Cast as Flo, a girl sent to Girls Town because she was so unattractive she stole money to pay for cosmetics and fancy hairdos, Moffitt would go on—as muse and model to futuristic fashion designer Rudi Gernreich—to become one of the most famous and iconic faces of the '60s.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Silver?
Mother Veronica (Margaret Hayes, the harassed teacher in Blackboard Jungle) and Sister Grace (gossip columnist and F. Scott Fitzgerald mistress Sheilah Graham) discuss the pros and cons of giving Silver Morgan a "poke in the kisser."

PERFORMANCES

As one of the platinum blonde 3-Ms of the ‘50s (Monroe, Mansfield, and Mamie) Mamie Van Doren carved out a niche for herself as the bad girl of B-movies. I haven’t seen enough of her films to access her talent as an actress (she seems a good light comedienne), but I can tell you that in Girls Town she has a vivacity and presence that makes it difficult to watch anyone else when she’s onscreen. The performance Van Doren gives may not be considered "good" by any objective standard, and though neither she nor any of the other major players are believable as teenagers, her prototypically '50s charm and somewhat hard edge makes her ideally suited for the material. Girls Town drops several degrees Fahrenheit whenever the story veers away from her.

Infinitely more convincing as a tough-cookie troublemaker than Ann-Margret was in Kitten With a Whip, Van Doren possesses a tongue-in-cheek sexiness and sass that suggests Mae West more than Monroe. 

Silver (certainly one of the screen's most energetic listeners) steps out with
superannuated delivery boy/Private Investigator Dick Culdane (Ray Anthony)

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
At least half of the Girls Town screenplay is devoted to bop talk and slang. I have no idea if the dialect is authentic or exaggerated, I just know that it makes for a very quotable movie.

All quotes attributable to Silver Morgan:

"You’ve gotta let me out of here! There’s nobody to take care of her but Aunt Scrooge...and she’s cracked!"

"Aw, Don’t flip your wig… I got your signal"

“Big deal. King Groovy comes to Dungeonsville to make with a song for po’ little ol’ us. What do you want me to do, kiss your foot?”

"Hey, who are them apples, the Junior WACs?"

"Go flap your plates!"

“I got tired of you cats with the fast cars and slow heads. You give me a pain in the ears”

“Ok if I use the Alexander Graham?”

"Stop draggin’ your axel!"

"What’s my crime, dad? For not having as much moola as this jerk? Or my old lady wasn’t in the social register?"

“You’re in queersville, man. You’ve flipped.”

"Go bingle your bongle!"

Lovely Cathy Crosby (whose character isn't even given a name) pops up out of nowhere to serenade The Dragons - rival hot rod gang to The Jaguars - at a "crazy weenie roast" with the Paul Anka composition "I Love You" only to disappear, never to be seen again

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

If the male juvenile delinquent movies of the ‘50s owed more than a passing nod to the Warner Bros. gangster films of the ’30s, then the exploitation movie bad girls of the era were simply a gum-popping, teenage iteration of the ‘40s film noir femme fatale. What gives this particular incarnation its ginger and snap is the percussive beat of rock and roll, the restless hum of Youth Culture, and its unexpectedly (and perhaps unintentionally) progressive female lead. Girls Town, free of its half-hearted social commentary, is a great deal of mindless fun. A shining specimen of time capsule camp. Mamie Van Doren rocks!

BONUS MATERIAL 

In a movie whose 90-min. running time is excessively padded out with musical numbers which somehow manage to be both brief and interminable, not affording the well-padded Mamie van Doren a solo feels like a particularly egregious omission. We do get to hear Miss Van Doren sing (in that flat, rocker-chick style later adopted by Debbie Harry of Blondie) a verse of the film's theme song during the opening credits, but as everyone knows, as a vocalist, Van Doren is strictly a visual act.

Apparently '50s censors thought so too, for it seems Anka penned a swingin' rock and roll ditty for Van Doren that was shot and later cut from the film for being too suggestive. Not the lyrics, the setting: Silver Morgan sings the song "Hey Mama" while wriggling around in the shower as she prepares for her date with the 36-year-old delivery boy.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, here's that heretofore unseen Mamie Van Doren number in all its glory. "Hey, Mama" has the same melody as the film's terrific theme song and is as catchy as hell. And as you might expect from Miss Van Doren, her performance of the song is nothing short of crazy, cool, and fantabulous!

Not a success during its initial release, when Girls Town was re-released in 1964, its dated, Drive-In-friendly title was changed to the bland and nondescript The Innocent and the Damned 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2016

HOT SPELL 1958

What would Hollywood do without the South as the all-purpose, go-to metaphor for all things hot, steamy, and neurotic during the sexually and emotionally repressed America of the 1950s?Hollywood, pandering to post-war propaganda intended to reassure the nation of a return to prosperity and stability, consistently promoted the image of the Midwest and middle-class suburbs as exemplars of familial “normalcy.” To this end, metropolitan cities were represented as cold and impersonal sin-bins, rife with crime and corruption; while the South – where mossy oak trees and people’s accents drooped in languid surrender to the oppressive heat – was a veritable pressure cooker of stifled passions. No wonder the Southern Gothic (a film genre dear to my heart) came to embody the existential frustration, spiritual discontent, and sexual dissatisfaction of an entire nation.

Between 1958 and 1959, Hollywood released no fewer than six southern-fried movie melodramas: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Long Hot Summer, God’s Little Acre, Suddenly Last Summer, The Sound and the Fury, and the focus of this essay, author Lonnie Coleman’s (Beulah Land) little-known but no-less overheated domestic drama, Hot Spell. 

Hot Spell is based on Coleman’s unproduced 1951 play Next of Kin (which was subsequently turned into a novel when the film was released). It's directed by Daniel Mann (Come Back, Little Sheba) from a screenplay by James Poe (Summer & Smoke, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). Considering its cast and pedigree, I’m surprised that I hadn’t heard of this film, let alone seen it, until relatively recently. 

Hot Spell’s theatrical roots are manifest in the size of its cast (it’s basically a four-character story), the talkiness of its script, and the simplicity of its plot. In the sweltering heat of the eternal summer that is the mainstay of all good Southern Gothics (where a glass of sweet tea is never far from reach), long-suppressed tensions threaten to rupture the gossamer-thin fabric of delusion holding a small New Orleans family together. As frustrations rise to the surface, carefully constructed illusions begin to crack and blister like paint in the scorching sun.

Shirley Booth as Alma Duval

Anthony Quinn as John Henry "Jack" Duval

Shirley MacLaine as Virginia Duval

Earl Holliman as John Henry "Buddy" Duval, Jr.

Clint Kimbrough as Billy Duval

When the film opens, matronly housewife Alma Duval (Booth) is all aflutter over the 45^th birthday party she’s planning for husband Jack (Quinn); a seductively "wild" Cajun whose restless nature she's found – after 25 years of marriage – impossible to fully domesticate. As we observe her nervous attempts to orchestrate (manipulate?) every conceivable variable to assure a favorable outcome for her efforts, Alma’s fervent preparations betray an air of desperation more than celebration.

Armed with the birthday presents she herself purchased for her adult children to give to their father, Alma visits each at their workplace, dispensing behavioral directives and cheery dialogue prompts with every pre-wrapped gift. Perhaps too metaphorically (not for a fan of heavy-handed '50s Freudianism like myself), each child embodies contrasting, narratively-pertinent character traits, and have jobs reflective of their personalities.

Eldest son Buddy (Holliman), all self-seriousness and ambition, works at the family employment agency. Recently out of the army, Buddy is headstrong and restless to make a way for himself in the world. Daddy’s-girl and middle-child Virginia (MacLaine), works at the local 5¢ &10¢ and spends her time lost in fanciful daydreams about her new summer suitor, a pragmatic pre-med student (Warren Stevens). Surrounded all day by valentines, flowers, and perfumes, Virginia is a dreamy romantic. Youngest son, Billy (Kimbrough), is a bookish, sensitive type (coded: gay) who works in a library, and too-keenly feels the tension behind all that remains unspoken in the Duval household. His survival tactic is to escape; first into books, then by going so far as to enlist in the Air Force.

Alma, who refuses to see her offspring as anything but children, charges into these workplace sanctuaries, as heedless of their discomfort as their in-vain efforts to dissuade her from making a big deal out of an event they all know their vain father hardly looks upon as cause for celebration (no one, least of all Jack himself, even remembers the birthday).  It’s Alma’s wish (passive-aggressive insistence, actually) that everyone live the same lie she clings to: to ignore the open-secret of Jack’s mid-life crisis affair with a woman young enough to be his daughter, and just carry on as  if they are still (if indeed they ever were) one big, happy family.

An absorbing drama that benefits significantly from the top-notch performances of its cast, Hot Spell, with its over-familiar central conflict, falls prey to a fate similar to that which befell The Stripper (1963), the screen adaptation of William Inge’s A Loss of Roses; which is to say Hot Spell, in lacking a certain psychological profundity and depth of characterization, feels more like a Playhouse 90 television production than a feature film. But in spite of much of it feeling as though it were culled from earlier, similar sources (most in the Shirley Booth oeuvre) Hot Spell does provide a fairly moving examination of the what the inexorable passing of time portends to a family fighting hard to evade the inevitabilities of growing up, growing older, and growing apart.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

The fact that I come from a large Catholic family that never spoke about our emotions (until the 70s when my mother went through EST, after which we spoke of little else) is perhaps the main reasons I love movies like Hot Spell. Call it fantasy projection, but domestic dramas wherein suppressed hostilities and resentments erupt into biliously confrontational exchanges that ultimately prove to be liberatingly cathartic are a favorite of mine. Double if it takes place in the South of the '50s and '60s.

While no one in Hot Spell adopts a Southern accent, and it doesn’t take place in Kansas, the film nevertheless has the stamp of Tennessee Williams and William Inge all over it. 

The Two Shirleys
MacLaine and Booth appeared in The Matchmaker this same year

As is the custom of the genre, Hot Spell is centered around a social event. An event or occasion necessitating the close-knit interaction of characters (usually under circumstances forcing a display of false emotion or sentiment). Hot Spell’s pivotal birthday party, the catalyst for the film’s domestic upheaval, is largely ironic in function, being that a celebration of growing older is particularly ill-suited for Jack and Alma Duval; a couple deeply invested in living in the past.

In a deluded effort to reclaim his lost, wild youth, Jack imbues a thoroughly common extramarital physical attraction with all the romantic gravitas of true love reborn. Alma, no less delusional, lives in an aspic world frozen in time. Feeling acutely the impending loss of her family, Alma pins all her hopes on a longed-for return to the town of New Paris – a state of mind as much as geographical location – idealized in her memory as the place where everyone was happiest.

Come Back, Little New Paris

Caught in the middle: the children (their main offense being their failure to remain so), nurtured as infants to fill a void, weaned in adulthood to be the guardians of their parent’s illusions. There’s more than enough culpability, regret, and incriminations to go around as the Duvals of New Orleans endeavor to weather their personal hot spell of discontent.

Running at a brisk 86 minutes, Hot Spell may be Southern Gothic-lite, but it’s like a Greatest Hits collection of all I hold near about that obsolete film genre.  

Running Wild
Anthony Quinn was already a two-time Oscar winner when he appeared in Hot Spell.
Here with actress Valerie Allen as Ruby, Quinn's restless character longs for a new life in
Florida, "Land of Eternal Youth"

PERFORMANCES

For those keeping score, this was Booth’s second onscreen swipe at playing a dowdy, once-beautiful housewife delusionally fixated on the past. Perhaps it was an intentional move on Booth’s part to revisit a character almost identical to the one she played in 1952s Come Back, Little Sheba (and won an Oscar for), but the effect created is déjà vu to distraction.

Shirley Booth is a remarkable actress and her performance here ranks among her best. She IS the entire film, as far as I’m concerned, and the nuances of vulnerability she brings to the role (along with a hint of the subtle manipulative strength unique to the very weak) is a tour de force. She single-handedly keeps the film from sinking into a mire of clichés. But I’d be lying if I said that much of it feels like I’d seen it all before. It’s like later career Maggie Smith; she’ always excellent, but she’s always the same. 

Oscar-winner Eileen Heckart (The Bad Seed) steals every scene as Alma's best friend, Fan. The hilarious sequence where she gives Alma lessons in being a Modern Woman is a worth-the-price-of-admission classic.

Fan: "Well what's he gonna say the first time you fish out a cigarette and light up?"
Alma; "He's gonna say, 'Alma, have you gone crazy?'"
Fan: "Yeah, well when he does you just take a drag on the cigarette, blow the smoke in his face and say, 'What's it to ya, lover?'"

1958 was a banner year for Shirley MacLaine, appearing in Hot Spell, Some Came Running (for which she won an Oscar nomination), and the delightful The Matchmaker. As the lovesick daughter, MacLaine isn’t called upon to do anything here that Elinor Donahue didn’t do on TV every week in Father Knows Best, but her easygoing, natural appeal is a major asset to a film as dramatically stagy as Hot Spell. 

Things heat up between Virginia and Wyatt (Warren Stevens) 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that the same breast-fixated/blonde bombshell era that produced Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, also found room to appreciate the matronly charms of actresses like Shirley Booth and Geraldine Page. These actresses may not have been the pin-up type, but they played middle-aged women who were still afforded passions, sex drives, and depth. While most of Hollywood was falling over itself looking for the next fetishized male fantasy sex symbol, gay writers like Inge, Williams, and Coleman were creating dimensional roles for real women. 

The often unglamorous women Shirley Booth portrayed were nevertheless
granted a sexuality and impassioned emotional life

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Wasn’t it Margo Channing who said, “I detest cheap sentiment”? Well, normally I do, too, but something about Hot Spell always gets the waterworks going come fade-out. That something is Shirley Booth and the breadth of emotions she brings to her almost stock character. It’s a memorable (albeit familiar) performance in a movie that’s far more enjoyable than it should be. A credit to the cast, to be sure.

I don’t know if Hot Spell is available on DVD yet, but it crops up on TCM from time to time and is definitely worth a watch. It’s not likely to make anyone forget Come Back Little Sheba or invite comparisons to O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, but it is a fine example of a once-popular dramatic genre, that (based on recent posts for The Stripper, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean) I can’t seem to get enough of. 

"I guess the hot spell's over."

BONUS MATERIAL

 Hot Spell: Margaret Whiting sings this promotional song for the film. Written by Burt Bacharach /Mack David.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

BLACK WIDOW 1954

Today to get the public to attend a picture show,

It’s not enough to advertise a famous star they know.

If you want to get the crowds to come around...

You’ve got to have Glorious Technicolor,

Breathtaking CinemaScope,

And Stereophonic Sound.

Cole Porter -1955 Broadway musical "Silk Stockings"

“The first big murder-mystery in CinemaScope!” “The first crime-of-passion story in CinemaScope!" Thus screamed the poster and newspaper ads heralding the 1954 release of 20th Century-Fox’s all-star, all-color, widescreen film noir, Black Widow. Well, seeing as I somehow managed to never even hear of this movie until just last year, I’m going to have to take them at their word that Black Widow represents a series of "firsts" in the annals of CinemaScope. What I can attest to is that by combining the backstage bitchery of All About Eve (1950) with the murder-mystery-told-in-flashback structure of Laura (1944), and burnishing it all to a garish, high-gloss color palette reminiscent of How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), Black Widow succeeds in being a pleasingly campy goulash of disparate genre tropes and style conventions in search of a unifying tone.

Ginger Rogers as overbearing diva of the New York stage Carlotta Marin

Van Heflin as slow-witted theatrical producer Peter Denver

Gene Tierney as patrician stage star Iris Denver

George Raft as the Beau Brummel of the NYPD, Detective Lt. C.A. Bruce

Peggy Ann Garner as  Southern-fried "purpose girl" Nancy Ordway

Reginald Gardiner as lapdog househusband Brian Mullen

Given the big push by 20th Century-Fox in order to compete with the escalating popularity of television, CinemaScope, like today’s mania for 3-D (that ship has struck dry-dock by now, hasn't it?), is a technological advancement devised to enhance the moviegoing experience that doesn't necessarily translate to enhancing the quality of the film itself. In its time CinemaScope was a spectacle-based invention which proved ideal for epics (The Robe – 1953), musicals (There's  No Business Like Show Business – 1954), and scenic adventure films (Beneath the 12-Mile Reef – 1953). Black Widow, a murder mystery based on the novel Fatal Woman by Hugh Wheeler (of A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd fame) was an early experiment by Fox to try out its widescreen process (with blistering color by Deluxe) on a less visual, more narrative-driven genre.

Set in the glamorous world of the New York theater (although no one in the film ever sets foot on a stage), Black Widow feels more like Americanized Agatha Christie than full-blown noir. It throws together a colorful assortment of cliché Broadway luminaries, bigwigs, hangers-on, and bohemian Greenwich Village types, then stands back as this close-knit group of professional pretenders grows progressively unraveled by the inconvenient intrusion of a murder into their cloistered enclave. 

Virginia Leith as Claire Amberly
Although I always associate Leith with Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying (1956), fans of MST3K will recognize Leith as the disembodied talking head in 1962s The Brain that Wouldn't Die

While Black Widow is built around the noir staple of an innocent person having their life spiral out of control due to being falsely accused of a crime, missing-in-action is the hard-boiled dialogue and requisite climate of fatalism necessary to make this overlit whodunit feel like the real thing. Not helping matters is the fact that time which would have been better spent fleshing out character motivations and plot twists is given over to draggy amateur sleuthing that leans heavily on coincidence and relies too often on slow-witted police work.

Skip Homeier as John Amberly

Plot: Naive to the point of thick-headed Broadway producer Peter Denver (Heflin) befriends guileless 20-year-old wannabe writer Nancy Ordway (Garner) while his stage star wife (Tierney) is out of town. Although their friendship is platonic nature, it nevertheless raises the manicured eyebrows of Denver's neighbor, Great Lady of the Stage and all-around busybody Carlotta Marin (Rogers), despite the demurred assertions of her cowed husband, Brian (Gardiner), Denver's best pal.

At the periphery of this innocent but potentially combustible situation are: well-heeled sister and brother, Claire and John Amberly (Virginia Leith and Skip Homeier)--she a slumming Greenwich Village artist, he a law student; Nancy’s uncle Gordon (Otto Kruger), a low-tier stage actor; Anne (Hilda Simms), Nancy's sharp-as-a-tack co-worker; Lucia Colletti (Cathleen Nesbitt), the Denver's loose-lipped maid; and, once things take a nasty turn, Lt. Bruce (Raft), the steel-eyed, near-immobile detective.

Otto Kruger as Gordon Ling

The mystery at the core of Black Widow is handled fairly effectively, what with some throw-us-off-the-scent casting and a perhaps unintended lightness of touch helping to generate a few genuinely unexpected twists along the way. Also working in the film's favor is how the duplicitous and ruthless world of show business turns out to be a mystery-friendly environment rife with the potential for homicide.
And I certainly can't find fault with the production itself, it being a veritable cavalcade of stagy sets, overdone fashions, and rife with what was apparently a '50s hair vogue: The poodle cut - those unflatteringly short perms resembling gold-hued bathing caps made of tense, lambswool curls.

But in the end, neither the dark promise of the film's title, nor the camp excesses suggested by its gaudy visuals are ever realized in sufficient force to make Black Widow more than a handsomely mounted, slightly overdressed crime thriller.

Cathleen Nesbitt as Lucia Colletti

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

It isn't common for a film’s greatest strengths to be found in its weaknesses, but Black Widow is frequently at its most persuasive when serving up a brand of moviemaking so glossily old-fashioned, its patently theatrical artificiality begins to take on the characteristic of something resembling a style.

From the outset, Black Widow embarks on a narrative course endorsing a mode of dress (the crisp, stiff clothes look like costumes), setting (95% soundstage, 5% NYC locations), and performance (all indication, little believable emotion), all supporting the theory of a concentrated effort on the film’s part to bear as little resemblance to real life as possible.
There's an alien "otherness" to the look of the film created by the lighting and composition requirements of the CinemaScope process. A process that turns New York into a sterile and oddly spacious environment (a basement Greenwich Village coffeehouse looks to be roughly the size of an airplane hangar) which puts it at direct odds with the kind of shadowy claustrophobia one associates with film noir.

The sort of natural, laid-back blocking CinemaScope made necessary

I sound like I'm complaining, but honestly (and this may be mere perversion on my part) I found the discordant visual tone to actually work to Black Widow’s advantage. Based on its initial scenes and not knowing anything about the film before I saw it, I thought Black Widow was going to be a light romantic drama. One of those '50s “woman’s pictures” combining elements of All About Eve (Tallulah Bankhead was first approached for the Ginger Rogers role), The Moon is Blue (that film’s star, Maggie McNamara, was first choice for the Peggy Ann Garner role), or a continuation of Rogers’ own Forever Female (1953) - another age-centric rivalry set in the world of theater.

That these posh surroundings, pretty people, and harmlessly waggish conversations are setting the stage for a murder mystery took me totally by surprise. And so it remained throughout: Black Widow's key lit, musical comedy sheen works at such amusing variance with what one has come to expect from noirish suspense thrillers that it inadvertently serves as a device to keep the audience off balance.

Mabel Albertson (left), known to scores of classic TV fans as the smothering mother figure on Bewitched, That Girl, and The Andy Griffith Show, gets a chance to let her hair down (and, by the looks of it, her bosom) as Sylvia, the tough-broad proprietress of a Greenwich Village hangout

PERFORMANCES

Beyond the musicals she made with Fred Astaire, I’m not enough of a fan of top-billed Ginger Rogers to know if the divinely catty character she plays in Black Widow is as much a departure from type as it seems. She has always displayed a charming brassiness in films like Stage Door and Golddiggers of 1933, so perhaps this isn't that much of a stretch, but with Van Heflin’s one-note performance and the obvious fragility of Gene Tierney (the actress was in the early throes of a mental breakdown during filming), Ginger Rogers' flamboyant energy is a godsend. Plus, she gets all the best lines.

In a role that amounts to little more than a bit part, Broadway actress Hilda Simms
gives the most natural, convincing performance in the entire film

For former child star Peggy Ann Garner (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), Black Widow was a a bid for adult legitimacy on par with Patty Duke's Valley of the Dolls...and it proved to  be just about as successful. Given grief by critics at the time for not being a believable "type," I think she succeeds in the role chiefly for that reason. Garner's Nancy Ordway is a far more convincing babe-in-the-woods on the make than, say, Anne Baxter's brazenly transparent Eve Harrington in All About Eve.

Pretty much the entire arc of Van Heflin's character

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

To convey the grand style of the New York theater folk at the center of Black Widow, 20^th Century-Fox designer William Travilla whips up a drag queen's wet dream of ostentatious outfits for Ginger Rogers to parade around in. Happily, the longtime dancer is physically up to the task.

Carlotta - "To put the kindest face possible on it, the girl was a little horror. A transparent, syrupy little phony with about as much to offer a man as 'cuckoo the bird girl.' Not even Peter with all of his radiant innocence about women could have been stirred for one instant by that dingy little creep."

Peter - "Lottie, the girl is dead!"

Carlotta - "I know...and that’s precisely why I refuse to speak harshly of her!"

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

For a movie written, produced, and directed by a single individual (Nunnally Johnson of How to Marry a Millionaire, The Grapes of Wrath, The World of Henry Orient, etc.) Black Widow distinguishes itself by being almost completely lacking in distinction. Polished, well-made, and not nearly as vulgar as one might hope given the subject matter, Black Widow looks and feels like Hollywood product, circa 1954, that could have been directed by any number of studio contract professionals.

The tall, lanky fellow holding his hat is future TV producer Aaron Spelling.
Gene Tierney's health problems while making Black Widow necessitated her being seated in virtually all of her scenes  

And perhaps that's why, for all its slick competence, Black Widow never coalesces into more than just a pleasantly diverting way to  spend 95 minutes. A crime-of-passion movie without passion is a cold affair indeed, and Black Widow, while lovely to look at and fun in a detached sort of way (imagine absent-mindedly playing a game of "Clue") is ultimately most rewarding as a time-capsule view of Hollywood in its final years before it was forced to change in the mid-1960s.

Never intended to break new ground, Black Widow - a 40s noir retrofitted with color and CinemaScope - is but an example of 1950s Hollywood trying to hold onto its audience by giving them brighter and shinier versions of what they've always given them. Sorta like today today's digital, HD, CGI, 3-D opuses.

The black widow, deadliest of all spiders, earned its dark title through its deplorable practice of devouring its mate. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson