MIDNIGHT LACE 1960

The "woman-in-peril" melodrama is a popular subgenre of film that fell neatly under the banner of the "woman’s picture” of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Early films in this mold (Rebecca - 1940, Suspicion - 1941, Gaslight -1944) combined aspects of the horror film, film noir, and the romance gothic in suspense narratives with female protagonists bedeviled by dashing and desirable men who, under normal circumstance, would be considered the romantic ideal.
In the postwar years, when Hollywood took to aggressively reinforcing more traditional gender roles, these sophisticated romantic dramas became decidedly more domestic in focus (Loretta Young in 1951s Cause for Alarm, Doris Day in 1956's Julie - the original "The stewardess is flying the plane!" thriller), and more conspicuously tailored to appeal to a female audience.

The relative dowdiness of these black & white suburban suspense thrillers eventually gave way to the tonier, full-color escapism of a the “posh women in peril” subgenre. Here, the aproned housewife of yore was replaced by the moneyed lady of leisure, therein offering the added diversions of fashion show and travelogue to the mix as these well-turned-out heroines were photogenically menaced in delectably plush surroundings. To this latter category belongs producer Ross Hunter’s Midnight Lace, an appealingly glossy, routinely effective, thoroughly predictable woman-in-peril melodrama graced by a persuasively committed performance by Doris Day.

The Victim:

Doris Day as Katherine "Kit" Preston
 Overdressed + Overactive imagination = Patronized 24/7

The Suspects:

Rex Harrison as Anthony Preston
Neglectful husband with one too many last-minute "business" emergencies

Myrna Loy as Aunt Bea Coleman
Oversolicitous matron with a penchant for comic headwear

John Gavin as Brian Younger
Phone-happy, shell-shocked veteran with appalling British accent 

Roddy McDowall as Malcolm Stanley
A Gen-X prototype. The entitled, ne'er-do-well son of the Preston's Dickensesque housemaid.

Natasha Parry as Peggy
Smartly-dressed neighbor with an absentee husband and a too-canny talent for
always being at the right place at the right time

Herbert Marshall as Charles Manning
Avid gambler & worrywart possessed of the singular gift of looking guilty absolutely all of the time 

Anthony Dawson as Roy
Silent skulker who might as well wear sandwich board reading "Suspicious Character" 
A Dial M for Murder (1954) alumnus

John Williams as Inspector Byrnes
Literally phoning in his identical performance from Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder (1954) 

Midnight Lace is the very last of Doris Day's regrettably infrequent forays into drama (a gifted and versatile dramatic actress, Day claimed to have put herself so emotionally through the wringer for this film that she vowed thereafter to appear in comedies. A woman of her word, Day saw of the '60s in a string of comedy films, her sole and final musical outing being in Billy Rose' Jumbo (1962). Midnight Lace, a high-toned hand-wringer about an American heiress in London who can't get anyone to believe she's being terrorized by threatening phone calls from an unseen assailant who's also making sundry attempts on her life, is a suspenser catering shamelessly to the Ladies Home Journal/Women’s Wear Daily crowd. At frequent intervals director David Miller (Sudden Fear -1952) and producer Ross Hunter (Portrait in Black - 1960) find it necessary to pad out events and throw mis-en-scène to the wind in an effort to play up the film's “feminine” distractions:

Thrill at the splendor of the ballet! Featuring excerpts from Giselle, Petrouchka, and Swan Lake! 

Gasp at the divoon frocks and bed jackets designed by wrested-out-of-retirement
"Irene," who earned herself an Oscar nomination for her trouble

Even Don Loper would swoon over the magnitude of  marvy millinery on display!
(Although I don't recall if any are in violet satin lined in fuschsia and purrrrple)

Midnight Lace is the kind of movie you can imagine Lucy and Ethel taking in at a matinee after luncheon at Schrafft’s (with hats!), then talking animatedly about Doris Day’s gowns and the relative “dreaminess” of Rex Harrison and John Gavin as they take the train back to Westport.

Striking a note of violent hysteria even before the credits roll, Midnight Lace wastes no time getting underway, swiftly setting a wobbly foundation of emotional instability for Doris Day’s harried heroine to hurl herself from. As American heiress Katherine Preston, Day plays a newlywed “work widow”: a lonely London expatriate three months married to a British financier (Harrison) whose unforgiving work schedule leaves her with far too much free time. Too much time to roam the unfamiliar city alone; too much time to grapple with the confusing monetary exchange rates; and (as per the plot) too much time to fabricate phantom assailants in an effort to garner the attention of her neglectful husband.

Though the film makes us privy to the fact that she is indeed the target of threatening phone calls and a series of near-fatal mishaps, Kit’s nervous excitability, combined with a septet of vaguely suspicious supporting characters, conspire to create just enough doubt as to whether Mrs. Preston is the victim or the agent of her torment.

When one settles down to watch a film like Midnight Lace—the motion picture equivalent of those paperbacks you buy at drugstores and airport gift shops for the sole purpose of reading poolside or on the beach—certain rules must be applied: you either surrender yourself to its contrivance, artificiality, and slavish adherence to form, or else you’re simply better off watching something else.

In movies like this, you buy into the fact that characters never say anything directly when they can confuse and obfuscate with round-robin statements like, “It was the man on the phone! I saw him! I mean…I didn’t actually see him, but I KNOW it was him!” You allow for characters never alleviating another character's fear by announcing their arrival, letting their presence be known, or merely introducing themselves; no, they must wait until they are inches from the individual before speaking, or else they reach out and grab them on the shoulder before saying a word. You also must accept that all normal, rational responses to unsettling events will be met by the suggestion to “Put it out of your mind,” “Don’t give it another thought,” or the laziest cliché of all, “Get some sleep.”

In order for films like this to work, a ringing phone has to be treated like a summons from the Queen: it simply cannot be ignored. Friends and loved ones know you're being harassed by a phone maniac, so of course they will be placing calls to you at regular intervals.  And it goes without saying that just hanging up on the pervert is never an option. Not when the victim can ask the same question over and over again ("Who IS this?!?") certain that the 12th entreaty will yield a result different from the 7th. 

But the necessity to check your brain at the door doesn’t mean one can’t simultaneously marvel at the manner in which the entire plot of Midnight Lace hinges on and is propelled by the Freudian fear (and subsequent dismissal) of the “hysterical woman,” complete with its psychological tie-in to sexual frustration.

Midnight Lace was adapted by two male screenwriters from the play Matilda Shouted Fire by British playwright Janet Green. Green was co-writer of two of the UK’s most influential “social problem” films: Sapphire- 1959 (racism) and Victim -1961 (homosexuality).

I have no idea how closely the motion picture hews to the original play, but I suspect the entire enterprise would clock in at roughly 23-minutes had it dispensed with the presupposition that women are inherently emotional creatures, strangers to logic, and prone to coming unglued under stress. 

Midnight Lace's overweening patriarchal tone—apparent in the galling level of male condescension Day’s character has to contend with—would all seem rather quaint and easy to shrug off with a “That’s how it was back then,” were it not rooted in a “protect women from themselves” cultural mindset that persists today (Google search: Roomfuls of wizened, Viagra-dependent old farts legislating women’s bodies).

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

In spite of its creaky sexual politics, Midnight Lace is a surprisingly watchable little thriller that shares a lot in common with another of my favorites, Elizabeth Taylor’s sole foray into the suspense thriller genre, 1973s Night Watch. In both films a neglected wife’s claims of being terrorized are met with both suspicion and disbelief by male characters. In each film the women are driven to the brink of hysterical madness, suspected of fabricating an emotional crisis out of a neurotic response to loneliness. The similarities in plot and tone are intriguing, but the more contemporary feminine perspective of Night Watch (another film adapted from a play written by a woman) recognizes and incorporates the sexist tropes of the woman-in-peril genre and subverts them to startling effect.

Like a great many genre films, Midnight Lace hews rather religiously to form, but thanks to its sleek production values and old-fashioned style, manages to entertain even while offering few surprises as it wends its way to its conclusion. A conclusion which took me very much by surprise when I first saw this on late night TV as a kid, but which seems embarrassingly obvious to me now. Midnight Lace was released just a month after Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and as with that film, trailers for Midnight Lace encouraged patrons to see the film from the beginning and not to divulge to friends “the shocking surprise ending!”

Myrna Loy, whose career spanned the silent era through to the 1980s, is a welcome presence 

PERFORMANCES

In the loony disaster film Airport 1975 Karen Black played a stewardess left to fly a commercial jet after the flight crew is injured. The fact that Black played her absurd scenes with the utmost of conviction drew both laughs and criticism at the time, but in a 2009 interview the actress explained that her oft-parodied intensity was a result of having seen the film’s rushes. It seems she noticed the cabin sequences were being played for laughs or soap opera (Midnight Lace’s Myrna Loy is present as a comic dipsomaniac) and none of the characters were reacting to the impending danger of the plane crashing into the Utah mountains. Karen Black’s acting choices for the cockpit scenes came down to “I realized that if I didn’t care that the plane got over the mountain, no one in the audience would.” 

McDowall, Loy, and even Day had little good to say about working with Rex Harrison, his well-documented unpleasantness in this case perhaps attributable to the recent death of wife Kay Kendall

Well, Doris Day pulls off something similar in Midnight Lace. Surrounded by a talented (if decaffeinated) cast giving earnest, stiff-upper-lip performances (Harrison, Parry, Williams) or outright rotten ones (John Gavin), Day being in a near-constant state of distress, panic, terror, and sobbing may come off as shrill to some, but her 100% commitment to the material is the single element providing Midnight Lace with whatever thrill factor it has. In a plot bordering on the preposterous, Day makes the menace believable and her character's emotional disintegration compelling. Doris Day is one of my all-time favorites, and though she's well-respected and beloved by many, has never been given what I think is her due as an actress (WHEN is the Academy going to give her an Honorary Oscar?) 

In Midnight Lace, Doris Day’s natural delivery and grounded, level-headed bearing works miracles with the film’s artificial dialogue and contrived plotting. No matter what histrionics the script requires of her, Day's innate well-adjustedness prevents her character from appearing neurotic or unhinged. Indeed seeing such a healthy, uncomplicated screen persona crumble under pressure give her scenes of torment an unsettling authenticity. No pretty "movie star" screaming here. Day cries, wails, and lets out with guttural sobs that are positively heart-wrenching. The movie itself may be a tad overwrought, but I find nothing lacking in Doris Day's impeccable performance. 

In her memoirs, Doris Day recounts that for this scene she channeled memories of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her first husband. So successful was she at working herself into a state of  near-hysteria, Day actually suffered something of a breakdown and the production had to be briefly shut down. 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Midnight Lace is an old-school Hollywood “movie” movie at its best. If you have a taste for such things, these last-gasp studio-system entries before Hollywood shifted to experimentation and naturalism can offer many amusing diversions. For instance, I'm convinced the film was shot on a soundstage and backlot, it's that artificial-looking, but a few (second-unit?) shots look as though could actually be taking place in London. 

Similarly, for a film of this period, I was impressed with the color photography. At a time when flat, overlit sets were the order of the day, Midnight Lace’s cinematography (Russell Metty, Oscar winner for Spartacus) has a richness and depth that makes marvelous, atmospheric use of shadows and color. It's one of those movies where everybody is always being offered a drink, women sleep in full makeup, and there is no such thing as dressing casually. And of course it’s difficult not to giggle every time a scene is contrived to be filmed in longshot so as to better showcase one of Day’s many lovely, matronly costumes.  

I really think I have to reassess my longstanding indifference to Roddy McDowall. Cropping up on this site in no less than seven films, I'm starting to not only grasp that he was the Kevin Bacon of his time--appearing with practically everyone in Hollywood at one time or another--but I see that what he lacked in versatility, he more than made up for in dependability. He consistently turns in solid (albeit, one-note) performances in one thankless role after another. 

These days I'm not really sure what condition the woman-in-peril film genre is in (my hunch is that TVs Lifetime Network pretty much wore it into the ground), but 1960s Midnight Lace stands as a high-style entry with plenty of retro appeal, and boasts Doris Day giving one of her best dramatic performances. Forget that it was originally targeted to female audiences, this Lace is one size fits all.

BONUS MATERIAL

Midnight Lace's sole Academy Award nomination went to the costume designs by Irene (Lover Come Back). Universal made available to theaters a promotional featurette titled High Style Elegance showcasing Doris Day modeling the many costumes from the film. Along with fashion-centric ads placed in national women's magazines, the featurette was intended to inspire hoards of female theater patrons to stampede their nearest department store and demand it stock the Irene, Inc. line of Women's Wear.

Here Ms. Day models a leopard-print crowd-pleaser that never made it into the finished film. Watch the featurette (German soundtrack) HERE.

For a time in the 1980s, it seemed as though the only "liberated" profession writers could think of for a woman was TV reporter. Here, a year before Morgan Fairchild (Flamingo Road) portrayed a TV reporter terrorized by a stalker in the feature film The Seduction (1982), Dallas's Mary Frances Crosby played a TV reporter terrorized by a stalker in a truly wretched 1981 remake of Midnight Lace. Its plot retooled to dispense with a great deal of the original's patriarchal tone (along with a great deal of the original's coherence); in its place is almost unwatchable mediocrity and tedium. Those with a masochistic streak and taste for the obscure can catch this thrill-free thriller on YouTube while you can.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

CALAMITY JANE 1953

A look at Doris Day’s filmography doesn't exactly yield (at least on the surface) a kaleidoscopic portrait of versatility when it comes to the kind of roles the extremely underrated actress has undertaken throughout her career. From her debut in 1948’s Romance on the High Seas, the studios made it their business to place Day in movies in which audiences were encouraged to partner the sunshiny implications of her alliterative stage name with the homespun effervescence suggested by her strapping good health; freckled, apple cheeks; and pleasantly toothsome smile. This, coupled with Day’s well-scrubbed sex-appeal and soothing, honey-coated voice—–which in spite of its clear-as-a-bell virtuosity, rarely strayed convincingly into the sultry or sensual—helped her to become one of the reigning boxoffice stars of the day (pun not only intended, but shoehorned). It also saddled her with an image of such strenuous and unrelenting wholesomeness, that for years term “Doris Day movie” was a pop-culture punchline signifying a certain brand of clean-cut cinema artificiality.

Famously, director Roman Polanski used the term “Like a Doris Day movie” to describe the disconcertingly sunny look he wanted for the early scenes of Rosemary’s Baby; and only recently I've come to learn of the existence of the slang phrase, “Doris Day parking,” which apparently is the name given to a miraculously open parking space found exactly in front of the point of one’s destination. (An allusion to a familiar movie trope, by no means restricted to Doris Day films, in which characters always seem to find available, convenient parking near, or right in front of, the place they need to be…even in crowded cities.)

The rather tragic particulars of Doris Day’s real life, pooled with her personal values and a loyalty to her sometimes rabidly image-sensitive fanbase, has led Day, throughout her career, to shun some of the darker, more against-type  material offered her (Mike Nichol’s The Graduate, for example) that might have better showcased her range. For example, her fans reacted strongly to Doris smoking and drinking in Love Me or Leave Me, and as late as 1968, when the actress was well into her 40s, some fans bristled when, in her last film, With Six You Get Eggroll, her character—a widow with three children, not the constant virgin she usually played—goes to bed with suitor Brian Keith before they marry.

But Doris Day never set out to be a character actress. She was a star. And if the limitations of her squeaky-clean image and light-as-a-feather roles conspired to create in the public’s mind the impression that she was more a personality than an actress (especially during the “kitchen sink realism” era of the late '50s when her style of films began to fall out of favor), it’s nice to know that the passing of time has ultimately brought about a much-deserved reevaluation of her body of work. A reevaluation which rightfully places Doris Day amongst the most talented of Hollywood’s Golden Age stars.

Doris Day as Calamity Jane (nee Martha Jane Canary)

Howard Keel as Wild Bill Hickok (James Butler Hickok)

Allyn McLerie as Katie Brown

Philip Carey as Lt. Daniel Gilmartin

Calamity Jane, a tuneful, quadrilateral romance fashioned around the highly-fictionalized lives of real-life Old West figures Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok, fools no one in its actually being a blatant, rather bald-faced, carbon copy of  Irving Berlin’s Broadway hit Annie Get Your Gun; a show which Day's studio, Warner Bros., lost the screen rights to in a bidding war with MGM. The 1946 Ethel Merman musical was made into a film in 1950 starring Betty Hutton and Howard Keel, he playing essentially the same role he plays here in Calamity Jane, albeit under a different name.

Dick Wesson as Francis Fryer

Calamity Jane was released to great success in 1953, and were not for the merit it earns on the strength of its own unique gifts, I’m certain its “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” similarities to Annie Get Your Gun would have branded it an embarrassing copycat. I've never read anything about what the creators of Annie Get Your Gun thought of Calamity Jane, but I’m surprised that two such similar products didn't lead to some kind of courtroom shootout at one time or another. That being said, as much as I like Betty Hutton (an acquired taste, to be sure) and think she acquits herself very nicely in a role she had to step into when an ailing Judy Garland was sacked, I much prefer the more modestly-budgeted Calamity Jane to Annie get Your Gun.

Deja Vu All Over Again
Howard Keel's face-off with Doris Day in the number, "I Can Do Without You," is a dead-ringer for Annie get Your Gun's "Anything You Can Do"

A staple of Saturday afternoon TV programming when I was a kid, Calamity Jane is the very first Doris Day movie I ever saw. And, discounting Love Me or Leave Me (1955) which features Day giving a standalone, powerhouse dramatic performance, Calamity Jane is perhaps my favorite of all of her films. Absolutely nothing else I've ever seen her in has matched Calamity Jane for flat-out, lift my spirits, always-puts-a-smile-on-my-face, double-barreled (to use the vernacular of the trailer) enjoyment.

Made at a time when original movie musicals were fast being replaced by adaptations of Broadway shows, Calamity Jane is, at 101 minutes, a brisk and snappy far cry from the butt-busting  roadshow behemoths that musicals would become in later years, and is an example of the Hollywood musical at its entertaining and unpretentious, best. (Historical and artistic merit notwithstanding, I've never been too enthusiastic about the arty self-seriousness that overtook the movie musical in the post-Agnes de Mille/An American in Paris years).

Gale Robbins appears briefly as sagebrush songbird, Adelaid Adams

As befitting the time, the genre, and the film’s featherlight approach, Doris Day gives a performance that is oversized, but never overdone. Liberated from having to be all sweetness and light, Day is allowed to give full vent to the tomboyish, outdoorsy quality (read: butch) that has always lurked beneath even her most glamorous screen appearances. Calamity Jane gives us a Doris Day at her most rambunctiously appealing, and, in being given lively support by a score of catchy songs by the Oscar-winning team of Sammy Fain and Paul Francis Webster (Love is a Many Splendored Thing), Calamity Jane ranks among a short roster of films I think provide near-ideal showcases for a particular star’s talents and strengths. A list which includes: Meet Me in St Louis for Judy Garland, Singin’ in the Rain for Gene Kelly, Funny Girl for Barbra Streisand, The Unsinkable Molly Brown for Debbie Reynolds, Mary Poppins for Julie Andrews, and Cabaret for Liza Minnelli. 

Doris Day croons the Oscar-winning song, "Secret Love"
Thanks to its gleefully butch heroine and subversively playful preoccupation with gender-normative behavior, Calamity Jane has grown into something of a Queer Cinema cult-favorite over the years. All that repressed, '50s-era skirting the issues of sex and gender allows for the contemporary attribution of gay-coding subtext  to the mismatched romances at the center of the plot. For years, "Secret Love" has been regarded as something of a gay anthem, with pop singer k.d. lang recording a rendition to play over the closing credits of the 1995 documentary, The Celluloid Closet.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

I’m not sure when it happened, but of late it has become a subtly dismissive form of insult to label anything as fun or purely entertaining. Crowd-pleasing pop stars Madonna and Lady Gaga became crashing bores after they stopped making infectious dance music and took up the mantle of serious artiste; likewise, Jerry Lewis ceased being even remotely funny (and he wasn't all that funny to begin with) once he and the French came to a meeting of the minds regarding his genius status.
Pretentiousness and self-seriousness has killed a lot of what is lively about the lively arts, so when a film like Calamity Jane comes along, devoted as it is to providing its audience with a rollicking good time and plenty of toe-tapping music, it is by no means a minor statement to assert my fondness for this film chiefly because it succeeds in being such a cheerful and thoroughly captivating entertainment.

The Deadwood Stage (Whip-Crack-Away)
You'll have to look hard to find a sprightlier opening sequence for a movie musical than this bouncy, marvelously economical little ditty that gets across a staggering amount of expositional information while showing off Doris Day as a consummate musical performer. Her energy and charm is totally winning. And just check out how effortlessly she glides through Jack Donahue's athletic choreography and manages the timing of all those props!

The list of what works in Calamity Jane extends to the music (joyous, not a clunker in the bunch), performances (sharp as a tack), and pacing (glides along at a clip). But Calamity Jane starts out way ahead of the game by merely avoiding a few Musical 101 pitfalls which trip up filmmakers to this day:
Hire actors who can sing and dance
Seems a no-brainer, but after the mid-'60s, Hollywood adhered to a perverse prerequisite of ONLY making musicals with individuals devoid of musical skill of any kind (see: Camelot, Man of LaMancha, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Paint Your Wagon, Lost Horizon).
Give songs a melody
I’m not calling for nursery rhymes or jungles, but hummable tunes of the sort that made the songs from The Wizard of Oz and Mary Poppins ones children remembered and wanted to sing along with. Too many musicals today are hamstrung by atonal, over-sophisticated melodies songs designed to either earn the composer a spot on the Billboard charts ("Colors of the Wind" from Pocahontas), or land the composer an Oscar nomination. The latter often resulting in songs so lacking in distinction, they could be inserted into any number of films with no loss of relevance (pretty much everything written by Randy Newman).
Entertain
I don't mean keep it light or frothy; I simply mean keep in mind that things like pacing, good humor, and energy go a long way with audiences. When Vincente Minnelli excised each and every uptempo song from his film adaptation of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, one had to wonder, was it his express purpose for audiences not to have a good time?

Above: Character actor Dick Wesson's reluctant drag number, "Hive Full of Honey," is a comic highlight in Calamity Jane. Below: Wesson in drag again, fifteen years later in an episode of That Girl with Marlo Thomas.

PERFORMANCES

The price of being a Doris Day fan is having to resign oneself to the fact that only occasionally do her films measure up to her talent. Calamity Jane is such an occasion. Always a fine singer and actress, what’s impressive about Day in Calamity Jane is the sheer athleticism of her performance. Leaping about in form-fitting buckskin (which makes her resemble William Katt in Butch & Sundance: The Early Days) she displays a boisterous physicality that perfectly matches her full-throated brand of singing. A particular jaw-dropper is when she's singing while sitting crossing-legged on the bar, then raises herself to he feet by pushing off of her ankles. Amazing!

My partner and I take particular pleasure in poking fun at Calamity Jane's over-emphatic, inconsistent western dialect; which consists of terms like "cigar-reets" and "sarsparilly," yet accommodates words like "malign." And don't get me started on her adjective/verb/noun formula for insults: "You mangy pack of dirt-scratchin' beetles!"

Growing up, strikingly handsome Philip Carey was more familiar to me as Granny Goose—the cowboy spokesman in a series of popular TV commercials for the potato chip company in the '60s. But it was several years before I came to associate Calamity Jane's Katie Brown, engaging comedienne/singer/dancer Allyn McLerie, with Red Button's sardonic marathon dance partner in They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, or as Tony Randall's comically stern secretary, Miss Ruebner, on his eponymous 1976 sitcom.

On the topic of the natural beauty of the Dakota Black Hills, Calamity Jane inadvertently proves that a lack of education  (ignorance) has always played a big part in Manifest Destiny and the legacy of entitlement. I saw Calamity Jane at a revival  theater once where I'm happy to say this exchange was met with a deafening chorus of "boos" from the audience

Howard Keel (who always seems to be on the losing end of a battle in trying to navigate his lips over his gorgeous but sizable teeth [caps?]) makes for a very appealing co-star. As was the case with Annie Get Your Gun, he has the curious ability of making chauvinism look charming.


THE STUFF OF DREAMS
It’s easy to see how Calamity Jane gained a reputation as a paean to gender independence and a coded, gay-identity musical viewed through the prism of '50s repression. The amount of time the film invests in comedy centered on identity, drag, and gender role reversal is certainly intentional, as are the gender-normative romantic complications that don’t quite gel: tomboyish Calamity is in love with hyper-masculine Lt. Gilmartin, who has eyes for ultra-femme Katie Brown. Calamity’s best buddy, Bill Hickok, relentlessly teases Calamity about her lack of womanly virtues, and he too is smitten with the girlish Katie. But the overall (unintentional) impression it leaves is that it is a film about the oppressiveness of traditional gender roles, and that the day-to-day "drag" of feminine clothes and masculine clothes doesn't define how much a woman is a woman and a man is a man.

Hickok has to appear in public in female Native-American costume as a form of shaming

Calamity Jane doesn’t know it, but it sets up a “Born This Way” dynamic with Calamity’s character. She is happiest and most at ease when she is just being herself (the only person she knows how to be) and the fact that her natural way of living is labeled “masculine” comes as news to her…she’s just being Calamity. In fact, it’s not until she visits “Chicagy” and gets a dose of the crossed messages her demeanor and mode of dress elicit (women flirt with her, men regard her as either an unsophisticated male or female curiosity), that it evens dawns on her that there is a different way for a woman to be.

Wannabe showgirl/full-time maid Katie Brown returns to Deadwood with Calamity, becoming her roommate once landing a job at the local saloon. And if the cohabitating pair are revealed to share a livelier and more palpable chemistry than what has thus far been exhibited by either of the women with their rather stolid male love interests; that fact has nothing to do with what the film is intentionally trying to convey, and everything to do with the natural, unforced butch/femme synergy Doris Day and Allyn McLerie.

Female duets are rare in musicals, and McLerie and Day shine in the marvelous, "A Woman's Touch"

Sure, Doris Day arguably looks “better” to our glamour-trained eyes after she gets her feminine makeover, but Calamity never again appears as carefree or seems to have as much fun as she did in the earlier part of the film. The otherwise playful film suddenly gets all misty-eyed and slow, as if both Calamity and the movie itself are reined in by her corset.

In the end, heterosexual love wins out and the gender roles realign, but I don’t think it takes a Queer Eye to see that the two lantern-jawed males make a more appropriate-looking pair, just as the duo of Katie and Calamity look made for each other.

Seriously, who wouldn't have wanted to see these two hook-up?

Calamity Jane predates Some Like it Hot by five years, but both films, in poking fun at sex, cross-dressing, and gender roles, manages to unintentionally—through the adherence to the standardized cultural norms of the day—make revealing (and subtly subversive) statements about the liberating aspects of not always having to conform to society's rules of accepted gender behavior.

Bonus Material
In 1963, Carol Burnett starred in a TV adaptation of Calamity Jane. See a clip HERE.

Philip Carey in a Granny Goose Potato Chips commercial  HERE 

In 1963 Doris Day teamed with Robert Goulet for a studio album of songs from Annie Get Your Gun. Listen to their duet "Anything You Can Do" HERE

Hear Gil Peterson sing an ersatz rock & roll rendition of "Secret Love" in The Cool Ones  HERE

Copyright © Ken Anderson

LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME 1955

The musical biopic, as a genre, is one grown so homogeneous and formulaic over the years, even films I’m seeing for the first time have a sense of déjà vu about them. Irrespective of the subject or its title - The Helen Morgan Story, I’ll Cry Tomorrow, Funny Girl, Star!, or Lady Sings The Blues - these films hew so closely to a standard Hollywood rags-to-riches soap opera blueprint that their basis in biographical fact matters, at most, only tangentially. 

Doris Day as Ruth Etting

James Cagney as Martin (Moe the Gimp) Snyder

Cameron Mitchell as Johnny Alderman

For a public never tiring of being fed endless variations on the same Horatio Alger myth, celebrities and their alternately sordid/glamorous life stories have long been a wellspring of source material for Hollywood's dream machine. Hollywood and the old studio system has always trafficked in the wholesale packaging and commodification of reassuring fantasies designed to both titillate and tranquilize. And as such, movie biographies, musical or otherwise, have never really been about the actual lives of their chosen subjects so much as they were middle-class cautionary tales detailing the perils of pursuing the very sort of fame, glamour and wealth that make going to the movies so alluring in the first place. These interchangeable tales of sin and sequins always start out advocating the virtues of hard work, talent, and ambition; only to pull a moralistic about-face in the last reel, revealing the brass ring of success to be only nickel plate.

America’s perverse love/hate relationship with celebrity demands that our glorification of wealth and notoriety never be rewarded with stories about famous people who are actually happy. In the end, it always seems as if our innate puritanism gets the better of us, allowing only for the depiction of stardom as a fundamentally empty, joyless kind of ambition. A goal fraught with heartache and awash with tears behind the tinsel.
Love Me or Leave Me follows a similar course, but distinguishes itself by making the road it takes toward its anticipated comforting conclusion one of the bitterest and bumpiest I've ever encountered in an MGM musical.

The biographical musical's claim to being "Life-inspired," "Told as it really happened," or "Based on a true story," is less an assertion of verisimilitude so much as a marketing ploy allowing for the recycling of "showbiz melodrama" tropes dating back as far as 1929's Broadway Melody.

If queried about its track record of making biographical films that bear little to no resemblance to the actual lives of their subjects, Hollywood’s response would most likely be along the lines of: “If you want facts, go see a documentary!” And indeed, dramatic interest and entertainment value always trumps truth in movie bios. And so it goes with Love Me or Leave Me, the reasonably accurate (read: mostly made-up ) story of Ruth Etting, popular jazz singing star of the '20s and '30s.

During the 1920s and '30s, Ruth Etting gained fame as "America's Radio Sweetheart" and  "America's Sweetheart of Song."

When we first meet Ruth Etting (Doris Day), it’s the 1920s and she’s working as a taxi dancer in a seedy Chicago dime-a-dance dive that’s being squeezed by small-time racketeer Marty Snyder (James Cagney). Recognizing an opportunity for exploitation when he sees one, Snyder attempts to put a squeeze of another sort on the spunky, well-put-together Etting after she's sacked for defending herself against the physical advances of an over-ardent customer. In a romantic song-and-dance as old as Herod and as topical as an episode of Judge Judy; Snyder hopes to curry the favor of Etting through the gracious bestowing of a lot of strings-attached assistance. Although initially apprehensive, Ruth, a woman not unfamiliar with bread and knowing upon which side hers is buttered, soon finds herself the begrudging recipient of the diminutive mobster’s largesse. (That sentence reads smuttier than perhaps intended.)

As Martin Snyder, Cagney adds another memorable character to his Rogues Gallery of cinema bad guys. My favorite character touch: Snyder's inability to remember Ruth Etting's last name (he calls her "Ettling" for the longest time!)

In spite of an awareness of Snyder's increasingly possessive actions on her behalf being motivated by a romantic interest she cannot return, Etting—the nakedly opportunistic possessor of both a burning ambition to be a singer and a moral compass desperately in need of adjustment—nevertheless permits the gangster to bankroll and promote her career while she strings him along. Not exactly a problem until continued success incites in the songstress a longing for independence that increases in direct proportion to Snyder’s obsessive need to control her every waking moment. Further fanning the flames of discontent is the ongoing flirtation between Etting and onetime on-the-Snyder-payroll pianist, Johnny Alderman (Cameron Mitchell). Yes, for a brief period, both Etting and Alderman are being paid by Snyder while making goo-goo eyes at one another behind his back. A mobster, an opportunist, and a double-crosser: what a lovable cast of characters!

Although Love Me or Leave Me was made with the compensated consent of then-living Martin Snyder, Ruth Etting, and Myrl Alderman (changed to "Johnny" for the film), upon the film's release Etting is said to have dismissed the film as "Half fairy tale." 

That I even enjoyed spending time in the company of three such largely unsympathetic and self-interested individuals is a testament to the irreproachable charm of both Doris Day and James Cagney; the tuneful score of period standards made famous by Etting; and the obfuscating dexterity of Daniel Fuchs Oscar-winning story and Isobel Lennart’s (Funny Girl) Oscar-nominated screenplay.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

If the above statement gives the impression that I’m less than thrilled by Love Me or Leave Me’s somewhat flinty cast of characters, let me clarify that nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary, the hard-bitten characterizations and refreshingly cynical tone of Love Me or Leave Me place it far beyond the pale of your typical, sentimental, MGM musical fare. And by me, that is just fine. I truly love movie musicals, but a rarely-discussed downside to this pop-cultural predilection of mine is how frequently I'm forced to endure the most cloyingly false and saccharine plotlines just to get to the singing and dancing. Love Me or Leave Me is such an atypically dark depiction of ambition and obsessive love that one immediately senses that there is no way a film this sordid would ever be green-lighted were it not purportedly based on true events.

Doris Day has had just about enough of your shit.

Succeeding where Martin Scorsese’s not-dissimilar New York, New York failed, Love Me or Leave Me finds the humanity behind its hard-boiled characters and delivers a solid musical drama that takes an unflinching look at the kind of relationship that is doubtless more common in show business than we're usually shown. It all makes for a remarkably gripping viewing experience as anticipated romantic clinches and cliches are dashed left and right by characters with scarcely a sentimental bone in their bodies. Chiefly due to the powerhouse performances of Doris Day & James Cagney, what might otherwise be abhorrently unpleasant material becomes truly compelling human drama. Marred only by the occasional lapse into perhaps Production Code-mandated, tacked-on morality.

Although the film's production values are all top notch, one has to keep reminding oneself that Love Me or Leave Me is set in the 1920s. The musical and visual tone is decidedly '50s. Doris Day's big musical number,"Shaking the Blues Away," owes more to Judy Garland's "Get Happy" number in Summer Stock (1950) than The Ziegfeld Follies.

PERFORMANCES

If you’re a fan of the extensive catalog of mobsters, hoods, and mugs that made James Cagney one of the biggest stars at Warner Bros. in the '30s & '40s, then his performance in Love Me or Leave Me might feel like a late-career “best of” reprisal of the kind of roles he near-copyrighted in his heyday (Cagney was 55 at the time). Fair enough. For Cagney doesn't do a lot here that he hasn't done before. But whether his pugnacious, poignantly lovesick Moe the Gimp is your first or fiftieth exposure to James Cagney onscreen, there’s no getting past the fact that the man kicks serious ass. Looking very much throughout the film like a fist with eyes, Cagney—whether combative, funny, wounded, or monstrous—is such a magnetic, menacing, and dynamic a presence, you literally can’t take your eyes off of him.

I never fail to marvel at Cagney's ability to create sympathetic monsters. As versatile an actor as they come, Cagney could have you rooting for a character in one scene and booing him in the next. Pictured here with character actor Harry Bellaver, Cagney gives one of those looks you really wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of.

I’m a Doris Day fan from way back. But unlike most, my least favorite films of hers are those so-called sophisticated sex comedies she made with that interchangeably bland lineup of lantern-jawed stiffs: Rock Hudson, Rod Taylor, and James Garner. I know I’m alone in this, but I've always felt Doris Day—an actress of untapped versatility and an effortless appeal that made her considerable talent all too easy to dismiss—was sabotaged throughout her career by always being paired with handsome-but-dull leading men. Doris had a lot more danger and sex behind that million-dollar smile than she was ever able (or willing) to take advantage of, but in Love Me or Leave Me, she more than rises to the occasion.

She delivers what is to me the best performance of her career and meets Cagney’s intensity head to head. She drinks, she's tough, she fires off her hard-bitten dialogue as if to the manner born, and she's one helluva crier (her sobs are so body-wracking they break your heart). There’s no way to look at her work here and not wish she had ventured into more dramatic roles in her career. (Perhaps the story is apocryphal, but if it’s true Doris Day was offered the role of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, based on her performance here, more's the pity she didn't accept it.)

In this particularly harrowing scene, Doris Day is nothing short of phenomenal. How she failed to receive an Oscar nomination for her performance is a mystery (of the film's 6 Oscar nods, Cagney's was the only nomination in the acting categories). The scenes these two share crackle with a vibrancy and tension thoroughly absent from Day's scenes with Cameron Mitchell. Day and Cagney had previously appeared together in the 1950 musical, The West Point Story.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Lest one begin to think Love Me or Leave Me is nothing but a lot of sturm und drang, rest assured that things are enlivened considerably by a passel of songs Doris Day gets to sing and dance to (quite marvelously, I might add). Although the songs are period-perfect, the arrangements are strictly 1950s, and Ms. Day sounds absolutely nothing like Ruth Etting, which is all to the better since she looks nothing like her either. Day is in fine voice and for once her spectacular figure is shown off to full advantage...in a series of sexy, form-fitting gowns totally wrong for the 1920s, but who's complaining?

A staple of show-biz biographies is the played for laughs "starting at the bottom" scene where the neophyte star "amusingly" ruins a musical number by not knowing the steps. In Funny Girl it was "Roller Skate Rag," in Star! it was "Oh! What a Lovely War." In Love Me or Leave Me, Doris flubs the dance steps to "Has Anybody Seen My Gal?" Curious how in all of these scenes the least experienced dancer is always placed front and center.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Tossing aside any need for Love Me or Leave Me to actually be a historically/narratively accurate biography of Ruth Etting (If you must, you can see and hear her on YouTube, and read her considerably seamier story online), I have to say that I have nothing but praise for this film. In fact, I admire it a great deal and consider it to be one of the best of the overworked musical biopic genre. It isn't often that a mere musical offers up so gloomy a portrait of obsession, or showcases characters of such ambiguously complex motives and attachments.
Love Me or Leave Me's old-school, MGM gloss is considerable, but there's a maturity to the whole enterprise which more than makes up for the film's occasional adherence to by-the-numbers movie bio plotting. In a way that feels very contemporary now but must have been jarring in 1955, Love Me or Leave Me maneuvers its tricky shifts in tone expertly. The songs never bring the story to a halt and the drama always feels honest (sometimes brutally so) to the characters.

Of course, what brings me back to Love Me or Leave Me time and time again are the performances of Doris Day and James Cagney. Who would ever guess that Doris Day could be so rivetingly sexy playing sullen and cynical? And as for Cagney...well, they don't make 'em like him any more. A polished diamond in the rough if there ever was one.

Copyright © Ken Anderson