SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS 1961

The weird thing about sexual repression is how it creates, then proceeds to foster and perpetuate, the atmosphere of shame and sin it purports to be on guard against. Case in point: so-called "family" entertainment.

Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma! (1955) is the dirtiest movie I ever saw. Really. This corn-fed ode to spring, sparkin', and spoonin' is nothing but a wall-to-wall smut-fest obsessed with fornication. Or, fornicatin' as the characters themselves would probably drawl, were the film able to stop being so coy and wholesome for five minutes and just lay out on the table what is obviously its sole purpose, preoccupation, and focus. For nigh on 2 ½ hours (dialect helps to get into the spirit of things), horny farmhands in tight jeans and overheated farmer's daughters in calico dresses and bullet bras talk and think of little else but sex. Sure, it's all coded and cloaked in innuendo-soaked songs and double-entendre choreography, but Oklahoma! is like one long, whispered-behind-the-barn dirty joke. A rumps and udders horse opera. There's your dim-witted, semi-nymphomaniac who "cain't" say no; Kansas City bur-lee-cue dancers going just as "fer" as they can go; randy traveling salesmen; rape-inclined farmhands; and, lest we forget, that sexual assault disguised as a kiss: The Oklahoma Hello.

If a ten-year-old is capable of moral indignation, then indeed I was. By the time that surrey with the fringe on top rolled in at the end, my cheeks were hotter than Hades, and I could barely look my parents in the eye. 

"A raging torrent of emotion that even nature can't control!"
OK, that's actually the ad copy for the 1953 Marilyn Monroe film Niagara, but it so succinctly captures Splendor in the Grass' metaphorical use of rushing waterfalls barely contained by dams (not to mention the film's overheated, Freudian themes) I just had to use it.

I'll admit my tongue-in-cheek scandalized reaction to Oklahoma! might seem a tad incongruous coming from someone who saw all manner of R-rated movies during his adolescence. Still, I'm not kidding about how vulgar this musical seemed to me when I was young. The comparatively straightforward approach of movies like Barbarella and Midnight Cowboy didn't embarrass me so much as demystified sex for me. Their explicitness made it feel as though sex and nudity were no big deal. Oklahoma!, on the other hand, mirrored my repressed Catholic upbringing. By figuratively and literally dancing around the film's all-pervasive topic of sex, the film turns sex into a sinful no-no suitable only for giggling and snickering about in empty, euphemistic codes of indecency.

A firm memory I hold from my adolescent movie-going years is how filthy I considered the family films of my era (the '60s): David Niven's The Impossible Years, Doris Day's Where Were You When The Lights Went Out, Debbie Reynolds' How Sweet It Is – compared to the permissive, let-it-all-hang-out R-rated films that were coming into fashion.

The pernicious effect of repression and guilt - its power to distort and pervert natural sexuality - is the theme dramatized in Elia Kazan's sensitive film adaptation of William Inge's original screenplay, Splendor in the Grass.

Natalie Wood as Wilma Dean "Deanie" Loomis

Warren Beatty as Arthur "Bud" Stamper

Pat Hingle as Ace Stamper

Barbara Loden as Virginia "Ginny" Stamper

Audrey Christie as Mrs. Loomis

Splendor in the Grass is set in a small town in Kansas in 1928. Not, as immortalized by Rodgers & Hammerstein, a Kansas corny in August, but one overrun with oil derricks born of an oil boom. And all that pumping, pumping, pumping of the land serves as unsubtle metaphoric counterpoint to all the pent-up sexual energy of the town's young folk. Experiencing the first rushes of jazz-age permissiveness, the air is full of sex (in a nice touch, almost all the half-heard background conversations have to do with sex, sin, or something forbidden) and high-school sweethearts Deanie Loomis (Wood) and Bud Stamper (Beatty) find their barely-understood passions clashing with the repressive, Victorian-era values of their parents. As a result, archaic notions of propriety and decency intrude upon their natural urges, and the young lovers suffer painfully and unnecessarily under the strain of trying to do "what's right."

"Mom...is it so terrible to have those feelings for a boy?"
"No nice girl does."
"Doesn't she?"
"No...no nice girl."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

William Inge is one of my favorite playwrights. His works, among them: Picnic, Come Back Little Sheba, and The Dark at the Top of The Stairs, find the poetry and tragedy in small lives – recalling for me the best of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill. In Splendor in the Grass, Inge's gentle evocation of the subtle frustrations, conflicts, and inchoate desires festering below the surface of otherwise tranquil small-town life is engagingly realized by director Kazan (A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, East of Eden).

William Inge appears as the sad-eyed Rev. Whiteman, whose sermon on holding onto
 what's real in times of material prosperity falls mainly on deaf ears. Inge's original screenplay for Splendor in the Grass won an Oscar.

In this story about "innocent" passion, a young couple, excited by newly awakened feelings but confused by their intensity, are left without guidance by well-intentioned adults incapable of doing anything but projecting the failures and frustrations of their own lives onto the pair. The young feel an obligation to live up to the ideals of those who have sacrificed to give them a better life. Yet, in trying to orchestrate the happiness of their children through the stressing of false morals, shame, and repression, these parents succeed only in passing on a legacy of compromise and regret.

The Stampers
This awkward portrait sitting pretty much says all there is
to say about the functionality of the town's wealthiest family

PERFORMANCES

Stage director and Actor's Studio co-founder Elia Kazan is heralded as an "actor's director" for the sensitive performances he's credited with eliciting from those under tutelage. It's not a title I'm likely to argue with in that I think Splendor in the Grass is a remarkably well-cast movie, with everyone involved giving colorful and fleshed-out performances devoid of some of the fussier affectations of Method Acting. Sure, Warren Beatty's pauses can drag on a little, and one strains to hear him speak on a couple of occasions, but by and large, the natural performances here all crackle with vitality and life. 

Future Mrs. Kazan Barbara Loden makes an indelible impression as Ginny Stamper, the flapper-out-of-water in the small, conservative Kansas town. Her screen work is minimal (she died of cancer at age 48), but in 1970 she wrote, directed, and starred in the noteworthy independent film Wanda. 

As deserving of praise as all the players are, I just have to single out a personal favorite, Natalie Wood. Tapping into a natural edginess and heartbreaking eagerness to please that had only been hinted at in previous roles, Wood gives what I consider to be the best performance of her career. As the lovesick, worshipful Deanie, she displays an emotional daring I always find so compelling in actors. She is tragically vulnerable throughout, and she and the absurdly beautiful Warren Beatty (making his film debut) make a stunningly beautiful screen couple and display a palpable chemistry. (Tip: watch her in scenes where she's not the focus. She's entirely in character and reacting to everything at each moment in a way that feels so wonderfully spontaneous. I can't say enough about her in this film. The Oscar nomination she garnered was so very well-deserved.)

Zohra Lampert as Angeline
I have always had a thing for this appealingly sensitive, low-key actress (and marvelous comedienne) who deserved a bigger career. She has a bit of a cult fan base built around the horror film Let's Scare Jessica to Death, but outside of her scene-stealing performance here, I mostly know her as the Goya Beans spokeslady.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Splendor in the Grass is a tragic love story in the grand tradition. True love, in the form of Deanie and Bud, finds no solace or sanctuary in small-town (small-minded) mores that uphold the curious notion that the pursuit of happiness is good, but the pursuit of ecstasy is sinful and wrong. Instead, love that should be simple and uncomplicated descends into confusion and madness, the star-crossed pair suffering at the hands of false morality and parental interference.  

Understatement

Aside from Natalie Wood's stubbornly contemporary look throughout most of the film, Splendor in the Grass has one of its greatest assets in its detailed depiction of small-town life and attention to period. In addition, it's a great-looking film, from the atmospheric cinematography (Boris Kaufman) to the costumes, to the eye-catching art direction.

Personal favorite Sandy Dennis (l.) makes her film debut as Kay,
a somewhat fair-weather friend of Deanie's.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I first saw Splendor in the Grass when I was a youngster back in the late sixties, and recall being struck by how much the film's chronicling of a uniquely American brand of sexual restlessness in the face of cultural change (rampant horniness crossed with faith-based guilt), echoed the cultural climate of what was going on in America at the time. In terms of young people confronting changing attitudes about morality, sex, family, religion, double-standards, and women's roles, the America of the late '60s was not dissimilar to the America of 1929. A reality even 1961 audiences must have felt when confronted by the relative sexual candor of Splendor in the Grass hot on the heels of the conservative Eisenhower years.

Comedienne Phyllis Diller makes her film debut as real-life nightclub owner, Texas Guinan

I can't say I really understood Splendor in the Grass when I first saw it. Thrown by the film's portentous manner and the pedigree of talent both behind and in front of the camera, I simply thought the film had gone over my head. I went away from it thinking I had just seen the most poetic film about blue balls ever made.

Life experience has revealed to me that Splendor in the Grass is about much more than sexual desire. Familial obligation, guilt, love, innocence, loss, and coming-of-age maturity all make William Inge's bittersweet look at young love a film I always enjoy revisiting, and one of my all-time favorite Natalie Wood movies.

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 -2013

ANGEL, ANGEL, DOWN WE GO 1969

In my previous post about the James Cagney / Doris Day film Love Me or Leave Me, my praise for Doris Day's remarkably accomplished, against-type assaying of the dramatically intense role of Jazz-Age songstress Ruth Etting was followed up by a lengthy harangue about stars who play it safe and fail to venture very far beyond the narrow parameters of their carefully crafted images. An extremely talented actress and singer, Day's choice of film roles certainly helped sustain her career (she worked that fresh-faced, girl-next-door thing well into middle age). But in sticking so closely to type, there's no denying that the sugary-sweet sameness of so many of the characters she played hardly tapped into her obvious versatility and dramatic range. Doris Day is so effective in playing a not-so-nice character that it led me to further lament the perceived cultural loss of her having turned down the role of Mrs. Robinson (that sexually predatory, chain-smoking alcoholic) in Mike Nichols' The Graduate.

Of course, all this tsk-tsking about the failure of image-conscious Hollywood stars to take creative risks is a stance nurtured exclusively by memories of those instances where said risks actually paid off. Eternal ingénue Audrey Hepburn performed best in her career as a disillusioned wife in Stanley Donen's sophisticated Two For the Road (1967). And perennial sex-kitten Ann-Margret's moving portrayal of an aging party girl in Carnal Knowledge (1971) was so unexpected it garnered her an Oscar nomination.

My guess is that this was Jennifer Jones' mantra throughout
 the entire filming of Angel, Angel Down We Go

What tends to fade from memory are the far more plentiful instances wherein actors, in a sincere attempt to break from type, inflict untold damage to years of hard-won legitimacy and respect by taking on thankless roles that end up making them look more ridiculous than courageous.
One such doozy of a miscalculation is the aptly titled Angel, Angel, Down We Go, a film that sees Oscar-winner and member of old-school Hollywood royalty Jennifer Jones extend herself so far out on a wobbly limb that the only trajectory can be downward.

Angel, Angel, Down We Go is a marvelously loopy artifact from the age of culture-clash psychedelia, and a primo example of that weird transitional period in motion picture history (roughly 1966 through 1970) when it appeared at times as though Hollywood had completely lost its mind. How else to explain the green-lighting of a film that casts classy Jennifer Jones as a former porn star unhappily married to a gay industrialist (Charles Aidman); saddle her with an unwanted, overweight teenage daughter (Holly Near); and has her seduced by a Jim Morrison-esque rock star (Jordan Christopher)?

Released by American International Pictures (the Drive-In exhibitor's best friend) and penned by the same writer who delivered the 1968 sleeper hit Wild in the Streets; Angel, Angel, Down We Go is an exercise in youth-rebellion exploitation that didn't pay off back in 1969 but reaps considerable dividends today for being an astonishingly weird product of a time when Hollywood was seriously grasping at creative straws.

Jennifer Jones as Astrid Steele

Jordan Christopher as Bogart Peter Stuyvesant

Holly Near as Tara Nicole Steele

Charles Aidman as William Gardiner Steele

Rock star/mogul/cult leader Bogart Peter Stuyvesant ("My mother went into labor pains during a Bogart flick...she almost dropped me in the lobby!") first deflowers, then insinuates himself into the life of the unloved, overweight debutante, Tara Nicole Steele. Stuyvesant and his motley band of sky-diving cultists (an uncomfortable-looking Lou Rawls; obligatory pregnant flower child, Davey Davidson; and an underutilized but probably just-happy-not-to-be-wearing-monkey-makeup, Roddy McDowall) see in Tara a symbol of overindulged American excess. In her decadent parents, they see the personification of older-generation corruption and greed. 

Bogart Peter Stuyvesant & Co. have plans for this family, but beyond, perhaps, talking them to death, it's difficult to know just what the endgame is for the seriously unhinged young man. We know it has something to do with youth rebellion, but as to what form that rebellion is supposed to take, your guess is as good as mine. "You're insane!" people keep shouting at him, as though we hadn't noticed.
All I know is that along the way, Bogart sings a passel of pop/rock songs written by the Oscar-nominated songwriting team of Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann (Somewhere Out There), spouts a lot of anti-establishment gibberish, and in the end, winds up seducing mom, dad, and daughter. Not necessarily in that order.

"We say hip, hooray, hip. hip hooray for fat!"
The newly liberated Tara dances to Bogart's ode to corpulence: "The Fat Song." Barely considered chubby by today's Big-Gulp, Super-Size standards, 19-year-old Holly Near, making her film debut, gained five pounds for the role (the studio asked for 20). 

Angel, Angel, Down We Go is the screenwriting/directing debut of Yale graduate (so much for higher education) Robert Thom. Thom adapted the screenplay from an unproduced 1961 play he wrote for his wife Janice Rule. Yale's resume as a screenwriter is a mixed bag representing the good: All the Fine Young Cannibals: the bad: The Legend of Lylah Clare: and the unseen (by me) Death Race 2000. In speaking of what he intended with this film he explained he saw Angel Angel Down We Go as: "A far-out version of a  'The Green Hat'  (Michael Arlens) kind of play about a wild girl heading for destruction…a present-day type of F. Scott Fitzgerald heroine." (Source: Jennifer Jones: The Life and Films by Paul Green).

That it was adapted from a play certainly explains the film's talkiness (you've never encountered a lippier group of flower children in your life), but the rest of that quote is a bit of a stretch. Anyone detecting even a note of F. Scott Fitzgerald in this monumentally disjointed morass has likely gone the way of Zelda. Angel, Angel, Down We Go was Robert Thom's debut/swansong as a director.

Pills with an alcohol chaser accompany Jennifer Jones' explanation for why she named her daughter Tara. Meanwhile, David O. Selznick (Jones' recently-deceased real-life hubby and Gone With the Wind producer) can be heard spinning in his grave.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

The economic power of the newly-emboldened youth audience of the late '60s really threw old-guard Hollywood for a loop. Long out-of-touch and more concerned with capitalizing on the counterculture zeitgeist than trying to understand it; Hollywood during this period produced some of the oddest, most out-there films in the annals of cinema history. Angel, Angel, Down We Go is an unholy marriage of studio system aesthetics trying to pass itself off as an underground, college campus youth-rebellion flick. 

The result is a work of pandering insincerity that manages to alienate two potential audiences in one swing. Young people, the movie's principal target audience, must have found it "challenging" to have a movie about the morally corrupt over-30 set try to pass off 40-year-old Roddy McDowall and 35-year-old, receding-hairlined Lou Rawls as agents of an impending youth revolution. And the older movie-going public, those old enough to know and appreciate the name Jennifer Jones, must certainly have gone into apoplexy when confronted with so much profanity, drugs, sex, and bad rock music.

The Mild Bunch
(L.to R.) Soul singer Lou Rawls makes his embarrassing film debut as Joe. Jordan Christopher fronted the rock group "The Wild Ones" and was married to Sybil Burton (Richard's ex) at the time. Holly Near is a well-known folk singer and activist. As pregnant "teen" Anna Livia, Davey Davidson is known to fans of the sitcom Hazel, as Nancy, Mr. B's virginal niece. Roddy McDowall, as Santoro, was friends with director Robert Thom and must have owed him a favor.

For fans of bizarre cinema, however, all of the above are merely ingredients that went into creating one of the most obscenely entertaining train wrecks from a major studio. The kind of film that could not have been made at any other time in cinema history. Get a load of this dialogue:

Jennifer Jones shouting at her husband- "Oh, you're out of your Chinese skull!" (He's not Chinese.)

Jennifer Jones playing the truth game- "I made 30 stag films and never faked an orgasm!"

Jennifer Jones to her masseuse- "Stop it, Hopkins, you're hurting me. You're a bloody, sadistic dyke!" 

Jennifer Jones in a moment of self-reflection- "In my heart of hearts, I'm a sexual clam."

Jennifer Jones rebuffing the advances of the man who just bedded her daughter- "There's a word for you, but I don't think I even know what it is."

Yes, Miss Jones has the lion's share of the film's quotably bad dialogue. However, she delivers it with so much gusto and bite, one wonders if perhaps she thought she was appearing in another absurdist hoot like John Huston's Beat the Devil (1954). Unfortunately for her, Robert Thom is no Truman Capote.

Only in the Sixties 
My favorite film of five-time Oscar nominee Jennifer Jones is Madame Bovary (1949). Who would guess that 20 years later, the 49-year-old actress would appear in a film requiring she rest her head near the crotch of a 26-year-old, naked balladeer?

PERFORMANCES

Jennifer Jones in Angel, Angel, Down We Go is less an instance of against-type casting so much as it is "What the hell was she thinking?" casting. If you can get over the shock of seeing the star of The Song of Bernadette wallowing in the sordid gutter of sex and drugs exploitation, you can catch glimpses of a sensitive performance that never had a chance. She's particularly good in a scene where her character revisits the Santa Monica Pier cotton candy stand she worked at as a girl. Alas, the quiet moments in this film aren't allowed to last too long. 

The ever-refined Astrid Steele responds to her daughter complimenting
 her on being "The most beautiful woman in the world."

Watching an actress as good as Jennifer Jones in a film as crude and intentionally vulgar as this, you never get a chance to applaud her "bravery" in breaking out of her Selznick-Shell. Why? Because not only is the film so far beneath her, but you're never quite sure whether she's in on the joke. Her participation feels a little like it's part of a secret put-down, and you feel a little embarrassed for her. Angel, Angel, Down We Go joins the ranks of the many Hollywood films from this era that made it their business to present former leading ladies of the silver screen in as unflattering a light as possible: Lana Turner, The Big Cube (1969) / Eleanor Parker, Eye of the Cat (1969) / Rita Hayworth, The Naked Zoo (1970) / Miriam Hopkins, Savage Intruder (1970), and Mae West, Myra Breckinridge (1970).

"The Biggest Mother of Them All!"
Astrid builds up a head of indignant steam listening to Bogart's newest insult composition, the sprightly ditty, "Mother Lover." In the meantime, Tara nervously waits for the shit to hit the fan.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

One of the niftier byproducts of Hollywood's embracing of the economic potential of the sexual revolution was the industry's fascination with homosexuality, bisexuality, and narratives in which opportunistic young men sleep their way through entire families (Entertaining Mr. Sloane - 1970, Something for Everyone -1970, Teorema -1968). As I first saw Angel, Angel, Down We Go when it came out in 1969 and I was just 12 years old, what made the biggest impression on me, and contributed to my seeing it at least three times that summer, was the surprising amount of male nudity. It's one of those rare exploitation films where the women remain dressed and the guys doff their clothes left and right. The movie made absolutely no sense to me then (nor now, for that matter), but with all that male skin on parade, who was I to complain?

How can you hate a film whose first four minutes feature a girl's voiceover narration praising her perfect parents, only to have the idealized father appear in the shower with a young man! 

The ever-game Roddy McDowall shows that his celebrated boyish charm didn't stop at the neck. Co-star Lou Rawls threatened to walk off the production when asked to appear nude, telling the director to take it or leave it - "I worked ten years to get where I am, and I'm not going to destroy that image in 10 minutes."

After seducing the daughter and the mother, Bogart  (Jordan Christopher, bottom tier)
 literally takes the place of Mr. Steele's previous boy-toy (top tier, actor unknown).

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Filmed in February of 1968, Angel, Angel, Down We Go was released in August of 1969, the same month as the Manson murders. This was the film's title when I saw it at San Francisco's Embassy Theater in early 1970 on a double bill with Easy Rider (2 New Youth Hits! the marquee read). A year or so later, I'd heard it was redubbed Cult of the Damned and re-released in a tasteless effort to capitalize on the film's eerie similarities to the Manson case, whose trial was underway. 

Jordan Christopher was just one of several actors (among them Christopher Jones and Michael Parks) that tried hard to work a James Dean vibe in late '60s exploitation films

A bomb under either title, Angel, Angel, Down We Go, has more or less disappeared into what some might call well-deserved obscurity. But for those with a taste for the bizarre, a taste for the jaw-droppingly weird, a taste for the clumsy collision of old Hollywood and the shape of things to come…well, Angel, Angel, Down We Go is a psychedelic mind trip well worth taking.

Much of Angel, Angel, Down We Go was shot at a Beverly Hills mansion that once belonged to Marion Davies. 

Literally high on drugs, Tara finds she can't get down from the ceiling
(I told you this movie was weird).

NAME DROPPER'S CORNER

In the mid-'90s, I worked as a personal fitness trainer for the late Jennifer Jones. She had developed a lingering back problem from hoisting a little girl up and down many flights of stairs in The Towering Inferno (1974 ) and she worked out 5 days a week to keep strong and stay in shape. I remember her as an extremely gracious lady with a wonderful sense of humor and terrific discipline when it came to exercise. 

She lived in a high style not at all dissimilar to the character she played in this film (her home was a veritable museum of priceless art. She had a round-the-clock staff of security guards. And she had her hair done every day, her personal hairdresser usually arriving as I was departing). After working with her for some time, I found the courage to tell her that Angel, Angel, Down We Go was the first film of hers I'd ever seen. Laughing, her response to me was, "I'm sorry to hear that. I'm afraid I might owe you an apology." When I said that it inspired me to see her other films, told me, "I'm glad of that. But I hope you've forgotten about it...I certainly have."

As much as I wanted to bring the subject up again over the next few months (I wanted to know what everyone wants to know when they see this movie, "What possessed you?"), I nevertheless erred on the side of caution and kept my mouth shut on the topic. It felt like the polite and professional thing to do, but it certainly did nothing for satisfying my film-geek curiosity.

The reviews are in!

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2013

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