The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend (Preston Sturges, 1949)

Rudy Vallee and Betty Grable in The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend

Cast: Betty Grable, Cesar Romero, Rudy Vallee, Olga San Juan, Porter Hall, Hugh Herbert, Al Bridge, El Brendel, Sterling Holloway, Danny Jackson, Emory Parnell, Margaret Hamilton, Marie Windsor. Screenplay: Preston Sturges, Earl Felton. Cinematography: Harry Jackson. Art direction: George W. Davis, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Robert Fritch. Music: Cyril J. Mockridge. 

There's not much reason for anyone other than hardcore Preston Sturges fans to see The Beautiful Blonde From Bashful Bend, even though it was his last American film (he made one more, Les Carnets du Major Thompson, in France in 1955) and the only one in Technicolor. It has all the slapstick anarchy of his later films, like The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1943), but none of the wit of his best, among which I'd name The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan's Travels (1941), and The Palm Beach Story (1942). In those great comedies, he worked with stars like Henry Fonda, Joel McCrea, Barbara Stanwyck, and Claudette Colbert, letting them unbend in surprising and hilarious ways. In the later comedies, he stuck to purely comic actors like Eddie Bracken and Betty Hutton, and there's a bumptiousness about those films that can be a little wearying, though there's still some wit in their setups, like Hutton's mysterious pregnancy in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Bracken's mistaken heroism in Hail the Conquering Hero (1944). The Beautiful Blonde is all bumptiousness, getting most of its laughs from character clowns like Hugh Herbert, El Brendel, and Sterling Holloway, and from some tired gags like Porter Hall's character getting repeatedly shot in the ass. It's a Western movie spoof, with Betty Grable as the title character, a dance hall girl who's a wicked hand with a pistol and who gets mistaken for the new schoolmarm when she flees to another town after shooting the judge (Hall). Cesar Romero is the nominal romantic lead, but Sturges isn't interested in romance in this movie; all he wants to do is stage outrageous gunfights and pull off slightly risqué jokes that had the censors on edge. It was, deservedly, a flop, but also undeservedly made Sturges persona non grata in Hollywood, after the failure of the more entertaining Unfaithfully Yours (1948), which had more of the old wit and less of the late bumptiousness. 

Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947)

Joan Crawford, Dana Andrews, and Henry Fonda in Daisy Kenyon

Daisy Kenyon: Joan Crawford
Dan O'Mara: Dana Andrews
Peter Lapham: Henry Fonda
Lucille O'Mara: Ruth Warrick
Mary Angelus: Martha Stewart
Rosamund O'Mara: Peggy Ann Garner
Marie O'Mara: Connie Marshall
Coverly: Nicholas Joy
Lucille's Attorney: Art Baker

Director: Otto Preminger
Screenplay: David Hertz
Based on a novel by Elizabeth Janeway
Cinematography: Leon Shamroy
Art direction: George W. Davis, Lyle R. Wheeler
Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler
Music: David Raksin

Daisy Kenyon is an underrated romantic drama from an often underrated director. Otto Preminger gives us an unexpectedly sophisticated look -- given the Production Code's strictures about adultery -- at the relationship of an unmarried woman, Daisy, to two men, one of whom, Dan O'Mara, is married, the other a widowed veteran, Peter Lapham, who is suffering from PTSD -- not only from his wartime experience but also from the death of his wife. It's a "woman's picture" par excellence, but without the melodrama and directorial condescension that the label suggests: Each of the three principals is made into a credible, complex character, not only by the script and director but also by the performances of the stars. Crawford is on the cusp of her transformation into the hard-faced harridan of her later career: She had just won her Oscar for Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945), and was beginning to show her age, which was 42, a time when Hollywood glamour becomes hard to maintain. But her Daisy Kenyon has moments of softness and humor that restore some of the glamour even when the edges start to show. Andrews, never a star of the magnitude of either Crawford or Fonda, skillfully plays the charming lawyer O'Mara, trapped into a marriage to a woman who takes her marital frustrations out on their two daughters. Although he is something of a soulless egoist, he finds a conscience when he takes on an unpopular civil rights case involving a Japanese-American -- and loses. Set beside his two best-known performances, in Preminger's Laura (1944) and in William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), his work here demonstrates that he was an actor of considerable range and charisma. Fonda is today probably the most admired of the three stars, but he had always had a distant relationship with Hollywood: He suspended his career for three years to enlist in the Navy during World War II, and after making Daisy Kenyon to work out the remainder of his contract with 20th Century-Fox  he made a handful of films before turning his attention to Broadway, where he stayed for eight years, until he was called on to re-create the title role in the film version of Mister Roberts (John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy, 1955). Of the three performances in Daisy Kenyon, Fonda's seems the least committed, but his instincts as an actor kept him on track.