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.

In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950)

The "lonely place" is Hollywood, where Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) is a screenwriter with a barely held-in-check violent streak. This celebrated movie contains one of Bogart's best performances, though it looks and feels like the low-budget production it was. Bogart's own company, Santana, produced it for release through Columbia, instead of Bogart's employer, Warner Bros., which may explain why, apart from Bogart and Gloria Grahame, the supporting cast is so unfamiliar: The best-known face among them is Frank Lovejoy, who plays Bogart's old army buddy, now a police detective. In a Lonely Place seems to be set in a different Hollywood from the one seen in the year's other great noir melodrama, Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. There are no movie star cameos and glitzy settings in the Bogart film. What this one has going for it, however, is a haunting, off-beat quality, along with some surprising heat generated between Bogart and Grahame, who plays Laurel Gray, a would-be movie actress with an intriguing, only partly glimpsed past. She has, for example, a rather bullying masseuse (Ruth Gillette), who seems to be a figure out of this past. In fact, the whole film is made up of enigmatic figures, including Steele's closest friends, his agent, Mel Lippman (Art Smith), and an aging alcoholic actor, Charlie Waterman (Robert Warwick). Both of them stick with Steele despite his tendency to fly off the handle: He insults and at one point even slugs the agent, while at another he defends the actor with his fists against an insult. Though the central plot has to do with Steele's being suspected of murdering a hat-check girl (Martha Stewart) he brought to his apartment to tell him the plot of a novel he's supposed to adapt, the film is less a murder mystery than a study of a damaged man and his inability to overcome whatever made him that way. And despite the usual tendency of Hollywood films to end with a resolution by tying up loose ends, In a Lonely Place leaves its characters as tensely enigmatic as they were at the start -- perhaps even more so. The screenplay by Andrew Solt reworked Edmund H. North's adaptation of a novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, with much help from director Ray.