What a great, I mean a great, beginning to The Lady Pays Off.  Linda Darnell is about to receive a teacher-of-the-year award.  Darnell, a teacher?  Anyway, she’s sitting at a formal dinner, ignoring a dull speech praising her education theories—that teaching should apparently combine pedagogy, motherhood, and best-friendship—while gazing into an aspic dessert.  Inside this round blobby stuff appears a round blobby face.  It’s a memory of a former beau, at the moment he’s proposing marriage to her; because, he explains, Darnell being a teacher and he an academic, they’ll produce—genius kids.

That aspic ends up even blobbier, as if it were the Blob itself.

Next, as she stares at a cigar in an ashtray, another recalled face appears, a cigar-smoking man offering marriage—so she can be a mother to his three kids.

So much for that Freudian stogie.

Lastly, she looks into a glass of water, into which a third remembered face appears, a man in a swimming pool, who proposes marriage because Darnell…is just like his Mom.

I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass for that glass…

Called up to accept the award, Darnell faces an expectant mob waiting for the expected words of wisdom—on what is needed for both teaching and motherhood—and she gives it to them.  “A bottle of whiskey,” she snarls, “and a psychiatrist.”

If a cheroot-puffing Blob had fallen on its rat’s ass right into that mob’s midst, the reaction couldn’t have been sweeter.

Now that’s a real Darnell moment:  The tough, no-nonsense dame belying the smooth, lady-like exterior, who states it cool, hard, and direct.  You see it in such iconic Darnell performances as in Fallen Angel and A Letter to Three Wives (which I wrote about here and here), and even a bit in her nicely done appearance in Everybody Does it (which I wrote about here).  And you get it in this early scene in The Lady Pays Off.  I laughed out loud at the punch line and settled down for what I thought would be a good time.  Nothing like watching a woman attack desserts, coronas, and glassware, and then topping it off by outraging the audience.  Just where would this film go next?

Unfortunately, it goes nowhere. I thought we might get the freeing of Darnell’s character, kicking over feminine gender expectations and smashing through sexual conventions.  Instead, we’re told she’s frustrated because men don’t view her as sexy—which, given Darnell’s obvious pulchritude, seems hard to believe—and, gambling away her disgruntlement in Reno, she runs up a hefty debt.  The casino owner (Stephen McNally), finding out she’s a teacher, tells her she can pay off what she owes by ministering to his small daughter, who has a tendency to “mope” around.  Teacher and Gambler snap at each other, then fall in love, then encounter obstacles, then kiss and make-up, etc., all the way to the expected finish.  Nothing new here, nothing…unexpected.

And nothing in the rest of this film matches either its terrific opening nor Darnell’s performance in those scenes—angry, defiant, disgusted, and fed up to the eyeteeth.  But for the next hour and 20 minutes she can only switch between cold rage at the shanghaiing casino owner and soppy sentiment over his child, who lives in isolated splendor in an empty beach house with only a few servants for company—why nobody can figure out that what the kid needs is to be outside playing with other kids is never addressed or explained.  It’s just a plot contrivance anyway, to set up Darnell fuming at McNally, if not behaving like Norma Shearer in a frigid mood.  Why not have her do something different?  Why not let Darnell run her own gambling joint?  Why not let her do something other than hang around and wait to be melted into the conventional blob of goo by a charmless Prince Charming?

What was it between Linda Darnell and Hollywood?  Why was it so hard to find vehicles for her?  Darnell was gorgeous, unusually so, deeply, darkly sensuous, like chocolate dipped in brandy.  She was also sexy and talented, with genuine star power, grabbing the eye and keeping the focus on her luscious self.  She could act both drama and comedy, and she was interesting, pulling out unexpected feelings and reactions in her characters.  Maybe it was that combination of stunning looks, macho temperament, and yet a subtle, affecting underlay of sadness and desire in her persona that puzzled studio bigwigs.  You sense she wasn’t satisfied with being decorative; camera angles weren’t her priority.

Darnell was a major star for a very short time.  Her best-remembered work was done from the mid-1940s through 1950, beginning with the films Summer Storm, Hangover Square, and Fallen Angel—noirish melodramas that not only changed her image from a simpering ingenue (in such early films as Day-Time Wife and Blood and Sand) into a femme fatale, but unveiled, per her biographer, Ronald Davis, “both Linda’s histrionic abilities and her newly revealed physical attributes.”  She’s startling and memorable in these films:  Wily, captivating, sensually direct, sure of her power over every hapless male she encounters.  But she’s probably best known for A Letter to Three Wives, a role that highlighted her voluptuous, sexually knowing screen persona, while also demonstrating just how deft, sharp, and rigorously focused her comedy playing could be.

Darnell is splendid in Wives; tough yet soft, hard yet yearning, and dead-on in all the shades and nuances of her character.  Her flashback sequence with Paul Douglas, as the working-class girl with enough looks and, especially, smarts, to know what she wants and how to get it, is the film’s best, the one that takes a conventional situation and makes it un-.  Darnell acts deliberately coy and manipulative—she lets us see the machinery working in her character’s mind, just as Douglas’s character, the blustering, socially insecure self-made man she’s out to snag, knows he’s being played and knows he’s sucker enough to fall.  Their scenes rise to the kind of edgy, played-on-a-precipice screwball romances of Preston Sturges, as in The Lady Eve or The Palm Beach Story—nasty but funny; as light as a soufflé, yet as fast and riveting to watch as a fencing match.  When Darnell finally announces her victory—“Happy New Year, Ma!  We’re gonna get married!”—you can’t help but laugh out loud, the way I did at her cigarettes-and-whiskey line reading in The Lady Pays Off.  It’s the Wives line I remember; funny, yet bittersweet, even a tad melancholy; and Darnell delivers it, in all its layers, with a rapier thrust.

Darnell did get to act in a Preston Sturges film, excellent, and alluring, as the young wife of an ageing, egomaniac spouse who suspects her of infidelity, in Unfaithfully Yours.  The film is a savage look at the vain, frightened, self-centered, and vengeful male libido, the comic treatment of its subject probably too strong for audiences at the time (it was not a box-office success).  Darnell plays her part on a precipice here; is she or is she not screwing around?  Darnell keeps you guessing.  Though she assures her husband of her innocence (Jonathan Lethem’s Criterion essay notes how it’s only her declaration, and not any solid proof, that’s given), there is her final close-up, as, glancing over her husband’s embracing shoulder, her eyes shift slightly, teasingly towards the audience, as if sharing an unspoken joke.  I bet Darnell was having fun with her part, overlaying it with the sugared sweetness of her earlier, good-little-wives roles, while letting us see that all may not be as it seems.  As Mayukh Sen wrote, “Seemingly throwaway nuances like these showcased Darnell’s ability to imbue even the most morally sacrosanct characters with specificity.”

By 1949-50, Darnell was at her peak, capped by a fine, hard-bitten performance as a weary, working-class widow dealing with the consequences of racial prejudice in No Way Out, a drama still timely and uncompromising today.  Yet soon it was all to slide down.  Darnell’s next three films, Two Flags West, The Thirteenth Letter, and The Guy Who Came Back, were conventional flicks in which, says David Shipman, she “played conventional parts in a conventional way.”  Around this time, 1951-52, two things happened:  Darnell signed on as a freelance player at Universal to make The Lady Pays Off; and 20th Century Fox, where she had been working since breaking into films in 1939, dropped her contract.  Now Darnell was on her own.

Per Davis, Darnell’s contract drop was within a trend, of major studios letting go their major stars “in a panic over the competition from television.”  You have to wonder, though, if Fox, by assigning their star to poor films, was also deliberately sabotaging her career.  Though Darnell, says Davis, was at first happy to be choosing her own parts rather than accepting studio assignments, I question her choice of Lady.  Apparently she liked the script; and its director, Douglas Sirk, who had guided her in her career-breakout performance in Summer Storm, had requested her.  But Sirk himself supposedly said he had “no feeling” for the film at all, and it shows; aside from a few interesting interior shots—Sirk arranging characters in interior space to suggest a psychological one—the film is ridiculously plotted and written, and ultimately forgettable.

As a piece of dreck, Lady unfortunately started another trend for Darnell.  Throughout the 1950s, dreck was mostly what Darnell was given—stuff like Saturday Island, Night Without Sleep, the unintentionally funny Zero Hour!, and Angels of Darkness, filmed in Italy.   But why?  She was still young and beautiful, still amazingly photogenic; she looked like a rose, one in full lustful prime.  She also took chances, as in This is My Love, a minor 1954 film with Dan Duryea, dismissed in its time, says Davis, as “grade B soap opera,” but, seen today, is a dark, difficult study of thwarted desires, with both Darnell and Duryea giving standout performances.  Per Davis, Darnell had hoped for the title role in Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa, even claiming the part was written for her.  Mankiewicz had been Darnell’s on-off lover for several years; he had directed her in both No Way Out and Wives; but he denied Contessa had been fashioned for her.  The part, as we know, went to Ava Gardner, Darnell learning of it only in the trade papers.  “It was,” Davis writes, “a humiliation from which she never recovered.”

I wouldn’t say that Darnell’s career slide began with Lady; she’d already been cast in trifles that didn’t equal the quality of such films, and scripts, as Unfaithfully Yours, Wives, and No Way Out.  By the time of Lady, though, she’d lost a bit of her bloom.  She looks a little heavier here, ripe to the point of bursting out of her bodice.  But the film wastes her as an Ice Maiden waiting for the Big Thaw.  That’s not Darnell; she didn’t need thawing.  She oozed sexual knowledge and power; she’s a dame in charge, lusting after freedom and self-control.  Whatever else, Darnell is different.  Conventional she’s not.

I think the 1950s—the era that celebrated sugar-dipped domestic goddesses à la June Allyson—didn’t know what to do with Darnell.  When she couldn’t fit in, she went quickly out of favor and style.  She belonged in the world of ice-cold noir and ruthless screwball comedy; and she’d probably have been great in the era of pre-Code.  Nobody could curl a lip the way she did.  Darnell wasn’t meant for sugar and spice, nor for The Taming of the Shrew.  No, she’s Boadicea charging the Roman army and liking it.  Someone should have crowned her with a breastplate and shield.

You can see the full film of The Lady Pays Off on YouTube here.  Darnell is the reason to watch.