Charles Vidor (1955)

I knew nothing about the singer Ruth Etting (1897-1978) but it’s hard to believe Doris Day wasn’t wrong for the role.  A cursory glance at Etting’s Wikipedia entry suggests that the screenwriters Daniel Fuchs and Isabel Lennart (the former won an Oscar for ‘Best Story’ for this picture) simplified and sanitised Etting’s biography for the screen.  Nevertheless, the film begins in Chicago in the 1920s and is located throughout at an intersection of the worlds of show business and organised crime, a place where the congenitally well-behaved Doris Day does not belong.  Marty Snyder (James Cagney) – the owner of the club in which the film audience first encounters Ruth Etting and the man who becomes her manager and husband – was a Chicago gang boss.   Etting is desperate to break into the big time and is prepared to use Snyder, who becomes besotted with her, in order to do so.  At the start, she’s performing on stage as one of a group of dancers.  That she can’t dance is meant to be painfully evident but her clumsy moves, as expressed by Doris Day, come across as perfectly executed mistakes.

Immediately self-assured and a fully realised vocal talent as soon as she opens her mouth to sing, Day doesn’t remotely suggest someone so desperately hungry for success that she’ll sell her soul.  Later in the film, when Ruth Etting has become a star, Day performs ‘Ten Cents a Dance’.  She makes a few, perfunctory raunchy movements but remains invincibly wholesome – as far away as one can imagine from the persona of the tawdry, weary taxi dancer who’s meant to be delivering the Lorenz Hart lyrics.  Doris Day is clearly trying hard not to be her usual perky self but she doesn’t go much deeper than withholding her brilliant-white smile.  She’s ill-served too by her costumes (by Helen Rose) and hairdo (by Sydney Guilaroff):  thanks to these accoutrements, Ruth Etting is perfectly groomed from the start, which reinforces the lack of development in Day’s characterisation.  Worse, her appearance (at this distance in time, anyway) suggests the 1950s rather than two or three decades earlier.  That goes for the look of the film more generally (the DoP was Arthur E Arling and Cedric Gibbons headed the team of art directors).  Every location seems spacious and spotless, whether it’s a supposedly poky dressing room, a gloomy police station or a swanky New York or Hollywood apartment.

As Marty Snyder, James Cagney dominates Love Me or Leave Me.   The naturally dynamic rhythm of his walk, emphasised by Snyder’s gammy leg, gives ‘Moe the Gimp’, as he’s also known, the look of a creature of vaudeville as much as of gangland but it brings to life every scene in which Cagney appears.  In the first half of the film, the emphasis on Snyder’s infatuation with Ruth limits Cagney’s opportunities to dramatise the predicament of a man who is used to being in charge but who now finds himself in a more complicated power struggle.  But Cagney is compelling in the later stages of the story, as Marty Snyder becomes more violently tyrannical.  You feel the discrepancy between this display of apparent power and his increasing insecurity about his marriage to Ruth.  Although the two stars don’t exactly strike sparks off each other, Cagney and Doris Day do make you feel how grimly impacted Etting and Snyder’s relationship is:  he feels he can’t control her yet she feels trapped.  The film also features creditable performances from Cameron Mitchell, as the pianist and musical arranger who loves Ruth (and who became her second husband), and Robert Keith, as a principled agent.   The use of music as dramatic accompaniment, as distinct from the musical numbers, is unusually sparing for a product of mid-1950s Hollywood.  The last shot of the final sequence, in which Doris Day sings the title song, is oddly striking too:  Charles Vidor, rather than closing in on his leading lady, pulls the camera back from the diminishing figure on the stage.

5 December 2014