Vincente Minnelli (1958)
The people who made it seem to have thought that, because it’s ‘frothy’, it can be nonsensical in terms of its basic premise. To be fair to William Douglas-Home, that wasn’t the case with his 1955 stage play, on which the film is based. In the play, Jane Broadbent, the title character, is an English girl whose neurotic mother wants to see her successfully and suitably paired off in the course of the debutante season. In the movie, Jane is – for Hollywood star casting purposes – an American just arrived in London (for how long isn’t clear). Her parents are divorced, her own mother is still in the US, and the frantic driving force behind the deb campaign that Jane doesn’t want to be a part of, is her father Jimmy’s new, young wife Sheila – whom Jane’s never met before. Why would this American girl feel any kind of obligation to play along with her stepmother’s stupid vicarious ambitions in a social world that means nothing to her?
Rex Harrison was between the Broadway and West End productions of My Fair Lady when he filmed The Reluctant Debutante and you keep hearing Henry Higgins – especially when Jimmy Broadbent expresses his exasperation with what-all-these-damned-women-are-up-to. It’s an expert but characteristically lazy performance, which involves a fair amount of mugging. Sheila Broadbent is perhaps the film role for which Kay Kendall is best remembered; even now, it’s poignant to watch because this was the last of her movies released during Kendall’s lifetime (her final film, Once More With Feeling, came out after her death). She does have great personal style – and she wears the Balmain clothes sensationally – but it’s not a style that chimes with the character she’s playing: Kay Kendall is too eccentrically modern to convince as a woman obsessed with success in such a constrained and ridiculous world as the debs’ balls circuit. Her line readings are pleasingly free compared with most of the rest of the cast but she’s required to be so frenetic that she becomes rather wearing. For much of the time, Sandra Dee as Jane looks more than reluctant – more like resentful – but who can blame her? She doesn’t exactly liven things up but she’s competent and, because the situation that Jane’s stuck in is so annoyingly implausible, you really do want her to escape from it.
John Saxon, who plays David Parkson, the Italian-American that Jane falls in love with, isn’t a great actor but he has charm and, in this company, his underplaying is a relief. It’s typical of the material, which appears to satirise the English upper classes but deep down (if that’s the phrase) finds them adorable, that the supposedly disreputable David Parkson turns out to be an aristocrat. It’s also typical of the careless script that Saxon, although handsome, doesn’t at all answer to Sheila Broadbent’s description of David Parkson’s other attributes. She says he’s ‘tall and lean’. Saxon is quite square and shorter than Rex Harrison. Hardly any of the physical casting makes sense. Is Clarissa, daughter of Sheila’s cousin twice removed Mabel Claremont (‘Twice removed isn’t far enough’), meant to look like the back end of a bus and be desperate for a man? Her devotion to silly-arse David Fenner and his ignoring her seem to imply that. But Diane Clare as Clarissa is reasonably pretty and perfectly pleasant; since Peter Myers as Fenner is physically unprepossessing as well as personally repulsive, the relations of these two are baffling. (It’s even more baffling that Myers was the only member of the London stage cast who kept his role for the movie.) Because this David is unfortunate looking, you feel it’s he who must be the desperate one. This gives a rather distressing as well as an uncomfortable edge to the revelation that David tries to force his attentions on young women. Angela Lansbury’s verve and characterisation skills just about see her through as Mabel. Ambrosine Phillpotts, who played Lansbury’s part on stage, makes rather too much of her smaller role here as Jimmy Broadbent’s secretary.
A little of Douglas-Home’s wit goes a long way with me (he co-wrote the screenplay with Julius J Epstein) but there are problems putting The Reluctant Debutante on screen that aren’t to do with the deficiencies of the original. In the theatre, all the action takes place in Jimmy and Sheila’s flat. In the movie, the audience isn’t spared the tedium of the actual balls. The film was made in the year of the last debutante season, which the young Queen Elizabeth II had decided to abolish. There’s a single reference to this, clearly just stuck in for ‘topical’ effect, although it’s unbelievable that the demise of the deb balls wouldn’t have mattered to, and been a persisting subject of conversation between, people like Sheila Broadbent and Mabel Claremont. Watching this immediately after watching Some Came Running (for a second time), it was hard to believe they were the work of the same director. There’s a lot wrong with Some Came Running but it has real visual life and atmosphere (and fine lead performances). Vincente Minnelli may have been intrigued by the social peculiarity of The Reluctant Debutante but this gruesome movie is one of his worst.
13 May 2012
