Killer Content

This entry is about one of my favorite movies: Once More, My Darling (1949). Ms. Spenser and I taped it off of AMC, back in the eighties or nineties or whenever we recorded VHS tapes of cable channels, and AMC was a movie channel.

We watched it together many times over the years. I found myself daydreaming about the movie on lunch breaks or when out walking. I had things to say about Ann Blyth - so I started a blog as was the fashion of the time. But I don't think I've really said much about Ann Blyth on it.

Then let's talk about Robert Montgomery. who directed this, as well as starring. He plays Collier Laing, a very minor actor from a rich family of lawyers. He is perfect in every way and extremely handsome (Maybe he wrote this too). His mother, Jame Cowl, wants him to give up acting (and running around with women), take up law and settle down. But before he has to make up his mind, he gets a telegram from the government. He's been drafted - re-activated.

You're going to have to take this next part on faith. It's the plot of the movie. You see, a notorious jewel thief has disappeared, but left a necklace with his girl. To flush out the thief, they want to make him jealous, which means Montgomery has been drafted to seduce the girl.

And the girl is Ann Blyth.

When he first meets her, he doesn't recognize her as his assignment. She is dressed in tennis shorts, a tee shirt that says "KILLER", big sun glasses and a ball cap. She tells him right away that he is a very attractive man. He basically tells her, go away kid. But once he realizes it's her, he starts the seduction - except that she has already fallen for him, and wants him all to herself.

Before their first date, she wants to meet his mother, who's hosting a party for a few legal sorts. She shows up in her pajamas (she snuck out of bed), doused in perfume. The maid, Lillian Randolph, says she could wear those pajamas to the races, and inhales the perfume deeply (while everyone else is gagging on it). See, it's always the black actors in the tiny roles who know what's what. 

Her scene at the party is brilliant. She is socially correct, doesn't want to intrude, remembers all the guests names, and speaks quite freely about love at first sight, "youth calling to youth", and her attraction to Cowl's son.

But by the next day, it seems like she wants to get married. Immediately, in Las Vegas.

Blyth is wonderful here. Of course, she's beautiful, a sort of elfin beauty, with a high forehead, almond eyes and a tiny nose and chin. But the way she plays Killer! As she tells Montgomery, she's nineteen years old, American, her friends tell her she isn't bad looking, and as for money, she's rolling in it. She's nearly perfect and she is going to get him if it's the last thing she does.

Montgomery is good too, but he's 45 and looks it, or worse. Blyth is 24 and having no trouble playing 19. The idea that teenagers would go nuts over him might have worked for Cary Grant, but for him ... well, just suspend disbelief. Anyway, he's directing so of course.

In conclusion, Blyth is playing a very particular type of teenaged girl, a very serious, intelligent girl who thinks she's sophisticated and adult, who's just as ditzy as any bobbysoxer in her own way. We don't see it that often.