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One year ahead of Ray's The Lusty Men, the arena empty but for windblown rubbish. Of stage mothers and ingénue prodigies, a transposed showbiz portrait. "My daughter's going to have everything. Everything I missed." Domesticity scarcely curbs the ambition of the Santa Monica housewife (Claire Trevor), she and her husband (Kenneth Patterson) keep separate beds pushed against each other so that the headboards split the screen vertically, he reaches for her hand but her nails are wet. Their daughter (Sally Forrest) meanwhile has her own divided frame outside, a picket fence between herself and the country-club "dogcatcher" (Robert Clarke). So it goes with a stark mise en scène keyed to the tennis court, the path to stardom as a zone of nets and lines. (The young protagonist's introduction pushes the abstraction even further, a ball smacking numbered boxes painted on a garage door.) "I'm always interested in a winner" is the byword of the coach-interloper (Carleton G. Young), elsewhere is voiced the motto of Ida Lupino the filmmaker: "I like a tough game." A recomposition of Sherman's The Hard Way for an ambivalent view of feminine drive, the champion posed behind a headless mannequin or warped by a grilled locker-room door. "Sure you're frightened. You're happy, aren't you?" Endorsements, stunts, mechanics of fame. A wedding is planned for the European tour publicity, the fiancé bails: "Drop me a postcard some time. I'm starting a collection." Piccadilly Circus neon seen from the sterile hotel room, a proper pad for the hardened heroine clutching a wind-up teddy bear. "A girl's best friend is your mother, and all that sort of thing." It builds to the vacant stadium and Trevor with discarded trophy and hurt gaze, an invisible match playing for the benefit of Antonioni's Blow-Up. With Marcella Cisney, Joseph Kearns, William Hudson, and George Fisher. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |