Deep Valley (1947) is a
movie where the telling of the story is probably more important than the story
itself; indeed, what is likely to be most memorable to the audience is the
poetic cinematography by cameraman Ted McCord.
In post-World War II Hollywood, film noir was sometimes deliciously
softened and morphed into romance by introspective sensitivity.
This
is our entry in The 1947
Blogathon
hosted by Shadows and Satin, and Speakeasy blogs. Have a look here at the other great bloggers
participating.
Directed
by Jean Negulseco, we get the feeling Deep
Valley was a warm-up for his Johnny
Belinda the following year. The plot
is familiar—a troubled young woman suffering from some handicap and shut off
from the outside world is visited by an equally troubled stranger who will
change her life. Ida Lupino plays the
young woman with a natural, glowing gentleness.
She is isolated on her parents’ remote property on the California coast,
and traumatized by her parents’ estrangement.
They live on separate floors of the house and do not communicate.
Veteran actress Fay Bainter is her self-pitying mother who playacts an invalid to punish her
rough husband. Henry Hull is Ida’s
scruffy, resentful father, who perhaps—though this is never really
explored—feels guilty for the final argument which tore him and his wife apart
when he struck her.
Ida
Lupino is their whipping boy, the daughter caught between them, dismissed, used
as a servant to clean and cook, but the worst torment for her is her parents’
hatred of each other and their failure to express any affection for her. The poor girl is starved for a kind word, let
alone affection. Her tearful pleading for
a sign of any love in the house once she can finally find the words is
heartbreaking. Only her dog shows her
any devotion. She escapes the house when
she can and roams the woods with him, finding freedom in the outdoors. She stutters at home, but in the woods can
converse quietly with the squirrel she feeds, and he scrambles onto her back.
The
stranger is played by Dane Clark. He is
a convict on a chain gang who escapes.
He and Ida find each other in the woods, and fall in love. He is a well-meaning guy, whose quick temper
and lack of judgment has gotten him afoul with the law, but he is always
repentant afterwards and baffled, frustrated that he almost always does the
wrong thing. He is disillusioned by the
world, as isolated from it in his chains as she is a prisoner of her home—but
his love for her has a gentling influence.
He finds peace; she finds love and acceptance.
It’s
a kind of role in which I think Dane Clark was best used. Repeatedly referred to, ad nauseum, as the
poor man’s John Garfield, Dane Clark did not have Garfield’s strengths, his
particular way of playing the cussed and outcast. However, he had something Garfield did not: a
manner of vulnerability that is eloquent and heart-wrenching. I find I like Clark less in hard villain
roles because he does not play them as well as somebody like John
Garfield. There is a mask, like he’s
trying too hard. But give him a role
like this, where he can be on a knife-edge of anger and anguish, where he can
show his softer side as a tortured soul, and he’s wonderful.
A
few particularly great scenes: when
Garfield and Lupino lie along the brook and attempt to catch a fish, their
exuberance at their success, and physical closeness leading to their first
kiss, so much that we want to cheer the fish too.
The
scene where, Dane Clark hiding in the hay loft of the dilapidated old barn,
protected from the sheriff by Lupino, and she sneaks up the ladder to check on
him. He thinks it’s the sheriff after
him, and to defend himself, he grabs an old scythe. The long sharp blade glints in the dimness of
the barn as Ida’s head pops up into the loft.
We see Clark’s horrified, manic expression as he comes frighteningly
close to decapitating her, but for perhaps the first time in his life, he
pauses before he acts rashly. They stare
at each other a moment, she is acutely aware of the inner strength it took for
him to stop himself. His tortured,
sweaty face bears the look of a man clinging to the edge of sanity.
Wayne
Morris plays a construction engineer. A
highway is being carved out of the hillside where Lupino’s parents live, the
work being done by the convicts. Morris,
always a dependable actor, here is a nice, boring guy who has taken a fancy to
Ida. She has no feelings for him, but we
may wonder if there had been no Dane Clark in the picture, would she eventually
fall for the kind but dull Morris?
An
interesting subplot is the change in the relationship between Ida’s
parents. When Ida runs off, her mother
can no longer wallow in her self-absorbed and utterly phony invalidism. Fay Bainter gets dressed, goes downstairs for
the first time in seven years, and orders her husband to stand away from the
stove while she gets breakfast, as if she’d been doing it for years, as if she
just left the room for five minutes. He
takes her gruff and grudging take-charge attitude as a sign she has forgiven
him, and he becomes gentle in her presence.
They make small talk at the table over breakfast. This is a simple scene their daughter would
have loved—mother and father together, but it only happens when Ida’s absence
forces them to, for want of a better word, reconcile. It’s an intriguing, weird sort of
development, but it happens too fast and too automatically to be believed. There is an absurdity to it that does not
match the tone of the rest of the movie.
The
biggest problem with the plot, however, is that we know from the start that the
romance between Dane Clark and Ida Lupino is doomed. There is no hope for an escaped convict, no
happy ending, and the only relish from the brief relationship for either is the
epiphany that they have come to a greater understanding of themselves and have
found the ecstasy of love for a few hours.
At
the end, we see Miss Lupino and Mr. Morris standing atop a bluff, and he
putting his jacket over her shoulders to fend off the chilly breeze. She walks away, he follows. It is as if he will be the new man in her
life by default, but the emptiness in her eyes that she displayed at the
beginning of the film has returned.
What
lingers to the viewer are the sometimes stunning shots: The a construction
worker silhouetted against bright sunlight; the deep woods; the fine, shabby
detail of the house, and the intensity of the quiet close-ups on Dane Clark and
Ida Lupino. It is a dismal story, made
beautiful through the eye of cameraman Ted McCord and director Jean Negulesco.
*****************************
Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.
