Only Angels Have Wings - 1939 repost

Only Angels Have Wings (1939) is a quintessential film of 1939, I would suggest for two reasons. First, its “boys’ own adventure” type story of a band of mail flyers in South America would be the end of the Depression era adventures, the last bit of intrigue in a far away land before World War II, a more gruesome adventure which would turn very young real-life fliers into men under horrific circumstances and in which many were killed -- not because the luck of the draw or the stern mistress of fate as in this movie, but because an enemy nation just as well equipped and just as determined, destroyed them. The aimless flyers in Only Angels Have Wings haven’t any such worries. They are not responsible for a nation’s freedom. They can’t even be responsible for themselves. Somewhere out there in the tropical mist, we are on the cusp of a more treacherous world, a more grown-up world. One gets the feeling Cary Grant is trying to hold it off as long as possible.

The second element that makes this movie such a prime example of 1939 is the presence of character actor Thomas Mitchell, who played in five of the top movies that golden year, all winners. Besides this one, he was in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (which we covered here), Gone with the Wind (which we covered here), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (which we covered here), and Stagecoach, for which he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. It’s not a 1939 film without Thomas Mitchell.



For classic movie buffs, 1939 has always been regarded as the banner year, when the Hollywood movie factories churned out on their assembly lines a greater than usual number of excellent films. This post is part of the Classic Movie Blog Association “Classic Films of 1939 Blogathon” which runs from May 15th through the 17th. Have a look here at the website for a listing of bloggers and their 1939 films. Looks like a lot of great reading.

In this essay, I’d like to look at Only Angels Have Wings through the prism of 1939 and not so much about what we know about that year, but what we may have forgotten about it. The biggest thing we often forget is that we’re watching current events. This film marks the end of a timeline in an era, though I rather imagine director Howard Hawks, himself a former flier, would not have recognized that when he made it. It had only been some 12 years previous to the making of this movie that Charles A. Lindbergh, “Lucky Lindy” flew the first non-stop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. That generation of seat-of-the-pants fliers like Lindy and Amelia Earhart, the Granville Brothers, and Bessie Coleman, were still part of the American popular culture; though some of them had already been killed in their daring exploits, their fame had not yet flown into history. These were still the days when airplane flight brought out the press and the newsreels cameras, where records made for huge headlines and parades. Most people alive in 1939 could remember a time when there were no airplanes.

A week or so after Only Angels Have Wings premiered in May 1939, an unusually large number of the original cast, including Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, Richard Barthelmess, Rita Hayworth, and Thomas Mitchell, and even some original actors in very minor roles, appeared in a radio script version broadcast by Lux Radio Theater. Have a listen to the show here, now in public domain, at the Internet Archive site. Scroll down the year 1939 until you get to May 29th.

Between the 2nd and 3rd acts, the show’s producer and host, Cecil B. DeMille, interviewed on radio hookup from New York City the captain of the Yankee Clipper that had just that week made headlines by inaugurating the first commercial airline service from the United States to Europe. This was not a movie stunt, this was real life. The four propeller engine plane held a crew of 14 and could carry 74 passengers, and the mail. The captain announced, “That means we have at last conquered the Atlantic.” The flight took 25 hours.

Here is a newsreel of the event (Remember to scroll down to the bottom of the page to mute the music so you can hear the video):






The world suddenly got smaller, and inter-continental travel got easier (if you consider a 25-hour flight in a propeller plane easy). Only Angels Have Wings, is a product of this world where pilots were regarded as daredevils and pioneers, not yet corporate executives or administrators.

There is an inherent comic book feel to this movie, though again, I’m sure Mr. Hawks did not intend that. Consider how the pilots wear their holstered side arms below the belts of their high-waisted pants, their cuffs rolled up to show their boots. Black leather jackets with faded World War I insignia, and broad-brimmed straw hats to suggest a rakishness that is permissible in a area of law by mutual consent, opportunities built on enormous risks, too much liquor and a few carefully chosen (by the director, at least) women. Except for these last two points, we might be watching a film version of the popular comic strips Terry and the Pirates or Smilin’ Jack.

Here in this world of rattan shades and bamboo furniture, tropical birds and strumming guitars, Cary Grant is boss of a fledging airline running mail from a small port city of Barranca (you know you want to say it. Go ahead: “Calling Barranca, calling Barranca!”) to villages and mining camps far up the Andes. We are in South America, and the only premonition we get of the war to come is the Latin American music, which will have a huge impact beginning in the next year when after war broke out in Europe, we strengthened military and commercial ties with Latin America. The samba and the rumba were not far behind.

Jean Arthur stumbles into Barranca off a tramp steamer one tropical night that delivers a handful of passengers, and cargo, and mail for the plane. She is a piano player, who has left her last troupe of entertainers in Panama. She’s on her own, as free, or as lost, as the men she encounters in the base camp run by Dutchy, played by Sig Ruman. Most of the action of the film takes place in his bar/restaurant/hotel/air field. It is almost like Rick’s Café Americain in Casablanca (which we discussed here) only without the Nazis, or the refugees.

Casablanca, despite being almost entirely confined to Rick’s, gives us a closer look, and better acquaintance with the local setting and people. Only Angels Have Wings gives us only a brief look at the locals, when Jean Arthur enters another saloon that seems to cater only to them, and enjoys, and sings along with, vibrant Spanish music and dance. She is courageous enough to explore and appreciate. Cary Grant and his boys only buy drinks for, and we assume, sleep with, local girls from time to time. They don’t bother with the local culture too much. Their clubhouse is an island unto itself. An American 1939 fantasy.

Two happy go lucky fliers chat up Jean and bring her to their clubhouse for drinks and steaks, and take turns flirting with her. One, played by a young Noah Beery, Jr., is sent by the boss, Cary Grant, on a late night mail run, but there is bad weather and he returns in a risky landing. The film is barely ten minutes old and we have a ghastly crash while Grant, Miss Arthur, and Grant’s best pal, Thomas Mitchell look on, horrified.



Jean Arthur, sassy and street smart, is crushed by this tragedy, and finds herself equally exasperated with, and attracted to, flippant Cary Grant. In matters of everyday living she is in firm control and nobody’s fool, but in love…she is utterly helpless.

Mr. Grant plays the cynical, smart aleck leader. It would be interesting to have seen Humphrey Bogart in the role, to have his calm stoicism play against a jittery Jean Arthur. He would have given the character a soulfulness, a back story of pain and hard luck just in his glance. Bogie always walks in the door with his own back story, the way some actors might show up for auditions with their own costumes. Despite his veneer of danger, he has a code of honor, while Cary Grant has no such nobility. He is really a condescending rogue. He sizes up Jean Arthur with the taunting remark, “Chorus girl?”

But Cary Grant, as handsome as it gets and just coming off his hero-adventurer stint in Gunga Din (1939) is right for the role in his charm, his boyish devil-may-care attitude, and especially his under-the-surface neediness. There is an inkling of brittleness to his bravado that is intriguing. He talks a great game of fatalistic acceptance of risk and death, but he clings to Thomas Mitchell as his chief emotional burden and his greatest friendship, for whom he takes heartsick responsibility and from whom he receives love and understanding he gets from no one else…until Jean Arthur comes along.

She is the lone woman who infiltrates the boys’ clubhouse. She says “Down the hatch” when she drinks her bourbon with Noah Beery, Jr. and Allyn Joslyn (for more on Allyn Joslyn, have a look at Caftan Woman’s recent post here), but she’s still a lady. She bristles at being passed along, and at being taken for granted. Eventually, she starts to blend in with the boys, after Cary Grant has shaken her, physically as well as emotionally, bawling her out for bawling the boys out when they display no mourning over the death of the flyer Joe Souther.

“Who’s Joe?” they scoff.

In a sweet bit of consoling, which is reprised later in the film, Victor Kilian, who plays the radio operator “Sparks,” confesses he got the same treatment when he was a newbie. Jean unburdens herself to the gentle, sad-faced Mr. Kilian,

“You know, all my life I’ve hated funerals. The fuss and bother never brings anybody back and it just spoils remembering them as they really are. And when I see people actually facing it that way, I act like a sap.”

She remembers the pain of her father’s sudden, violent death. She is alone in the world and so she grabs onto life with both hands, traveling by herself, not fearing to explore, or expose herself to emotional commitment. She is braver than Mr. Grant in this respect.

To make amends for her “unmanly” outburst of grief at Joe’s death, she wanders back into the bar and interrupts a jam session at the piano, taking over the keys herself, and banging out Sophie Tucker’s old theme song “Some of These Days.” Jean Arthur actually looks like she’s playing the piano here; she fakes it well. Most stars tinkling the ivories for a film role usually looked like they are mixing meatloaf with their hands.

Here’s the clip:





“Who’s Joe?” Grant tests her.

“Never heard of him.”

Later, alone at the piano as the bar empties out, she begins the leaden strains of “Lebestraum,” but catches herself before she gets too maudlin. Joe’s personal effects are brought in, only a handful of trinkets, and Cary Grant, per their ritual, allows anyone to take what they want. He offers the trinkets to Jean, and she takes a watch, the most expensive thing.

“You’ve got a good eye,” Grant sneers at her, insinuating that she is just a gold-digging chorus girl after all.

She gives him a look of disgust and mutters in a low voice, just short of growl, “Say, somebody must have given you an awful beating once.” It’s as good a putdown as anybody ever gave to Grant, and as truthful. He begins to change his opinion of her, for her honest challenge, and because she immediately gives the gift to the local girl who grieves the most for Joe. Grant is rebuffed, and impressed.

Miss Arthur is not far from the mark when she suggests someone has treated him badly. We get his version of a former love who tried to ground him with her possessiveness. It is also a warning to Jean not to try to do the same. He invites her to his room, and she accepts, but then he steers her out the door back to the boat. It’s a teasing game, and he blinks first. But when the fog clears and he must take the next mail plane out, he grabs her in a hasty kiss, and she is hooked. We know this, because she’s still there when he returns in the morning.

He irritably puts her off again, and she questions her own mixed up feelings and lack of judgment, “I don’t know whether this is me or another fella.”

Only Jean Arthur could say a line like that and be believed, just like she’s probably the only actress who can use interjections like “Hey!” “Say!”, “Gee whiz!” and “Jeepers” and have it sound profound.

There’s nobody that does that uncomfortable, “caught in the act” look quite like Jean.

But Grant is chafing over this clingy female, and the fear of commitment, and he demands she take the next boat, which won’t come until next week because, “Yes, they have no bananas” as Thomas Mitchell points out. Grant stomps away, and Jean is embarrassed and crestfallen.

“I’ve never quite made such a chump of myself.” Fortunately, Grant’s buddy becomes her buddy and he comforts her. Too bad she didn’t fall in love with Thomas Mitchell. (During the Lux Radio Theater broadcast of “Only Angels Have Wings,” Mr. DeMille thanked Jean Arthur and Thomas Mitchell for taking a week off from their current filming of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to do the radio show.)

The movie shifts gears and we have the introduction of Richard Barthelmess, last seen here in Heroes for Sale (1933), as a new flier with a fake name and a mysterious past. Rita Hayworth is his pretty young wife. She doesn’t know that years before he piloted a plane that was going down in flames, and he bailed out, leaving his mechanic on board to die. Ever since then he has been shunned by other fliers.

He doesn’t know that she is Cary Grant’s former lover.


The subplots of this movie keep the pace moving nicely. Another subplot is Thomas Mitchell’s fading eyesight, which prompts Cary Grant to ground him. Mitchell is noble about it, accepting, and Cary Grant is torn up. His booting a chair across the room is his only expression of emotion about how badly he feels.

The mechanic who died in Richard Barthelmess’ plane was Thomas Mitchell’s younger brother. When Mr. Barthelmess is found out, he is shunned here, again, by these pilots, as he always is wherever he goes from job to job. He withstands Cary Grant’s barbs with stoic, self-deprecating sarcasm, but Grant offers him a few dangerous jobs one else will take to earn his boat passage out of here. Including flying nitroglycerin, which he drops on condors.

Barthelmess is great in this role, a man doomed by his own guilt, haunted and too self-punishing even to look for redemption. We look in his expressive dark eyes and maybe we recall the The Dawn Patrol (1933) and other hero roles not so many years ago, but seemingly a lifetime for this now middle-aged man.

Another element is keeping up the pace is the constant and subtle shifts into humor. There are glib remarks and pratfalls. The proud Spanish-speaking company doctor, played by Lucio Villegas, who Barthelmess is ordered to fly up to a mining camp to treat an injured man is insulted by the suggestion that it might be too dangerous, and spouts a soliloquy from Shakespeare about courage while Grant tries to placate him and shut him up.

Another element is the periodic flying scenes that take us breathlessly up the mountain passes and across rugged terrain in a craft that looks like to be little more than a wood crate with wings. The aerial photography is spectacular. Though some of it is models, it’s all breathtaking action. At one point, Barthelmess must take off from a narrow cliff with not enough room to taxi, so he taxis the plane right off the ledge and picks up the wind currents on the drop, like a kite, in a stomach-turning descent.

It is these successful daring tasks and precise flying that earns Barthelmess Grant’s grudging respect. Eventually, however, Rita Hayworth (Judy, Judy, Judy) wants to know why her husband is always treated like dirt. She is still in the dark about his past. We have a reunion scene between the former lovers Hayworth and Grant, but we can see that there are no more sparks between them. Miss Hayworth is in love with her husband, and Mr. Grant is just as fed up with her as when she tried to tame him.



It would have been more interesting, I think, to have Grant and Hayworth still attracted to each other, then the foursome would really be caught in a dilemma; each would be forced into making decisions about their lives instead of just letting things happen.  Perhaps Howard Hawks felt he had enough subplots.

More humor when Grant catches the stumbling Jean Arthur eavesdropping on their conversation, and Jean slowly starts to enter the picture again, waiting out a nail-biting test flight of Grant’s that has her getting sick to her stomach. Again, comforted with kind words and a Bromo-Seltzer from Thomas Mitchell. She confides again her love of Grant to him.

“I know I’m a fool, but I can’t do anything about it,” she whimpers. She recognizes, and envies, Mitchell’s close relationship with Grant.

“You love him, don’t you, Kid?”

“Yes, I guess I do.”

“Why can’t I love him the way you do, sneer when he tries to kill himself, be proud when he doesn’t? Why couldn’t I be there to meet him when he got back? What do you do when he doesn’t come back when you expect him to?”

Mitchell’s tortured expression and body English tells us there’s been many a time he got sick with worry over Grant. “I go nuts.”

Another comic, but sexy scene is when Jean Arthur sneaks into Grant’s room so she can use his bathtub. Grant enters, and they bristle and irritate, and flirt, and laugh. Rita pops in, and a terrific jealous exchange between her and Jean:

“Maybe I’d better go,” Jean offers.

“No, please don’t,” Rita replies, with raised eyebrows and an arch expression.

“I really didn’t intend to.”


But Rita is not really jealous, she’s affirmed that she loves her husband and will let the past go.

Another comic bit when Grant sees Arthur limping and he picks her up in his arms. She tells him she’s not hurt, she just broke the heel of her shoe.

“Imagine,” she says, “Losing one heel right after another.” They kiss, and she promises there will be no tying him down or asking him to give up flying.

“You don’t have to be afraid of me anymore.” What a line, as comforting as it is accusing. The screenwriter gives her more gold,

“There’s nothing I can do about it, I just love you. That’s all. I feel the same way about you the Kid does.”

It’s an honest assessment of his relationship with Thomas Mitchell, who puts a coat over Grant’s shoulders on a chilly night, brings him coffee and worries that he doesn’t get enough sleep, lights his cigarettes. (Everybody seems to light Grant’s cigarettes in this movie.) He does what he can do for his chum, then he wanders into the background. It’s the kind of relationship with which Grant is comfortable, and the only kind he can accept from Jean.

He’s still not a committing kind of guy, but something happens to open up a place on Grant’s dance card.

Yeah, a great big old cast-iron spoiler here. Read on at your peril.

Another flight must be undertaken to meet a needed contract, but the only ones who can take this assignment are Barthelmess and Mitchell. Destiny takes a hand, and the man with the guilt, and the man with the hatred for the guilty party who got his kid brother killed are riding the skies together.

The plane runs into trouble, a fire on board, and they crash, but Barthelmess will not bail out this time. With superb flying, he brings the plane to the ground. He is badly burned, but Thomas Mitchell is fatally injured.

Afterwards, the fliers welcome Barthelmess into the fraternity and place a drink in his bandaged hands. Manuel Alvarez Maciste plays guitar and sings a sad Spanish tune that soothes and laments at the same time. Mitchell’s personal effects are laid out on the bar in a handkerchief. This time, Cary Grant does not cynically offer the goods to anyone. He takes the small bundle to his room to be alone with them.

It’s different with Mitchell. Nobody’s going to say, “Who’s the Kid?” at his death. Mr. Grant’s manly code of élan in the face of death does not extend to his dearest friend. Maybe he’s a hypocrite. Maybe he’s human. The men who call him “Papa” because he is their leader in their tight-knit male hierarchy will not see him cry, but Jean does.

Another smoothly comic bit when Jean, antsy and pacing outside Grant’s office just before she leaves for the boat meets with Victor Kilian again, who whispers to her,

“Aren’t you going to say goodbye to him? I think you ought to.”

Jean, surprised, clinging to hope, “You do?”

“I think he’d want you to.”

“You sure? I don’t mind doing it if you say so.”

“I do say so.”

“You do?”

With Kilian’s blessing, she enters Grant’s office, mumbling defensively that Kilian wanted her to.

It runs that knife edge between silliness and deeply touching.

She practically begs Grant to ask her to stay, but he vacillates. He wants her to stay, because he needs somebody. He’s just about to say something, when we hear from the radio once more:

“Calling Barranca! Calling Barranca!”

The weather clears, and there is one last chance to make their contract, so Grant scrambles to his plane. This time Jean’s plea has a disgusted, angry tone.

“I’m hard to get Geoff. All you have to do is ask me.”

He can’t, but he suggests they flip a coin, and it is not until after he leaves that she realizes it is Thomas Mitchell’s two-headed coin.

It’s the closest he can come to asking her to stay, and she does. We may wonder if she’s getting the short end of the stick staying with a man so emotionally close, or so proud, or so hurt, or so juvenile he cannot comfort her with a simple “I love you.” Maybe it’s because he doesn’t. If he’s inscrutable to Jean, he is to us as well.

But this is not a world of commitments, because commitment suggests the possibility of a future, and in Barranca we are only concerned with the here and now. There will be many hasty commitments made, clung to, and perhaps regretted during the war that will follow in only a few more months.

Does anybody else feel sorry for the guy in the mountain lookout post, all by himself through the entire movie? Played by Don “Red” Barry, poor “Tex” never gets any company, except his mule.

Only Angels Have Wings made such an impression of movie audiences of the day that “Calling Barranca!” was a punch line for a while. A few cartoons used the gag, including Tex Avery’s Ceiling Hero (1940) and Saddle Silly (1941).


Perhaps some of you will remember the early 1980s TV show Tales of the Gold Monkey starring Stephen Collins. That was inspired by Only Angels Have Wings.

The banner year of 1939 gave us movies that were escapist in many ways, but inevitably truthful about who we were, and what we imagined about the world. Please have a look at the many other blogs participating in this blogathon. Special thanks to Becky of “Classic Becky’s Brain Food” and Page of “My Love of Old Hollywood” for organizing the fun.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.  Her new book, a collection of posts from this blog - Hollywood Fights Fascism - is available here on Amazon.

Once More, My Darling - 1949

Once More, My Darling (1949) is one of the funniest comedies of the era, and one of the most charming ever made.  I’m not sure why it’s not more well known because it deserves to be lumped with the greats, especially in the madcap heiress genre.  Perhaps because it is so deliciously offbeat, it requires, just as Robert Montgomery discovers, you have to accept certain things at face value.  Its humor is more gentle and subtle than broad, a kind of hybrid between the screwball comedies of the 1930s and a more wry, introspective humor.

The title comes from the speech star (and director) Robert Montgomery delivers on set as a struggling movie actor. 

It’s a funny scene, where he has trouble proclaiming his love to thin air, so the director gets him a body to talk to—a bored and uncomfortable movie grip played by Jack Overman.  Mr. Montgomery looks equally uncomfortable with this situation, but he plods ahead proclaiming his love to Mr. Overman, who is deeply affected.

Montgomery is actually a lawyer, from a noted family of lawyers, but is bored with the work and, now that the war is over (where he served in the Army in Europe as an investigations officer in the military police), he wants to pursue a fanciful dream of acting.  He is smart, savvy, a bit of a ladies’ man who doesn’t want to be tied down to anything—not a wife, not his family’s law practice, and not the Army.  Unfortunately for him, he’s still considered Reserve status, and is called back to uniform to help in the investigation of a jewel theft that happened late in the war.

When he is called into the colonel’s office, he firmly responds, “I will not go in without my mother.”

He immediately attracts the attention of everyone in the office.  His mother, standing with dignity beside him, is played by theatre great Jane Cowl.  She is an even better lawyer than Montgomery is, and he wants her there as his attorney to get him out of the army.  She doesn’t do it though, because she really wants him to give up this silly acting hobby, get married, and join the law firm.

The case to which Mr. Montgomery is assigned involves Ann Blyth, who plays the daughter of a wealthy American industrialist who spends his time between the US and South America.  The jewel thief, like a lot of shady characters in the post-war years, left Europe for South America, met Ann and attempted to woo her with the stolen jewels.  She is innocent about the heist, but she has publically worn the jewels, notably in a magazine advertisement for perfume she did as a lark.  The government wants Robert Montgomery to woo Miss Blyth himself to flush the jealous bad guy out of hiding so they can nab him.

It’s a simple plot that is carried along with effervescent silliness and beguiling charm.  Robert Montgomery smoothly straddles the savvy and in-control aspects of his character—and helplessly rides the crest of the completely goofy and out-of-control situations in which he finds himself.  He is not entirely a calculating straight man, like, say, Gregory Peck in RomanHoliday (1953), but not entirely a vulnerable and befuddled guy like Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby (1938) who sometimes seems like a sap Katharine Hepburn culled from the herd for amusement.  Montgomery is more mature and adapts to the moment like the kind of good improvisational actor his character yearns to be.

Here Mr. Montgomery plays out the split personality of his character—a capable man able to think on his feet, but also a “romantic dreamer” as Ann Blyth calls him, who prefers dressing in costumes and acting, to a dull law practice.

Ann Blyth, in the role of the heiress he pursues, also has a duality about her character.  She is sure of herself, bursting with a courageous curiosity about the world, and yet utterly naïve.  I love how she plays this socially dysfunctional character, how she speaks and how she moves.  She leans into people, someone who has no concept of “personal space,” and has a slightly nearsighted squint as she navigates conversations, studying the faces of people to whom she speaks like someone who cannot read expressions 

Unlike Hepburn’s rapid-fire take-charge prattle in Bringing Up Baby, Ann enunciates her words carefully in a manner which illustrates perfectly the kind of young woman this is: someone who, having spent many years bouncing between North and South America probably learned English and Spanish together so that neither is her first language or her second language.  Her speech is formal, sounding as if she’s gleaned much of it from 19^th century novels, sprinkled with bits of odd-sounding modern slang she’s probably picked up in off moments from the radio.  She’s likely spent the bulk of her lonely life in the charge of tutors.

She is socially awkward, but lacking shyness, charges into social situations like an excited child discovering new friends at kindergarten, and is completely oblivious to what an oddball she seems to others.  This is consistently hysterical, but also I think rather poignant.  She has no siblings, no friends, and has been sheltered in the care of a dismissive father.

He is played by Taylor Holmes, a veteran movie character actor since the silents of the ‘teens, when he wasn’t on Broadway.  Somewhat of an eccentric himself, her father has lately taken to dressing like his hero, Winston Churchill, and has taken up painting to emulate him.  When Robert Montgomery approaches Mr. Holmes for permission to get to know Ann, and accidently knocks over his easel, Holmes launches into a furious tirade in Spanish.  Ann and her father speak Spanish back and forth, she trying to appease him, flinching at his rage.  When Mr. Montgomery requests a translation, Ann replies, “My father wants to beat you up.”

Catch the reference to the pollsters’ recent infamous mistake on the Truman-Dewey election.

Their chauffer, played by my favorite gravely-voiced guy, Charles McGraw, is an ex-boxer, also very protective of Ann, whom he calls by her nickname: “Killer.”  She is an excellent tennis player, and proudly wears a short-sleeved sweatshirt with the name Killer on the front some vanquished opponents gave her because she has a killer forehand.

In her tennis duds is where she first meets Robert Montgomery, and with her hair tucked under her cap, sunglasses, and Killer across her chest, and he at first doesn’t realize this is his quarry.   She doesn’t look at all like the glamorous debutante photo in the perfume advertisement he was given back in the Colonel’s office, in which she wore an evening gown, with a jeweled pendant—one of the stolen jewels—glinting on her cleavage, and on which Montgomery blissfully concentrates when he is shown the ad. 

She was given gallons of the perfume for doing the ad, which she uses liberally ("I practically swim in the stuff") and there is a running gag about the strong scent.

So Montgomery does not recognize her when he first meets her in this tennis getup, but she is drawn to him immediately.  When she remarks, “I’m sorry there isn’t a puddle so I could take something off and spread it for you to walk on,” we might first think she is being sarcastic, as he does.  Very soon, however, it becomes apparent that this is the love-talk of somebody who doesn’t know how strange she sounds.

Some favorite moments in the film:  When Robert Montgomery, unwillingly, brings Ann home to meet his mother on the night his mother is hosting a party at home for some influential friends. 

Ann is clearly the oddball in this scene, and sweetly, and painfully, doesn’t know it.  She eagerly pounces on Jane Cowl, expressing her love for Mother Cowl’s boy Robert.  She announces that she intends to do "the right thing" by Robert and marry him, pleading that Jane be a mother to her, too, since she never had a mother.  Jane Cowl looks at her like she's got two heads.

I love when Ann, kneeling on the ottoman before Jane Cowl, sits back on her heels a moment and considers the company in the room, momentarily breathless, with a slight, self-satisfied wiggle, like kids do when they’re pleased.

The well-heeled society ladies and gents are astounded and don’t know what to make of her, but are clearly entertained, and all react comically to her strong perfume.  I love when the wallflower daughter of one them, a brainiac, played by Dee J. Thompson, Mother Cowl has been trying to set Robert up with, stands upon being introduced to Ann, and she towers over her, booming a basso profundo “How do you?”

Ann, the daughter of a wealthy and influential industrialist, is socially equal to everybody in the room, and probably wealthier than all of them put together, but her ignorance on how to fit in puts her at a disadvantage.

The only one she connects with is Mamie, the maid, wonderfully played by Lillian Randolph.  Miss Randolph has a stronger role in this film than most domestics, and not stereotyped.  She has a personality of her own, and is clearly amused and delighted with Ann.  She seems to be the only one who is not repelled by her perfume. 

It’s another telling aspect of Ann’s character that, rather than dismiss a servant without a second look as would most young ladies of her class, she befriends Mamie instantly upon meeting her, telling her a long, involved story about how she came to wear pajamas this evening in order to sneak out of the house.  Ann is a girl whose closest friend is her father’s chauffeur and doesn’t know the difference between the status of the maid and the lady of the house.

I love Montgomery’s discomfort through the party scene and his rising sense of panic: “I may start laughing and crying at the same time.”  As much as I admire Robert Montgomery’s dramatic roles, especially in Night Must Fall (1937) which we discussed here, he really was terrific at comedy, especially in a situation like this where he is a kind of victim.

Another marvelous aspect to the party scene is Ann Blyth’s skillful command of it, how she is the engine that drives the scene, and how strong she is against the veteran actors. 

Another favorite moment is her proposal of marriage to Montgomery in the restaurant.  At this point, we see clearly that she is wooing him, not subtly with coy, inviting feminine wiles, but boldly, probably much in the same manner she has read of the speech and actions of ardent lovers in books, of heroes wooing maidens, of the way the few men who have had access to her, like the jewel thief, have attempted to woo her, grandly and with flourish.  Her lovemaking is necessarily bluntly masculine because she hasn’t the sophistication to lure him any other way.

In this manner does she woo Robert Montgomery, regretting that she cannot give him a scene of orange blossoms like he deserves.  It’s spectacularly silly, and yet somehow touching that she apologizes that the force of her passion and her impatience to marry immediately that denies him, “a big church wedding with your mother and all your friends there.”

He stumbles for an appropriate response, stalling, “Well, yes, it is the most important day in a man’s life.  He gets to wear a cutaway and striped trousers, and then there are the presents…”

Montgomery’s reaction is in keeping with both his mission—to carry on a public romance with her and flush out the jewel thief—and his nature, to be a good actor.  So he goes with the flow on what seems to be an incredible inprov scene dropped in his lap and plays “blushing bride” to her ardent groom behavior.  "You've won me, Killer."

This culminates on a long drive to a wedding chapel in Vegas.  He drives slowly, trying to drag out the miles, hoping everybody from the jewel thief, to the Army, to his mother, to her father will catch up with them before he has to really marry this fruitcake.  She senses his growing anxiety.  Like any thoughtful and concerned groom, she gently asks him if he is nervous about the wedding night.

He responds, “Well, a little maybe.  No more than the average man, I guess.”

She delicately tries to reassure him, as if he were a virgin in a 19th century English novel about to faint in the clutches of a highwayman, “There’s nothing to be afraid of, dear.  I’ll be awfully gentle and tender.”

He shoots her an incredulous look, this devil-may-care bachelor having lost all control of the situation.

We are brought to a kind of Marx Brothers ending in a cheap motel bungalow, and then the final scene moves us to a posh hotel and gambling casino where, curtain call style, we encounter all of the characters one more time as Robert Montgomery searches out Ann Blyth to apologize. 

She is angry and hurt that their “romance” was nothing more than a military mission, but he succeeds in truly winning her at last with his old standby, his “Once more, my darling” movie speech.  Just like the grip at the beginning of the film, she is deeply moved, and he is rewarded by resounding applause by the cast.  It’s an off-beat ending, a romantic comedy that is more comedy than romance, but we have the feeling that these two, so deep in their own fantasies, are probably made for each other.

Another aspect to this film I love is the score by Elizabeth Firestone, a breezy, melodic refrain that I’m surprised was never developed into a popular song.  According to the IMDb site, this film is the first to be scored entirely by a woman.  Daughter of the Firestone tire magnate, Elizabeth Firestone, I believe, worked on the scores of only a couple other movies.

Jane Cowl spent the bulk of her impressive career in heavily dramatic roles on stage.  She died only the year after this movie was made, and came to Hollywood with trepidation.  It was her first movie role in 32 years since she took a brief stab at the silents.  In a New York Times article of May 1949, Miss Cowl confessed that working on this movie was “a terrifying experience.”  Arriving at 5:00 a.m. for makeup to arrive on set at 7:15, “she was as panicky and bewildered as a neophyte."

“'In those opening shots…I found myself almost helplessly clinging to Mr. Montgomery; to such an extent, in fact, that I actually upstaged him.  Luckily he was most kind and understanding.  Those being his scenes, he would gently take me by the wrist and put me where I belonged.  Finally, I told him, ‘If you catch me doing that again, just slap me down.’

“On the second day, still unable to adjust herself to such unfamiliar instructions as: Toe that mark; don’t look too much to the left; don’t look too much to the right—but be perfectly natural, Miss Cowl gave what she described as a ‘wild bleat’ and desperately announced she was taking the first train to New York.  But the next morning, however, she had recovered her accustomed poise…”

After One More, My Darling, Ann would move on to another comedy, Free for All, which we’ll discuss down the road.  That is a weaker film, and surprisingly, has a much weaker role for Ann as a straight-man to Bob Cummings, considering what a fine flare for comedy she exhibits in Once More, My Darling.  There seemed to be an inconsistency in the quality of scripts she was getting from Universal.  She was twenty years old when did this film, already her film career had covered a wide range of roles and genres, even if it was hit-or-miss, and she would continue to play roles roughly around her actual age, and, as far as the script allowed, she was able to display her splendid versatility.  Regina in Another Part of the Forest (1948), which we covered here, is about the same age as Killer Connell, but they could not be more different than night and day. 

I do not believe Once More, My Darling is currently available in DVD, but I hope someone will correct me.  You can find it on YouTube, at least for now.  Two years later, in January 1951, she reprised the role on radio in the Lux Radio Theater, playing opposite Van Heflin. I like him in the role, and he probably would have been great in the movie, but the radio version is not as silly a romp as the movie, partly because it is necessarily abbreviated, and partly because so much of the movie relies on physical comedy.  You can have a listen here at the Internet Archive website.  Just scroll down to the episode.

Come back next Thursday when we jump to 1963, when Ann appeared as a guest in the new TV drama series about New York City reporters, Saints and Sinners, in an episode with the teasingly tongue-in-cheek title, “The Year Joan Crawford Won the Oscar.” 

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The New York Times, article by J. D. Spiro, May 15, 1949, p. X5.

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UPDATE:  This series on Ann Blyth is now a book - ANN BLYTH: ACTRESS. SINGER. STAR. -

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The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.

Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon, CreateSpace, and my Etsy shop: LynchTwinsPublishing.

 "Lynch’s book is organized and well-written – and has plenty of amusing observations – but when it comes to describing Blyth’s movies, Lynch’s writing sparkles." - Ruth Kerr, Silver Screenings

"Jacqueline T. Lynch creates a poignant and thoroughly-researched mosaic of memories of a fine, upstanding human being who also happens to be a legendary entertainer." - Deborah Thomas, Java's Journey

"One of the great strengths of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is that Lynch not only gives an excellent overview of Blyth's career -- she offers detailed analyses of each of Blyth's roles -- but she puts them in the context of the larger issues of the day."- Amanda Garrett, Old Hollywood Films

"Jacqueline's book will hopefully cause many more people to take a look at this multitalented woman whose career encompassed just about every possible aspect of 20th Century entertainment." - Laura Grieve, Laura's Miscellaneous Musings''

"Jacqueline T. Lynch’s Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is an extremely well researched undertaking that is a must for all Blyth fans." - Annette Bochenek, Hometowns to Hollywood

Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. 
by Jacqueline T. Lynch

The first book on the career of actress Ann Blyth. Multitalented and remarkably versatile, Blyth began on radio as a child, appeared on Broadway at the age of twelve in Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine, and enjoyed a long and diverse career in films, theatre, television, and concerts. A sensitive dramatic actress, the youngest at the time to be nominated for her role in Mildred Pierce (1945), she also displayed a gift for comedy, and was especially endeared to fans for her expressive and exquisite lyric soprano, which was showcased in many film and stage musicals. Still a popular guest at film festivals, lovely Ms. Blyth remains a treasure of the Hollywood's golden age.

The eBook and paperback are available from Amazon and CreateSpace, which is the printer.  You can also order it from my Etsy shop. 

If you wish a signed copy, then email me at JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com and I'll get back to you with the details.