Too Much, Too Soon

During Dorothy Malone's day in Summer Under the Stars, TCM ran Too Much, Too Soon, which is available on DVD from the Warner Archive Collection. So I DVRed it and got around to watching it do do a full-length review on it.

At the start of the movie, Diana Barrymore (Dorothy Malone) is returning home from boarding school to her mother, authoress Michael Strange (real name Blanche Oehrichs; played by Neva Patterson). Diana is the daughter of the famous actor John Barrymore (Errol Flynn), but apparently Mom and Dad had a stormy marriage due to Dad's drinking because they got divorced quite a few years ago and Mom got custody with Diana not having seen her dad for ages. But she wants to see Dad, which is understandable even if Dad is a raging drunk.

Diana goes out west and winds up on Dad's boat, which is approached by another boat. Dad gives a drunken reading of Shakespeare, winding in his falling off his boat and being fished out of the water. Except that he wants to join his drunk friends as they sail off to parts unknown. This should have been a massive red flag to Diana, except that she's decided she wants to take up acting, just like her dear old Dad. Not that she's anything more than mediocre as an actress, but she gets parts she otherwise wouldn't due to her family name.

After a stint on Broadway, she goes back to Hollywood, and despite Mom's advice, she decides to live with Dad! She signs a contract and meets another actor just starting out, Vincent Bryant (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.). He's a nice guy, and if Diana had any sense she would have stayed with him, but she's going to turn out not to have much sense. Oh, they do get married, but any number of things are going to put that marriage on the rocks. First is that Diana's presence keeps Dad on the wagon for a while, but once she goes off on her own, he hits the bottle, a move which ultimately kills him. Then, there are the disastrous movie reviews, which makes Diana not want to keep acting. It's all enough to drive her to drink, something she probably should have learned not to do what with her experiences with her father.

And then there are the other men in her life. Vincent has to do some location shooting for the movie he's on, leaving Diana alone in Hollywood, where she immediately starts partying, eventually getting seduced by a nasty tennis player John Howard (Ray Danton), this being the era when tennis players were amateurs. John wants to mooch off anybody and everybody, and is more than willing to try to take her right out from under Vincent's nose. Diana finally gets enough sense to dump him, but marries a third guy, who is a recovering alcoholic she drags back down.

The real-life Diana Barrymore wrote the book about this, and the book Too Much, Too Soon got turned into the movie of the same name. I haven't read the book, but according to what I've read, the movie takes liberties with Diana's real life much like most Hollywood biopics do. Both of her parents had subesquent marriages, and none of that is mentioned in the movie. The movie puts the bad reviews for a movie the real-life Diana was never in, although to be fair, they probably had to use a Warner Bros. property for that scene.

As for the movie, there is stuff to like about it even if it does have some big flaws. Errol Flynn is quite good as John, although you wonder how much he's playing himself -- he'd die about a year and a half after the movie was released. Ray Danton is also quite good. But the film loses a lot of steam once John Barrymore dies, and descends into melodrama on par with Valley of the Dolls. And the ending seemed to me to be nonsense.

The print TCM ran was panned-and-scanned down to 4:3, which was a big surprise to me, since the Warner Archive DVD is supposedly in wide-screen (IMDb says the aspect ratio is 1.85:1, not Cinemascope or another wider-screen process) and was released back in 2010.