We started a new month last week, but because of the vagaries of the schedule the new star of the month didn't come until tonight, November 7. That Star of the Month is Gloria Grahame, and her movies will be airing every Tuesday in prime time. This first Tuesday includes one of her early movies that I had on my DVR and hadn't blogged about before: Blonde Fever, overnight tonight at 1:15 AM (so technically November 8 here in the eastern time zone but still November 7 in the Pacific). As always, seeing such a movie show up on the schedule, I made a point to watch it so that I could do a review here.
The movie starts off with an establishing shot of the Café Donay, which is somewhere on the road between Reno, the divorce capital of the world, and Lake Tahoe. It's a way-too-upscale place for this part of the world, probably because the movie is based on a play by Ferenc Molnár which I'd bet was originally set somewhere else. But since Hollywood was making it and the movie was made during World War II, and the movie deals with divorce, the action had to be moved to Nevada.
Anyhow, showing up at the café on his motorbike is young Freddie (Marshall Thompson). He's in love with waitress Sally (a young Gloria Grahame, as if you couldn't tell from the looks or the voice), but he doesn't have the money to propose to Sally. That lack of money also bugs the proprietor of the café, Peter Donay (Philip Dorn), who doesn't want such low-class vehicles showing up at the front entrance to the café. Peter is married to Delilah (Mary Astor), while Sally has a crush on Peter, who she thinks of as worldly.
Unfortunately, there's the problem that not only is Peter married, but he's not a particularly good catch as a husband. Delilah stays more because she's got a stable enough life here and because she probably doesn't want to have to start over again. The café has been in financial difficulty in part because Peter has a gambling problem, yet another reason why he's been a lousy husband even though he claims not to have engaged in real gambling in a year or two. He has, however, but a raffle ticket in a national lottery and that's going to become an important point later.
Delilah decides she's going to try to save her marriage by bringing Sally and Freddie together. On the one hand, Delilah tells Sally about all the terrible things that Peter has done, and that the likelihood is one of Peter having an affair with Sally and then moving on to yet another someone else after growing tired of Sally. She also works on the financial front partly by getting Freddie a job at the place, and partly by telling Sally about Peter's gambling problem. But then Peter's raffle ticket pays off to the tune of $40,000, which is a couple years' salary in those days, so not enough to retire on but definitely enough to start a family if it were Freddie who had the money.
There are some fairly big problems with Blonde Fever. One is that Peter is written as such an irredeemable character that we don't understand why Delilah stands by him. The movie doesn't feel like a road house in Nevada (or anywhere) either, which is again down to the difficulty of taking what was likely an upscale play and trying to shoehorn it into Nevada. The air of unreality is added to by there being next to no mention of the war. Finally, the movie doesn't seem to have any idea whether it wants to be a comedy or a drama, and consistently gets things wrong.
The few bright points are Mary Astor, who certainly tries although she's given pretty dire material to work with. There's also a supporting performance by Felix Bressart, who also does the best he can. Thankfully, Blonde Fever didn't strangle Gloria Grahame's career in the cradle. But it's not that good of a movie.
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