Daisy Kenyon (1947)

I sense through various Web references lately that the reputation of this noir-tinged late Forties "woman's picture" has been growing, and I'm not surprised. In what seems at first to be a perfectly well-cooked meal of melodrama, there are all kinds of raw bits. Our heroine Daisy Kenyon (Joan Crawford) has to choose between two men, one of whom tries to force himself on her physically (an ugly scene, especially for its time), the other of whom no less disturbingly forces himself on her emotionally. The neglected socialite wife of the first man (lawyer/tycoon Dana Andrews) dislikes her younger daughter and abuses her physically (and the movie doesn't even beat around the bush about this!). Lawyer Andrews takes on a noble litigation involving a discriminated-against Japanese-American -- and, counter to the strong movie tradition of nobility winning through, loses the case. Meanwhile, the second man (ex-serviceman Henry Fonda) can't shake memories of his own dead wife and treats Daisy with a bizarre blend of loving attention and passive-aggression. In the ultimate showdown between the two guys, Fonda at first seems to have nothing but proves to be the ultimate slyboots, provoking the question, Can someone be a throroughly good man and a master manipulator at the same time? (Fonda's final line is one of the best closing observations in movie history.)

Director Otto Preminger's disciplined visual style serves the material with real distinction, and the actors are in great form -- all three are appealing, all three are maddening. (Fonda says perplexedly of Andrews at one point, "Funny thing is, I like him," to which Crawford responds, "He wants you to like him. He's good at that.") By the final scene, the movie has moved beyond melodrama: there can be no "happy ending" because someone is going to be unhappy, and our final glimpse of Andrews -- great facial acting here! -- casts a troubling shadow over, well, everything.