From MGM
Directed by Charles Vidor
Starring
Doris Day
James Cagney
Cameron Mitchell
Robert Keith
Tom Tully
Harry Bellaver
If asked who Ruth Etting was, I don't think most people would know. Of course, if one saw this movie and remembers it, then one would know. That's how I know and in fact, I have never heard of her in any context except as the subject of this movie biography, although I have done some homework.
Etting was apparently a very popular jazz and blues singer in the 20's and 30's. She started in Chicago, eventually making it to the New York stage and nightclubs, worked on radio and eventually did a few films.
The thrust of this screenplay and in fact ever present in seemingly everything written about Etting is her relationship with her first manager and eventual husband Marty Snyder. He was known as Moe the Gimp because he had a limp due to an early bout with polio. Moe was a gangster who browbeat her, got physical with her, called her a tramp in public and was loud, threatening and menacing with most of the people who employed her or showed her any attention. There seems to be no question that she lost out on a few engagements because Snyder would have come with her.
The film opens with Etting getting fired from a dance club which Snyder notices and attempts to take her under his wing. She is wary when he says he's going to see she makes the big time. While she resists his offers somewhat, eventually she succumbs because she's had little success trying to make it as a professional singer. She's initially impressed when Snyder makes things happen.
He advises a club owner that things might go badly for him but Snyder would be happy to see they don't if he hires Etting. She makes a name for herself in Chicago and people begin to come to see her. Snyder then muscles his way into the Ziegfeld organization and secures her a spot in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1927 and her fame busts wide open.
Etting and Snyder never seemed to have more than fleeting moments of getting along. Mainly he yells at her, threatens and slaps her when she resists his machinations. Watching the film it seems odd that she ups and marries him but it matches what happened in real life. She would claim (in real life, not the film) that she never loved him and married him nine-tenths out of fear and one-tenth out of pity.
Whom she did love was her pianist-composer-arranger Myrl Alderman (Johnny Alderman in the movie) and he loved her. Snyder hates his guts because, even though Etting and Alderman are circumspect, Snyder is certain he knows best and his jealousy runs amok.
Alderman parts ways with Etting after they have an argument over her refusal to leave Snyder (hey Johnny, we don't get it either) and he is out of her life until she is offered a Hollywood contract. As she first meets some of the honchos on the film, with Snyder close behind making an ass of himself, who is right there, announced as the musical composer and conductor on the film? Yes, Alderman. Snyder flips out.
Snyder has one of his goons accompany Etting to every rehearsal, practice session and filming. Snyder himself sneaks onto the studio lot in an attempt to catch Etting and Alderman in some compromising situation. He tells her that if he sees anything, he's going to shoot Alderman. (In real life, he threatened to shoot not only Alderman but Etting and his daughter, who worked for Etting, as well. The daughter is not a character in the film.)
Etting and Snyder have a knockdown and drag out, the beginning of the film's high drama. She lashes out at him, saying how sick she is of his treatment of her and others, his jealousy, his temper and asks him what it is that he has ever accomplished on his own, anything that has nothing to do with her? She then tells him she is going to divorce him. It is obvious that he is devastated and surprising that he puts up little resistance.
At her next musical session with Alderman, she not only tells him what has happened and that she is divorcing Snyder but she confesses for the first time that she loves Alderman. He is over the moon. She then has a driver take her home but Alderman is worried and follows her. Snyder is hiding in the bushes. After he watches Alderman and Etting kissing on her front porch, Snyder shoots him.
Prior to the shooting and after Etting accuses Snyder of never accomplishing anything on his own, he hocks himself to the gills to open a nightclub in California. He doesn't want Etting to have anything to do with it. After the shooting and a short prison stretch, Snyder finds the unfavorable publicity will have dire consequences for his club opening.
The last scene has Snyder being driven to the club which is packed and he is shocked. When he realizes that Etting is going to open that night, he starts to have one of his temper tantrums and is calmed down by a friend and then further cooled when he hears the sound of his ex-wife singing one of her biggest hits, Love Me or Leave Me. The camera breaks away from her performance to him standing at the bar... Gotta give her credit. The girl can sing. About that I never was wrong.
MGM paid Etting, Snyder and Alderman (who had by that time become her second husband) for the rights to their stories. She thought Jane Powell should play her. Even though Powell was under contract to the studio, they had other ideas. The part was first offered to Ava Gardner who declined because she was still miffed at the studio for dubbing her singing voice in Show Boat. Then the part was offered to Jane Russell who declined because she was hoping to play another real-life singer, Lillian Roth, in I'll Cry Tomorrow. Russell ended up getting neither part.
Apparently it was Jimmy Cagney who suggested to producer Joe Pasternak that the part be offered to Doris Day. She had just been freed from her enslavement at Warner Brothers but she didn't want to do the MGM movie. She said something about it bothered her. More on this later. But ultimately she decided to do it when she realized Cagney had been signed to play Snyder. While they hadn't gotten to know one another well, the pair had starred together five years earlier in ill-fated The West Point Story.
After years of fluffy movies, Day was excited to be doing a drama, albeit a musical drama. While I did occasionally enjoy some of those fluffy things, I much preferred Day in dramas. Early in her career as an actress I thought she was very good in Young Man with a Horn and Storm Warning and a year after Love Me or Leave Me I would largely respond to her efforts in Julie. I didn't appreciate her work as much in the dramas The Man Who Knew Too Much or Midnight Lace but I have always thought it was a shame she didn't do more dramatic work. Had she accepted the part of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, I think Mike Nichols would have opened doors for her to have a whole new career. But she turned him down.
But Love Me or Leave Me is a perfect film for Day... she got to do drama (and do it well) and sing. Other than the title song, other Etting songs Day sang are Shakin' the Blues Away (catch it at the end here), It All Depends on You, 10 Cents a Dance, You Made Me Love You, Mean to Me and Everybody Loves My Baby. Two new songs were written for the film, Never Look Back and I'll Never Stop Loving You.
After the film's release, some of Day's fans and her fellow Christian Science practitioners flipped out to see her drinking and smoking, wearing skimpy outfits and playing a woman who uses a man to become a success. Oh, those folks in 1955. But I and plenty of others thought Day plumbed new depths as an actress to play Ruth Etting. In fact, I think it's the best work she ever did. And those pipes are always a treat to hear.
I also think it could be the best work Cagney ever did but if that's not so, it's certainly among his best. He has said it was among the five or six films he considers favorites. He thought Day was a revelation... he had no doubt the girl can sing... but he was dumbfounded at what a talented actress she she had become.
Cameron Mitchell very thoughtfully etches out a winning performance as Alderman. Robert Keith, always so reliable, is the voice of reason as a friend and business associate of Etting and Snyder. He had just the year before played Day's father in Young at Heart.
While the film was wonderfully directed by Charles Vidor (he deserved all the applause he got for getting such a stunning performance from Day and probably for getting Cagney to keep the mugging to a low roar), it seems odd that MGM didn't use one of its own esteemed directors. Regardless, he can be as proud of this film as with Cover Girl and Gilda.
Etting and Alderman were apparently not pleased with the film. She particularly thought the script was too rough on her. From all that I have read on Etting to help prepare to write this, I expect the film treated her and Snyder with kid gloves. Furthermore what was released wasn't as rough as it could have been since some scenes were edited out. If this had been done at Warner Bros, former home of Day and Cagney, there wouldn't have been as many songs, the film wouldn't have looked as glamorous and the Etting-Snyder portrayals would have indeed been rougher.
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| The real Ruth Etting |
Etting complained that she sold the studio the rights to her entire life and all they used was her life surrounding Snyder which simply points out her naiveté. Had the story gone on in the film, we would have seen that the Snyder trial caused a sensation, was dragged out and Etting came out looking as unfavorable as anyone... so much so that within a couple of years, she retired from the limelight. She and Alderman would live out their lives happily on a ranch in Colorado.
Most reviews of Love Me or Leave Me seem to have a knack for mentioning it's a fictional biography. What Hollywood biography isn't? I expect most people's lives portrayed on the screen would be just a little dull if they weren't glammed up a bit. In real life, Snyder didn't get her on with Ziegfeld... Irving Berlin did. Snyder did not open up a club of his own either... it just gave the story a little redemption and gave Day a chance to belt out that title tune. All in all, they got the characters' behavior down pat and the main events of their lives together were there. Hell, in Mommie Dearest they boiled down Crawford's four husbands into one. Now that's fiction.
A sad footnote, as I see it, is that making a film on Etting's turbulent life with a controlling manager-husband, was something that Day would be coming to terms with in real life. She had been married to Marty (gee, even the same first name) Melcher for four years and she may have just been beginning to see his controlling, deceitful, criminal ways. When he died some years later, Day and the world learned that he had spent her fortune. He had also long manipulated the type of career she would have. Had she wanted to do more films like this one, he would have told her no. If he didn't slap her around, her previous husband did. I suspect this paragraph explains her initial reluctance to accept the part.
Here is Day singing one of Ruth Etting's biggest hits... Shakin' the Blues Away.
Next posting:
Starring the Newmans
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