RIP Arlene Dahl

Arlene Dahl has died.  She was 96.  The world is a little less beautiful.

This divine creature without question belonged in that Golden Age pantheon of beautiful Hollywood redheads.  There were quite a number of them, too, but Dahl was truly a standout as I saw it.  Her face was perfection and even came with a real beauty mark (mole). Her hair was always gloriously styled, makeup sensational.  She carried herself from head to toe as aristocracy. She wore clothes that always dazzled in one way or another.  Were the gods smiling down on her or what?

She brightened every movie she made and if some of them weren't so hot, she always was.  Her characters were usually sophisticates and frequently lustful ones.  Their speech was bold, they were forthright even as they fluttered a fan in a fair amount of costume dramas.  Dahl was a wonderful bad girl and she often was.  Few could play duplicitous as well as this lady.  I think if she could have played one of her best scenes and then winked at the camera, she would have loved it.  I'm sure it was found that husbands of the 40s and 50s might more willingly accompany their wives to the movies if Dahl were in the flick.

I loved her walk, her carriage and her confidence.  They all added to her elegance.  Her speech was deliberate and she never minded whatsoever if people caught on to her intelligence.  Her characters seemed to have a knack for being able to play a guy and if he were kinda dumb, so much the better.

Life started for Arlene Dahl in 1925 in Minneapolis and she was of Norwegian descent.  Her father was a well-to-do Ford executive.  As a youngster she took elocution lessons (they paid off handsomely) and practiced dancing.  She was an extraordinary-looking child and it seemed everyone commented on it.    

She involved herself in drama throughout all of her school years.  It actually was almost a given since her mother was involved in local amateur theater.  After high school graduation, she worked as a department store model and performed with a local drama group.  She also moved briefly to Chicago and then to Manhattan where she easily got modeling jobs that even usually paid the bills.

She auditioned for some Broadway roles and after a performance was approached by a Warner Bros scout.  Signed to a contract she  became a leading lady in only her second film, alongside mega-popular Dennis Morgan in 1947's My Wild Irish Rose.  It was a success and MGM took notice.  Suddenly she was under contract to that studio and let's face it, that is exactly where she should have been... the very pretty people at the pretty studio.

And what did MGM do?  Well for one thing they found out the lady was versatile.  She did drama (and a shoo-in for a few noirs), comedy (she practically became a screen partner with the studio's big comic) and she could sing and dance.  Was she a good actress?  I wonder if anyone asked, so besotted by beauty that MGM was.  So with or without her cooperation (and I'm surmising it's with), she became more well known for being decorative.  By and large that means costume pictures or more succinctly, B flicks.

So was she a good actress?  Yes, of course, she was.  I never thought for a minute that she didn't have the moxey to be a decent screen performer.  She knew what she was doing.  Unfortunately, it was the movies she was in that weren't so good.  More to the point, I don't think she was ever in a truly good film.  

Red Skelton was the comic she was paired with three times... A Southern Yankee (1948) and then Watch the Birdie and Three Little Words (both 1950).  I didn't see them.  I have my reasons.  The best noirs didn't come out of MGM but the studio put her in three of their very B offerings... Scene of the Crime (1948) and then came Inside Straight and No Questions Asked (both 1951).  Many years later I caught these three and liked them.

By 1951 she was out at MGM.  Her films weren't making any solid profits.  Actually that's not quite right because although she was in all of them, they weren't her films, as such, in that she was not the star.  Nonetheless they weren't attracting the large audiences the bosses had hoped for.  What's a fabulously beautiful woman to do?

Mr. and Mrs. Barker

Well, for one thing, get married.  There would be six marriages in all, the first two being to actors.  In 1951 she married movie Tarzan Lex Barker a few months after his divorce.  He was from a prominent New York society family and they looked good together.  Unfortunately the union only lasted a little over a year.  She would one day say he was the most attractive unclothed man she ever knew.  I'm sure I don't know what she meant.

In 1952 she began writing a syndicated beauty column which she would continue for decades.  Two years later she founded Arlene Dahl Enterprises which marketed cosmetics and designer lingerie.  

She perhaps suspected she would never be the big movie star she might have once envisioned.  She also had the sense to know what she should be doing.  A true example of beauty and brains, it would all pick up even more after she kissed movies goodbye.  

Now freelancing she got involved in one colorful costume picture after another.  Swordplay, whether on ships or not, seemed to be the order of the day.  There she was with John Payne in Caribbean (1952), Alan Ladd in Desert Legion (1953), Ray Milland in Jamaica Run (1953), Fernando Lamas, who would become her second husband, in both Sangaree (1953) and The Diamond Queen (1953) and Rock Hudson in Bengal Brigade (1954). 

Mr. & Mrs. Lamas on the set of Sangaree

After she left movies, she would say all her films left her feeling very embarrassed.  Certainly she must have primarily been thinking about the above group.  They certainly helped sink her career although I saw and liked every one of them except Jamaica Run.  

Musical-comedy, she claimed, was something she always wanted to do and she got some of it in 1953's Here Come the Girls with Bob Hope, Rosemary Clooney and Tony Martin.  Unfortunately, it wasn't very good.

The following year she had, I think, her best role in Woman's World.  Three husbands were invited to New York where they would be vying for a big promotion.  The wives were invited, too, and how they presented themselves would have a bearing on which man was elevated.  Dahl as a Texas high society wife makes an overly-ambitious plea to secure the job for her husband, Van Heflin.  It is a role she was born to play. 

Married to Van Heflin in Woman's World

In 1956 she joined up again with Payne in the film noir, Slightly Scarlet, another of her good roles. She's an ex-con who comes to live with her sister who, in turn, has a boyfriend targeted by the mob.  Rhonda Fleming, another beautiful redhead whose career closely paralleled Dahl's, plays the sister.

A friend of mine used to say that her role as a ruthless gold-digger in Wicked As They Come (1956) was Dahl at her absolute best.  He was crazy about her and thought this was the juicy type role she was born to play.  I must agree.  This was the wife in Woman's World on steroids.  For once she was top-billed.  B actor Phil Carey was a good match for her.  Again, as has been said, the film itself is too routine and word-of-mouth stopped it from being successful.

She sued the producers of Wicked As They Come for a cool million, saying the advertisements were lewd and degraded her.   A judge threw out the suit.

The above film was shot in England and Dahl stayed there to make She Played with Fire.  Jack Hawkins plays an insurance investigator who meets up with a former girlfriend, who is now married.  After the husband dies, Hawkins believes the woman murdered him.  It is another good role with Dahl as another beautiful seductress and again she is certainly believable.

In 1959 she plays the widow of a scientist who joins The Journey to the Center of the Earth with James Mason and Pat Boone.  She and Mason didn't get along any better off screen than they did on screen.  He said he tired of her movie star preening.  She was injured while making the film but it is probably her most famous one and most financially successful.  I'm still not taking back my earlier statement that she was never in a truly good film.  

She didn't do much acting after she had a child and she had three of them, actor Lorenzo Lamas is the eldest.  She made a handful of westerns in her career and I thought she was out-of-place in them.  All that dust didn't mar her beauty but it didn't enhance it either.  I don't know that any of the films she would go on to make from this point are worth mentioning.

In the late sixties she was employed as a veep at an ad agency and by

1970 she was working as an advertising executive for Sears Roebuck and she opened a fragrance company that was somewhat short-lived.

In the early 70s she replaced her Woman's World costar, Lauren Bacall, as Margo Channing in Applause.  

She did some occasional television.  She had a recurring role in a couple of soaps, One Life to Live and All My Children.  Of course, she was there on the requisite Love American-Style, Fantasy Island and Love Boat.

In the 1980s and for the rest of her life, she became passionate about astrology.  She ended up writing nearly as many books on the subject as she did on beauty.

In 1984 Dahl married Marc Rosen, her sixth husband.  He was a package designer and their 37-marriage was apparently a most happy one.  They shared homes in Manhattan and West Palm Beach.  Rosen survives her.

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She's out for all she can get...

in American Samoa