Slightly Dangerous is the last fully comic film that Lana Turner starred in. It’s very funny, but it’s also disorientingly schizophrenic. It can’t decide whether it’s a 1930s gold-digger-with-a-heart of gold story, a screwball romance, or the gothic tale of a beautiful psychopath. It feels like MGM in 1943 was effectively paralyzed in their vision of Lana Turner. She had proven her comedic bona fides; she had played sweet and innocent ingenues; she had played passionate lovers; she had played scheming femmes on the borderline of fatales. She could do a lot of things, but her looks and “animal magnetism” trumped everything else. Slightly Dangerous was an attempt to use her comic chops and marquée looks in equal measure. But things don’t work that way.
The script — written by George Oppenheimer and Charles Lederer, two of the best comedy screenwriters in Hollywood at the time — isn’t simple. Peggy Evans (Lana) has been working for years as a soda jerk for a department store in Hotchkiss Falls in upstate New York, “one of the dreariest towns in America.” So bored and frustrated with her dead-end job she can do it blindfolded (literally), she leaves for NYC, leaving behind a farewell note that the townsfolk interpret as a suicide note — and they blame her boss, Bob Stuart (Robert Young), for driving her to it. (He had disciplined her for the stunt of serving a customer while wearing a blindfold.) In the city, Peggy transforms herself into an elegant Lana Turner-like babe, and hits on the idea of pretending to have amnesia after a can of paint lands on her head. Soon she needs the security of a past. After somewhat creepy research in the newspaper archives, she lands on the ploy that she is the daughter of a millionaire, Cornelius Burden (Walter Brennan), whose daughter Caroline was abducted a convenient number of years ago and never recovered. The news of her re-emergence as Caroline makes the papers along with her picture. Cornelius has had to deal with many fake Carolines over the years, and is mightily skeptical at first. He puts her through tests, including a meeting with Caroline’s favorite nanny, Baba (May Whitty), and a challenge to find little lost Caroline’s favorite toy in her well-preserved, toy-packed bedroom. Peggy succeeds, and is then so convincing — i.e., seductive as the lost child — that Cornelius and Baba both fall for her.
Meanwhile, Bob, fired from his job as manager of the department store, sees the picture of Peggy in the paper and heads to New York to find her to clear his name. In a series of very funny zigzags, he keeps finding her, confronting her, and losing her. Understanding that Peggy’s amnesiac-found-kidnapped-daughter story is strong with Cornelius, Bob tries to convince him not only that the amnesiac girl is really Peggy Evans from Hotchkiss Falls, but also that she’s married to Bob. On a trip back to the Falls — he to clear his name, she to sabotage the trip altogether –, Bob and Peggy stop at a motel, and after several rounds of seduction and confusion, they realize they love each other. Bob feels bad for messing up Peggy’s good thing, and calls Cornelius to come pick her up. (Peggy had sabotaged Bob’s car the previous night to delay the trip to the dreariest town.) Peggy confesses the truth to Cornelius and Baba when they arrive, but they don’t care. They accept her as the daughter they lost long ago. Peggy — who now is fully Caroline — is in bliss, reciprocating the love of her new-found father and old nanny. And Cornelius, acknowledging Peggy’s love for Bob, agrees to their marriage. The end.
It’s a tough story to film, especially as a comedy. The doubled-identity situation is an archetypal one, and it had received its consummate Hollywood treatment a few years before in Sturges’s The Lady Eve. The parts are tried and true: ambitious girl in a hick town; the faux amnesia; the nobody who becomes the belle of big city society; the curmudgeonly rich father figure who is melted by the innocent love of the strange waif. Notice how apt these are not only for comedy, but for a noir psycho-thriller. The difference lies in whether the waif’s ascent is because of her virtues, like Cinderella, or because she has tricked her way up. In Slightly Dangerous, those lines are blurred.
Double Indemnity, the film that best demonstrates the tight kinship between noir and wisecrack-comedy, was made in the following year. (Compare Stanwyck’s dialogue in Ball of Fire with that in Double Indemnity to get the full uncanny effect.) The main problem with Slightly Dangerous, to my mind, is that the studio was trying to make a comedy while employing every atom of Lana Turner’s amoral seductiveness. The mood of the film falls between two stools: parts are very funny and placed at a nice comic distance, while others are dark and brooding, with deep focus and audience-melting close-ups. Studios were experimenting with hybrid dramedies, comedy horror movies, comedy westerns, and comedy thrillers. Comedy noir is easy to imagine in a satirical vein. But that’s not what happens in Slightly Dangerous. The title alone tells us that the project was intentional. There’s even more proof in the publicity posters.
The danger doesn’t look all that slight to me.
The film begins without intrigue. Peggy comes to work at the Coast to Coast Small Change Store, picks up a lucky penny from the sidewalk, and receives Merit Award #4 — there’s more than a little touch of Lubitsch here.
In a famous scene, Peggy demonstrates that she can do her job blindfolded. Buster Keaton was a consultant on the film, and it’s often noted that he directed this scene. (There are some later slapstick scenes that he undoubtedly helped to direct also.)
Turner was famous for her ability to change her moods quickly and convincingly — it served her well in both comedy and noir, and the studio folks wrote the script with this in mind. Her transformation once she arrives in New York is appropriately magical.
The lucky penny provides only roundabout luck, when her flippant flipping of it leads a sign-painter to lose his balance on a ladder and to drop a can of paint on her noggin. The ensuing scene is hilarious, almost entirely because of Turner’s performance. This is comedic diva stuff. You can see a whole pantheon of Hollywood comediennes evoked in scenes like this — Lombard, Jean Arthur, and Margaret Sullavan in the past, Judy Holiday and Marilyn Monroe in the future. (The likeness of Marilyn’s mannerisms and expressions to Turner’s in this film is so uncanny that I wonder whether MGM wasn’t trying to recreate Lana in Marilyn. Check it out. Fwiw, I much prefer Lana. )
Until this scene, one could have been excused for keeping the possibility open that the comic situation might turn sinister. The inventive, feisty, implacable small-town beauty, frustrated with her dead-end life, goes to the city and re-creates herself, deceiving all sorts of gullible upper-crusters and maybe a few gentlemen of the streets. Hitchcock might have done that. But the paint scene is too giddy to leave that avenue open.
And yet. From this point on Peggy uses the same seductive powers that Lana uses in all her darker films. The film was shot by Harold Rosson, one of MGM’s star cinematographers. He had two main jobs: make Lana look marvelous (he shot many of her films), and give the visuals style. Rosson was a master. He later shot films such as Duel in the Sun, The Asphalt Jungle, and Singin’ in the Rain. In Slightly Dangerous, he begins with the brightness and distance appropriate for comedies, but then, as if the future noir diva were dictating the aesthetic, not the comedy, the mood becomes deep and ominous. The straight-shooting Peggy becomes the fake Caroline Burden.
The ploy of adopting the identity of a kidnapped child who was never restored to her family is a steep one if you’re playing it for laughs. It’s a problem that’s not solved — not by the actors, not by the director Wesley Ruggles (a wobbly director in general), and certainly not by Rosson. In a weirdly tense scene, Peggy is challenged to find the favorite toy of the lost little girl. Everything about it seems taken from the dark psycho-thriller handbook: the deep focus chiaroscuro, the creepily up-close voice-over, the desperately intensifying reasoning, the morally dubious heroine under pressure. The resolution should, well, resolve something. Instead, it’s as suspended as The Turn of the Screw.
We might attribute all this to inept direction. I do, but this is no slapdash B-production. Peggy’s kidnapped-child problem is never addressed morally, and Peggy continues her amnesia story until the last minutes of the film. That allows the space for Robert Young to keep the comedy alive. I knew Young only from Father Knows Best when I was a kid. As with so many TV sitcom and game-show stars of my youth, it wasn’t until late in life that I discovered not only that he was a big Hollywood star, but that he was a fine comic actor. I love him in this film. Hapless, regularly getting punched and forcibly removed from rooms like a slapstick schlemihl, but no less persistent than Peggy, Bob is as farcical as Peggy is sedate. Here are two of my favorite Young scenes, both of which I’m reasonably sure were at least partially directed by Keaton — they have his signature all over them.
First, Bob goes to the opera to surprise Peggy into acknowledging that she’s Peggy from Hotchkiss Falls, not the glamorous Caroline Burden.
Next, Bob crashes a grand party for the same purpose. Watch how he becomes a waiter, and the career of the tray of champagne glasses. Just good visual comedy.
The problem of Peggy’s psyche remains. She travels with Bob back to the Falls, all the better to mess up his quest to reveal her identity and get his job back. On the way, we are left suspended again. Is she being the irresistible, manipulating seductress, or is she just naturally being herself? The scene in the car evokes for me a similar one in Borzage’s Desire. In that one, the jewel thief Marlene Dietrich puts the moves on American insurance-guy Gary Cooper. But Dietrich plays a self-acknowledged criminal who is saved by her slow-growing love for Cooper. In Slightly Dangerous, Peggy will be saved too by her love for Bob — but we’re never given the sense that impersonating a long-ago kidnapped child is morally questionable.
The whole thing might work if you really care about a beautiful psychopath and want her to succeed in her psychopathy. Judging from the IMDB comments, most folks don’t feel as I do. Most viewers seem to like it without reservations. That’s interesting.
P.S. There’s a short scene of Lana dancing a tiny dance with Young. It’s a sweet love-recognition moment and it’s in a dance because folks liked to see Lana dance. It’s cute and restful in the middle of all the dizziness.
