I saw 1947’s The Guilt of Janet Ames on what is a collection of film noir titles, though this picture is definitely not of this genre. Instead, it is solidly melodrama, though not so solid of a viewing experience. That’s a shame, because it takes some unusual risks.
It sure starts out looking like it could be noir. Rosalind Russell is clearly apprehensive about going into a bar across the street. She is so distracted that she ends up in the middle of the street, oblivious to the car which will strike her. Once she’s admitted to the hospital, nobody can find any ID in her purse, though they do find a Congressional medal of honor there. The orderlies also find a list of names, one of which is that of notorious local reporter Melvyn Douglas.
Douglas knows who this is, and he goes to visit a combative Russell in the hospital. I guess I would also be bitter if the accident left me unable to walk and doctors kept telling me it was all in my head. Still, she is quite unlikeable and quite arrogant. As he is pushing her around the corridors in her wheelchair, she remarks how uncomfortable she is with everybody staring at her, except nobody is looking her way.
One would think Douglas would be in a hurry to catch his plane to Chicago, where he supposedly has a plum city desk job lined up at a prestigious paper. Instead, he is more content to torment Russell, who is still mourning the loss of her husband in the Battle of the Bulge two years earlier. For those of you who don’t know your history, that took place in WWII and was not some guy fatally succumbing to a hernia.
Douglas knew her husband, as he and the other guys all served in the same unit. David, her husband, threw himself on a grenade, saving the lives of the others. What she doesn’t know is Douglas was not just among those saved by her husband’s sacrifice, but was actually the commander of the brigade.
It will be a long time before she discovers that, so I wondered why she just lets a stranger come to the hospital and start belittling her, bossing her around and making her feel guilty. His strange approach to have her imagine each of those men and in scenarios so real to her that they become indistinguishable from reality. This is what he calls the “Peter Ibbetson” technique, which will be lost of those who aren’t familiar with a popular Gary Cooper picture of the same name twelve years before. Let that be a lesson to those who rely heavily on popular culture references in their works. And once again, this is just some strange man she doesn’t know whom she allows to do this to her.
Through each of these imagined encounters, she discovers yet another aspect of herself for which she apparently supposed to feel shame. In the end, she is made to feel guilt for now encouraging her husband to pursue a crazy pipe dream that would have taken them to the jungle. Something else she is taken to task for is not wanting to have children. Remember, ladies, you should sacrifice everything you want out of life for the good of your man’s every whim.
In the end, she will apparently be cured in just this single night, with her rising from the wheelchair and stumbling like a drunken toddler towards Douglas. I was hoping she would riff on Peter Sellers’s final line from Dr. Strangelove, but no luck.
The sequences in the world of her imagination are curiously staged. The best is the first, where a crowded bar is rendered only as shadows on walls, except for the three people with whom she talks. One of those is a drunk who claims he can fly from one bar stool to another by flapping his arms. Russell calls him out as this being ridiculous, and Douglas chastises her, saying the worst thing a woman can do to undermine a man’s confidence. So, another lesson for the girls: you should always encourage a man, any man, to do whatever he wants, no matter how stupid and dangerous it might be. Boys will be boys, y’know, and every woman must be their surrogate mother.
The nadir of these sequences is the last. It is clearly meant to be funnier than the ones before it. Alas, every joke flopped, in my opinion, from the menus where every item is “L’amour a l’amour” to the arrival of the actual item, which is pearl necklaces on the half-shell. An appearance by Sid Ceasar approves things not one whit, with him doing an extended stand-up bit where he pretends to be a psychiatrist. I spent the longest time confused, thinking he was supposed to be shrink and this was just a cartoonish caricature. That said, I was amused by a French waiter who asks Russell and Douglas, “Shall I translate for you creeps?”
The Guilt of Janet Ames is a deeply ludicrous melodrama which has not aged well. I’m sure how good it would have been in its own time. There’s something reprehensible about a movie where the key message seems to be a lecture to women to appreciate their men before they possibly meet their untimely demise. Given how vivid Russell’s imagination can be, I propose she beg off men entirely and just resort to wanking. Her fantasies must be amazing.
Dir: Henry Levin
Starring Rosalind Russell, Melvyn Douglas
Watched as part of Mill Creek’s blu-ray set Noir Archive Volume 1: 1944-1954