One superficially “nice girl” that Dorothy McGuire played shortly after her restless widow in Till the End of Time managed to have several shades of gray. McGuire played a divorcée who becomes involved with journalist Gregory Peck in the 20th Century Fox film adaptation of Laura Z. Hobson’s Gentleman’s Agreement (1947).  Dorothy McGuire‘s performance of Nora in Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” on the radio is said to have convinced Darryl Zanuck that she was right for the part of the conflicted character in this film. Director Elia Kazan, who had earlier evoked great depth from McGuire in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, thought she was right for the part as well, though he had misgivings about what he believed were the compromises in the story made necessary by commercialism. As an earlier co-worker, Peggy Ann Garner, reflected much later, “Kazan had a marvelous quality. He even knew how to handle Dorothy McGuire, and there was a certain way you had to handle that lady.”

This then innovative movie addressed what it meant on an everyday level to be a Jew in America, a hornet’s nest that the film industry, largely managed by sensitive Jewish moguls, was understandably reluctant to stir up–especially if it affected their always insecure status and the bottom line. The filmmakers, prompted by a non-Jewish studio head,  Darryl F. Zanuck, director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Moss Hart approached the risky topic rather gingerly–though at the time of production it was quite striking in its frankness. Today, many critics view this film as “too nice”, glossing over some ugly realities in retrospect, but the fact that it was made, (in the same period as the similarly themed, grittier Crossfire), and that it found a large audience help to make it still worthwhile. Casting a young and, by his own later admission, callow Gregory Peck as a journalist and widower who lives with his son (Dean Stockwell, who is splendid) and mother (Ann Revere), the film follows Peck as he takes on the task of writing a “think piece” for a magazine (which seems to be based on Time, Inc.) about Anti-Semitism after WWII. To help him learn more about the experience of prejudice first hand, the WASPish Peck‘s character tells people that he is of Jewish descent, often going out of his way to mention his Judaism in an effort to evoke a response from others. In a matter of eight weeks, he acquires a front row center seat on life in a minority, having his “nose rubbed in it” when he finds a nimble hotel manager who refuses him a room in a thinly veiled equivocation, sees his young son beaten up at the park by other boys who believe he is “a dirty kike”, or finds that the apparently liberally educated, elegant and warm socialite (Dorothy McGuire), he has recently fallen in love with resents his pose of Judaism. Overwhelmed with his new-found knowledge (and a bit of self-righteousness), Gregory Peck points out to McGuire‘s shocked and hurt character that she may have a lingering prejudice within her as well. John Garfield, playing a supporting role as Peck‘s Jewish war veteran friend, electrifies this film in all his brief scenes, bringing a street wise credibility and his unique charisma to the story. He points out to his friend Peck that his experiment has made him “a crazy fool” whose telescoped experience is more cutting because “you’re not insulated yet. It’s new every time, so the impact must be quite a business on you.” Today, the conflicted reaction of McGuire‘s character to her fiancé Peck‘s attitude and her longing for a serene, comfortable life, insulated from life’s conflicts, may evoke impatience from viewers. The beautifully played scene in the restaurant between Kathy Lacy (Dorothy McGuire) and Dave Goldman (John Garfield) brings out the essentially sad quality of Dorothy McGuire‘s character and her lack of self-knowledge. Feeling that Peck‘s accusation of anti-Semitism in her is unjust, McGuire tries to use Garfield as a sounding board. Meeting him for a quiet drink away from Peck, she explains how ugly she believes prejudice is by mentioning a wealthy and “important” man at a dinner party who had made some crass remarks about Jewish people. Explaining her silent anger at his unfair comments, she says that everyone at the table despised him, especially her. Dave quietly asks what she did about it, not what she felt.  McGuire mentions that she felt sick and still felt ill thinking about that occasion. She had wanted to yell at the man and the assembled guests, “Why do we sit here and take this?” Garfield asks quietly, “I wonder if you’d feel so sick now if you’d nailed him. There’s a kind of elation in socking back.”  Kathy’s silent realization of her own culpability for perpetuating injustice by acquiescing in the name of civility lasts for a few moments. Then she covers her eyes with her hands, and the scene ends.

Peck and McGuire‘s characters come together again at the conclusion of the film, satisfying producer Zanuck‘s belief that audiences would only accept this love story resolution, though given the unease of their reconciliation, it seems an ambivalent ending. Btw, if you’d like to start an argument among film aficionados sometime, just ask them if they think this is a satisfying conclusion to this story.

A critical and popular success, the director Kazan felt dissatisfied with both Peck and McGuire‘s characterizations. He wrote, somewhat condescendingly, that Dorothy McGuire gave a performance that was “‘straight’, no surprises” and that she was “perfect for the part–not the nicest thing to say about a fine girl.” The film, which received a clutch of Oscar nominations, including McGuire‘s sole Oscar nod as Best Actress, won three as Best Picture, for Kazan as Best Director, and for Celeste Holm‘s likable working girl, a Best Supporting Actress award. While it was not Dorothy‘s most sympathetic role, she gave the character a believable and appealing fallibility that made Kathy a well-meaning if limited person whose experience might change her. Her grace and refinement also made her appeal for Peck‘s character quite understandable despite his disappointment in her.  Holm, when later asked about her experience working with Dorothy McGuire, commented that she “was lovely to work with, but I remember that she was kind of unhappy, though, because she had just lost a baby. And I had just had one, and was blooming.”

Despite this sad event in the actress’ private life, there seems to have been much more to be happy about during this decade, including her marriage and, after Gentleman’s Agreement, her alliance with Gregory Peck and Mel Ferrer, with whom she was instrumental in creating the La Jolla Playhouse . McGuire and Peck became friends while under contract to Selznick and during the production of Gentleman’s Agreement. Both longed to return to their theatrical roots to work and were discouraged by the lack of viable theaters in Southern California. Since their film commitments did not allow them to return to New York to appear on Broadway, the pair, along with Mel Ferrer, almost as a lark, formed the idea for a repertory company to be called the Actor’s Company in the beautiful California town where Peck had spent many of his childhood years.  Starting in 1947, the playhouse offered established actors and apprentice actors on the West Coast a chance to appear in good, usually well known plays before live audiences. As their schedules permitted, the trio appeared at the playhouse, (which was initially located in the local high school auditorium), and took on the sometimes daunting task of managing the facility.

McGuire appeared in the plays The Importance of Being Earnest, I Am a Camera, The Winslow Boy and Tonight at 8:30 at La Jolla, which were all roles that she would never have been cast in for the movies. Eventually, in the early 1950s, John Swope stepped in to manage the facility for the triumvirate until 1959, when it officially dormant became dormant until it was revived in 1983.. The La Jolla Playhouse exists today as a thriving institution, earning a Tony award for Regional Theatre in 1993 and fostering new plays and thoughtful revivals. In addition to her on stage appearances at La Jolla, Dorothy McGuire managed a 1950 tour in Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke and appeared opposite Richard Burton in an updated 1951 version of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth on Broadway in a brief run in Jean Anouilh’s Legend of Lovers. In the 1970s, McGuire played in a critically acclaimed stage production of Williams’ Night of the Iguana on both coasts, portraying the faithful, peripatetic granddaughter of poet Raymond Massey with Richard Chamberlain in the lead as the defrocked Anglican priest. 

At the end of the ’40s, a year in Italy enjoying life with her husband and her baby daughter may have slowed her career. When McGuire returned to pictures in 1950, the “industry”, which gave most successful actors about five years to “make it” before tiring of them,  was becoming a much harsher place. The studio system continued to disintegrate and McCarthyism contributed to the chill in the creative air.

By the dawn of the ’50s, McGuire‘s own career lacked one thing: a truly popular, wholly commercial hit. In part in an effort to enlarge her repertoire from aesthetic parts she had long been associated with, Dorothy took more varied roles, with some degree of success.

My personal favorite from this period is Mister 880 (1950),  featuring Burt Lancaster,  who seems to have been trying to soften his tough guy persona as a soft-hearted Treasury agent in this lighter film.  Dorothy appeared as a bemused U.N. translator who plays a neighbor of Edmund Gwenn, the skilled veteran actor who has been described as one “who could charm the stripes off a zebra”.  Based on an actual case of a not-so-greedy counterfeiter, Gwenn, (who replaced the recently deceased Walter Huston on short notice), played an endearingly amateurish fraud who  passed off crudely copied one dollar bills for ten years. The U.S. Treasury Department’s embarrassing and bulging file labeled #880 filled with the details of the unsolved passing of bogus bucks became an obsession for the T-man played by Lancaster. Dorothy McGuire, an unwitting recipient of the bills, becomes involved–naturally–with the handsome agent, but does her best, in her understated way with comedy to protect the foxy Gwenn.  Director Edmund Goulding, who had brought out so much of Dorothy‘s charm in her first film, Claudia (1943), was an ill man while overseeing this picture, but it may be one that well deserves to be revived. Long gone from broadcast television and commercially unavailable on home recording, I hope that 20th Century Fox will someday release this nimble comic charmer.

A more polished but less dramatically coherent attempt at an intelligent “woman’s picture” came in 1952 with MGM’s Invitation, a movie that featured Dorothy McGuire as the very well heeled daughter of a concerned Louis Calhern. As the luminously frail heart patient who was married to poor boy Van Johnson, the actress used her gentle and intelligent skill, and especially her voice, to inject the overproduced and unlikely enterprise with a transfusion of real, if fleeting feeling. Gottfried Reinhardt, the son of the legendary innovative theatrical giant Max Reinhardt had worked in the U.S. film industry since 1935, as a writer for Ernst Lubitsch and as a producer at MGM since 1940. This film, which was his first as a director, came at a particularly tricky time for the director, the star Van Johnson, McGuire and newcomer Ruth Roman, not to mention MGM. Journalist Lillian Ross of The New Yorker magazine, while preparing her pioneering book, Picture, on the inner workings of the film industry, had documented the sturm and drang surrounding the production of The Red Badge of Courage, which was directed by John Huston and produced by Gottfried Reinhardt. Huston’s allegedly controversial film was considered a “failure” before its release by the management staff of MGM under Dore Schary. This long entrenched group of producers and executives made the intrigues at the court of the Romanovs appear like a cub scout meeting compared to their jockeying for power and position. In this hothouse atmosphere, Reinhardt‘s film, which might have done better as a small scale “B” movie, was nearly overwhelmed by the soapier aspects of the plot, which  followed the travails of the rich, supposedly plain girl (Dorothy McGuire) who marries poor boy Van Johnson.

A former idol of the bobby soxers, Johnson was an actor whose megastardom was fading at the studio, but whose best performances were still ahead of him.  As McGuire‘s husband he struggled to establish himself with the help of his wife’s money, while making his mercenary role simulataneously sympathetic and supportive. His rich wife soon learns several secrets about herself and her spouse and, oh yes, a robustly healthy, if rather overheated old girlfriend as well, played as well as she could by rising star, Ruth Roman. Even veteran actors Louis Calhern and Ray Collins are practically overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of dazzling sets, the swooning music of Bronislau Kaper, and the endless palaver in this movie, with a wordy script by a usually good writer, Paul Osborn, (author of On Borrowed Time and later the adapted screenplay of East of Eden from Steinbeck‘s massive novel). Reinhardt, who reportedly received a new car, gold cuff links and other ostentatious presents on the first day of shooting on Invitation, miraculously went on to direct part of The Story of Three Loves (1953) and the memorable Town Without Pity (1960), which was produced after he returned to Germany to work. Without Dorothy McGuire‘s wistful presence, however, I suspect that Invitation, instead of being occasionally touching, may have been as artificial as the pond constructed on the sound stage outside the lavish home where the characters in this flick do the majority of their suffering.

Another film, Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), brought McGuire a commercial success unlike any she had previously known. The movie, set in Rome, and directed by Jean Negulesco, starred Dorothy,  Maggie McNamara and Jean Peters as American women of various ages and experience working in The Eternal City. As expected in the rather rigid world of  ’50s commercial cinema, reflecting some distorted societal values, they were also actively hunting for a mate. McGuire, whose character was the eldest and the most experienced, played the “old maid” secretary to a Bernard Berenson-like art connoisseur, (Clifton Webb) whose waspishness and routine have blinded him to the obvious love felt for him by Dorothy McGuire‘s character. Over the course of the movie, as each “girl” struggles with trying to drag a man to the altar, it is the odd couple of Webb and McGuire that proves most amusing and somewhat touching. (The pair would reteam in 1959′s The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker as well, a mildly entertaining film that gave Dorothy an opportunity to look her most beautiful in turn of the century costumes playing the non-plussed wife to an unlikely yet successful bigamist (Webb) with two thriving families that recalled his earlier success in Cheaper By the Dozen).

There is one memorable scene Three Coins in the Fountain that threatens to wrest the story from a moment of mild comic tomfoolery into some awkward reality. This occurs when Dorothy McGuire, in a funk over her lack of progress with Webb, uncharacteristically decides to get drunk and jumps in a fountain.  Soon cold sober and realizing that she is too old and sensible for such shenanigans, McGuire climbs dripping from the fountain, not as a “Venus Rising” figure, but as a disappointed, very wet failed romantic. While I found much of the movie pretty insufferable, (other than the beautiful location shots of Italy), I suspect that the participation of many cast members, perhaps even Dorothy McGuire, (seen at right with co-star Louis Jourdan), may have been influenced by the opportunity for a paid vacation in Italy. Three Coins in the Fountain is available on a dvd that appropriately conveys the cinemascopic proportions of the film and the color of the original is adequately if not perfectly transferred to the new format. I realize that my attitude toward this movie is not shared by many observers, who are happily able to suspend their judgment while enjoying the entertainment on display. I just wish the women, for the most part, didn’t have to appear to be so dumb.  In any case, the commercial prominence of the film may have helped to make McGuire seem a viable candidate for her next notable role with one of the greatest filmmakers of his era.

Later in the decade, when director William Wyler was preparing to make a movie of the stories about a Quaker family in Indiana during the Civil War, he contacted the author Jessamyn West. The filmmaker and the writer hit it off, and she moved to Los Angeles to participate in the transformation of her episodic stories into Friendly Persuasion (1956) starring Gary Cooper, Dorothy McGuire and Anthony Perkins. Filmed on a beautiful farm set created largely at the 214-acre Rowland V. Lee movie ranch in the San Fernando Valley, the movie captures the humorous and spiritual crises of the Birdwell family, led by the relaxed father, Jess (Gary Cooper) and the more religiously scrupulous mother, Eliza (Dorothy McGuire). In the original stories and script, West and the screenwriters had the mother as the central figure of the tale, but after Gary Cooper became attached to the project, the story was shifted to focus on his antics and his efforts to help his eldest son, (Perkins) who was being drawn into the encroaching war, despite their family’s beliefs. Cooper, feeling uncomfortable in a pacifist role, is said to have lobbied to have at least one moment of active, justifiable violence incorporated into the script. West suggested that the actor “furnish your public with the refreshing picture of a strong man refraining”, an alternative that apparently had not been considered likely behavior for a movie star. Fortunately, West’s desire to see Quaker values depicted on screen was honored, and Mr. Cooper did not strike a blow or shoot a gun during the film. Still, a strong rapport developed between Wyler, West and Cooper as the story came together.

With the shift in story emphasis, Dorothy McGuire may have felt that she needed to fight for her character’s life in the movie. According to Wyler‘s assistant at the time, “Every woman between thirty and fifty-five was considered for Eliza” from Jane Wyman to Maureen O’Hara to Martha Scott. One day Wyler seriously asked Jessamyn West what she might think of casting Jane Russell, “a very pious girl” in the role! He finally settled on McGuire, an actress who could convey a blend of prim intelligence with an undercurrent of playful sexuality and humor.

Hoping to help her get into character, the meticulous if sometimes inarticulate Wyler,asked her “to come to the set hours a day before production”, according to Dorothy. There, he had her spend vast amounts of time kneading bread, emulating the actions of a 19th century country woman.  The actress said that he “never explained why he did something, he just asked you to do it. It was funny. What director would ask you to knead bread? I guess it put me into a different period of time…” While Wyler sometimes had difficulty explaining his motives for requiring individuals in his cast to perform such tasks or to do repeated takes, when he suggested that McGuire move out of her home away from her family during the production, she drew the line at being accommodating to the director. Enlisting Jessamyn West in his Quakerization of the actress, he had the writer take Dorothy to a Society of Friends’ prayer meeting in Pasadena, hoping that she would absorb the quality of Quaker reflection for the part. In the end, the tender characterization delivered by Dorothy McGuire as the stricter parent Eliza Birdwell opposite a splendid Gary Cooper won praise from critics for “her spirited and compassionate” performance, highlighted by her secret enjoyment of pell-mell buggy rides, her reconciliation with her husband in the barn after a fight, her efforts to understand her son’s desire to defend his home, and her fear that everything she knows and holds dear may be threatened. Actress and director may not have been perfectly attuned to one another on the set, but the resulting film, which is readily available on dvd, is scheduled to be broadcast on TCM on Feb 20, 2009 at 3:00 PM ET. My only objection to this film is the treacly song performed by Pat Boone at the beginning of the movie, a ghastly trend in the film industry that lasted well into the next decades.