David – My favorite Ray film? Can I answer not on the basis of his most accomplished or influential work but rather sheer subjective pleasure? If so, I’d answer Johnny Guitar, with Bigger Than Life and On Dangerous Ground tying for second place. But I still have many others yet to see.

One of them, rife with strange connotations that puzzled me was between the Grahame character and Victor Jory (as a society lawyer whose connections make him, in G.G.’s earthy term, “a sucker”. How could a big city lawyer this successful be quite this dumb…and a mama’s boy yet!?). The other puzzler for me was the odd, business partnership of Gloria Grahame and Maureen O’Hara, which had more erotic subtext than the Production Office could probably detect, much less handle in that post war era.

I kept thinking about Ray‘s penchant for developing his films and characters into ad hoc families under stress, and could certainly see that O’Hara, (who was very good as a possible baddie, as she was in The Fallen Sparrow too) and Douglas gave G.G.‘s potentially wild, manipulative Susan some parental figureheads to rail against in her quest for “self-expression”. Too bad the underwritten script, (it really must have been penned by Herman Mankiewicz on an off day or drastically changed by Nick “we don’t need no stinkin’ script” Ray during production). It only allowed her childish rebellion to take the form of an unscheduled excursion to North Africa and taking the plunge with Bill Williams, (who seemed to have wandered onto the set from Deadline at Dawn without his sailor suit).

It was really an engaging if slight story, but I enjoyed the moments when Jay C. Flippen appeared, looking as natural as an old, battered hat, and when Mary Philips (who was Mrs. Humphrey Bogart for 10 years from 1928-1938) and Flippen acted as though this movie might be the start of a multi-film franchise about a police inspector and his nosy wife! Too bad that was not to be since RKO was about to be thrown away like a used tinker toy by Howard Hughes.

Thanks for all the grizzly detail on the chaotic turns of Ray and particularly Grahame‘s life as well. Do you think that Gloria Grahame had started to undergo all that unnecessary plastic surgery as early as this period in her career? She looked quite lovely at moments here, reminding me a bit of a svelte Ann Sothern, and other times she looked about fourteen years old…and scared. Uh-oh, maybe G.G. is manipulating me?