Stars: Bob Hope, Rhonda Fleming, Wendell Corey, Gloria Talbott, Jim Davis
Director: Norman Z. McLeod
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars
Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age. This month, our focus is on Rhonda Fleming-click here to learn more about Ms. Fleming (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.
By the end of the 1950's (where we will end our look at the actress), Rhonda Fleming's career was in a weird place. She had had a very big hit just two years prior to our picture today, Gunfight at the OK Corral, that might have turned around her career had she had a more significant part in it (we would have certainly profiled that for this series, and I'll likely see it at some point, but she didn't get above-the-line billing for it so it didn't qualify under our rules). She had, in 1957, opened up a wildly successful nightclub act in Vegas and she had become independently wealthy through shrewd real estate investments (Fleming would not be one of those stars who soared and would go broke later in her career), but it was clear that a film career that had been given great promotion throughout the decade was coming to a close. At 36, she reunited with the man who had made her career in 1949 with The Great Lover, Bob Hope, but starring opposite Hope in 1959 didn't mean as much as it had ten years earlier, as Hope's career (in film, at least) was also winding down. As a result, Alias Jesse James would come out just one year before Fleming would announce her "semi-retirement" from cinema and while she'd appear in pictures occasionally after 1960, she never had another starring role in the movies.
(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a silly little western, one that exists almost solely for Hope to be a witty dope as Milford Farnsworth, an insurance salesman who accidentally gives a $100k life insurance policy to outlaw Jesse James (Corey), and his boss tasks him with tracking down James, stating that he either needs to prevent James from getting killed or die trying. James and his brother Frank (Davis) see Wendell as an easy mark, someone who can be duped, and whom they can kill (and pretend it was James in order to get the insurance money). Milford keeps foiling their plans by accident, living through preposterous situations, until he finally realizes toward the end of the film what is happening. Along the way, he falls for Jesse's girlfriend Cora Lee (Fleming), who takes a shine to him despite the seemingly sexless nature of Milford (at one point Jesse tells Milford, who has just been kissing Cora Lee, something to the effect of "oh, Milford good, it's just you-I thought I saw a man through the window." Like all films of the era, Milford gets the girl who is totally out-of-his-league, and then takes over as president of the insurance company, with a family of redheads in tow.
The film is most well-known for two scenes toward the end of the picture. The first is an extended chase sequence where Hope is literally running at the speed of a moving horse as he's fallen through the bed of his carriage. It's funny, and Hope makes the most of the physical comedy (Hope's humor, though dated and predictable, has a retro feeling watching it today that probably felt tired when the movie came out in 1959 & he was an everyday part of most people's film-watching lives for the past 15 years). The most famous scene, though, is having Milford "shoot down" the James gang, but instead it's actually a series of western heroes who show up (without context) to shoot down the gang. This is a delight, so if you genuinely haven't seen the movie skip to the next paragraph as I wasn't kidding about the spoiler alert. The film has not only Hope's old pal Bing Crosby (just as a random cowboy), but also (in their famed costumes) Fess Parker's Davy Crockett, Gary Cooper's Will Kane, Jay Silverheels's Tonto, Hugh O'Brian's Wyatt Earp, James Arness's Matt Dillon, Ward Bond's Seth Adams, Gail Davis's Annie Oakley, and Roy Rogers as himself. It's a who's who of popular western figures at the time, and for years the film was difficult to find on home release because of the copyrights involved with recruiting these characters. The film marks the final cinematic appearance for both Bond and Arness.
Rhonda Fleming's role is, as you might be able to tell, minimal. She once again plays a beautiful woman, someone for our hero to fall-in-love with within seconds of meeting her, and to be almost comically attractive to the point where men do stupid things to stay in her favor. Fleming was very good at this type of role as we've seen throughout this series, and her Cora Lee is funny & she finds ways to elevate her even when she's not an interesting character on-paper. However, the assertion made by Fleming that we discussed at the beginning of this series was apt-after working on films like Spellbound and Out of the Past (genuine masterpieces), Fleming used her newfound fame and leading lady status to kind of make forgettable pictures. She definitely got fame & money, but she was correct in that she sort of sold out for playing toss-away parts in pictures that seemed to be beneath an actress as talented as she was. It's hard not to think of two other actresses born the same year as Fleming (Gloria Grahame & Anne Baxter) who also took promising careers in supporting parts but unlike Fleming transformed them into memorable leading roles, and have as a result enjoyed a career longevity that Fleming has lacked. Had she demanded at her heyday to get better parts in better movies, Fleming certainly had the talent to get off of a list of "actresses Oscar never acknowledged" and might not have needed to go into retirement in such unceremonious fashion. Instead, she's the sort of actress you're surprised to watch in Out of the Past and realize how good she can be.
Fleming, though, is probably better remembered than the woman we'll profile starting on Thursday, an actress who enjoyed only a few years of proper leading lady status, and is arguably the most obscure leading woman we're going to profile during our 2019 series. That said, unlike Fleming, she managed to get one truly great film out during her career that is better-remembered now than anything Fleming ever made in her career. Stay tuned!
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