B.F.'s Daughter

Turner Movie Classics featured a Barbara Stanwyck "Festival" this week, and I'm in the process of viewing ten I recorded. I must say, the lady is truly remarkable, giving her all to every performance.

In the case of "B. F.'s Daughter," Stanwyck is fully involved, feeling and executing her role with complete mastery. Fortunately, she's surrounded by an excellent cast headed by Van Heflin and Charles Colburn. The script may be flawed, but you'd never know it from the commitment given by this talented cast.

Call it a "B" or "women's picture"--"B. F.'s Daughter" held my attention throughout, thanks to its cast and MGM production values.

Barbara Stanwyck plays the title role of B.F.'s Daughter, a very wealthy heiress who marries iconoclastic liberal minded economics professor Van Heflin. B.F. is Charles Coburn and he's one of those people who's two initials everybody knows because he's that wealthy and powerful.

Coburn is a firm believer in Herbert Hoover's rugged individualism and he's inculcated those values in his daughter. Stanwyck falls for a man who is the antithesis of her father's values, but he's barely getting by on his professor's salary. She decides to help by using her piece of her father's fortune to send him on a lecture tour for one of his books. Heflin turns out to be a natural, but he's never to know that his wife bought him a career.

The novel was written by J.P. Marquand who is best known for those Mr. Moto mysteries. It was published at the beginning of World War II and MGM took several years to finally get it to the screen.

Rich heiresses who overpopulated the cinema in the Thirties were a dying breed of movie heroines by the time B.F.'s Daughter came out in 1948. Stanwyck however makes it work and Coburn is in most familiar surroundings as the gruff millionaire.

Van Heflin had teamed well with Stanwyck the year before in The Strange Loves Of Martha Ivers and he does well in somewhat lighter fair by comparison. Margaret Lindsay does well as Stanwyck's best friend who marries yuppie Richard Hart who goes to war. The term yuppie was not in use back then, but that is what Hart is. He proves to have the right stuff when that is questioned by Keenan Wynn.

Wynn plays a part that seems a dress rehearsal for the role of the news commentator in The Great Man. A little less bitter, but just as cynical and he's got an incredible knack for predicting events wrong.

B.F.'s Daughter is a great part for Stanwyck and a great film for her as well.

John Marquand didn't deserve to have his novel turned into this film, which was probably a vehicle for its star, Barbara Stanwyck. Mr. Marquand was a writer whose books were popular and some of them endured the passing of time.

It appears that MGM asked screen writer Luther Davis to transform the novel into something that the book was not. Under the direction of Robert Z. Leonard, one gets the impression this was a movie to show us how a woman in love can throw away all the comforts and perks of her wealthy life for a man that could not make a decent living to keep her in style.

It doesn't make sense that Tom sweeps Polly off her feet by their first encounter in that "divine" little bistro in the Village, circa 1940s. Polly in furs and Tom in rags, give me a break! It would be laughable with today's audiences.

Barbara Stanwyck and Van Hefiln, by the magic of the celluloid never age; if anything they get better looking. Ms. Stanwyck was a marvelous actress with the right material, but in here, she is bogged down by a the mediocrity of the writing. Ms. Stanwyck and Mr. Heflin worked together to better results in two other films. This film has to be viewed as curiosity piece that never made it big.

Richard Hart was perfect as the stuffy Bob, the fiancee that is left behind when he can't cut the mustard. Charles Coburn also appeared in other films in which Barbara Stanwych shone, like "Lady Eve", and he is perfect as B.F. Fulton, Polly's father. He always played rich men. Margaret Lindsay has only a small part. Keenan Wynn is perfect as Marty Ainsley, Tom's friend.

On one positive note, the decor of the homes we see in the film is just "divine", to imitate what Apples would say, as are the costumes and the glossy look they gave the film.

Probably one of the worst scripts ever given to Stanwyck, who shines like only she can despite the severe shortcomings of the dialogue. Maybe she saw something in it that she liked - plays like your average soap opera.

It may be that my nine-star rating is reactionary. I added one extra star because I thought the six that were displayed was at least one too few.) And it may be that the apparent custom of poo-pooing this movie has resulted from the government authorities of the time - or even the present - and their sympathizers, finding industialist B. F. Fulton's after dinner speech about being confined to a two-by-four room, treated like a schoolboy and "told how to run my own business" a bit over the top.

Both B. F. Fulton, played by Charles Coburn, and his daughter Polly, played by Barbara Stanwyck, along with Polly's mother, represent the rich American industrial class in this film, and are drawn far more sympathetically than members of the opposing, intellectual/moralist camp. The moralist male hero of this love-story-with-timely-political-interest (which has been ineptly described as a soap opera) is no exception, as he frequently gets what he thinks are deficient moral standards of his opponents mixed up with just being a member of the opposing camp, and tends to solve his arguments by turning tail and walking out once and for all (before returning) except once notably when Barbara tells him to stay put: so much for alleged female stereotypes.

This may be the reason Van Heflin's performance is not so well liked - because of the personality problems of the character he portrays. His friend and cohort, played by Keenan Wynn, if anything, is worse, constantly making aspersions and predictions of high import about people that have no basis in fact on his radio program "There's one good thing though, he's only on 3 days a week," quips B. F. Fulton.) though he is more honest than Heflin's character, openly admitting at one point that he consciously uses his victims - with no regard for veracity of the claims he makes about them - for his own selfish ends.

It doesn't seem there can be much argument that the characters of Polly and B. F. Fulton are not played with affection by the two celebrated actors. And that of B. F. Fulton is completely devoid of any visible selfish motive, a wholly good egg. Stanwyck has curtailed her sassier, blacker side to make way for the by-birth-and-training more milque-toasty ingenue, and does so consistently. And she's good too, one slip - a request by this aristocrat with a conscious made early in the film that a friend of her jilted erstwhile fiancé engage himself in insider trading - notwithstanding: this apparently to be interpreted as an uncharacteristic youthful indiscretion.

For the most part, the three Fulton family characters represent the epitome of noble goodness and we are taken in when Fulton senior soliloquizes the vanishing of his own breed during his last appearance. According to other reviewers here, the movie uses lines from an original J. P. Marquand novel, and the many sometimes ironic and clever turns of phrase help to ingratiate these characters, increasing the high level of believability and naturalness.

Even the scenery and music seem to be something special. (No credit is given for the music in the version I saw.) From the play of the morning light in the Fultons' Park Avenue apartment, as the little blacksmith of their whimsical parlor clock hammers out the chimes of the hour, to the unflattering contrast of oppressiveness in the heavily draped and damasked dining compartment of Polly's formal custom built mansion... From the creepily groaning nonharmonic tones derivative of Wagner's Im Treibhaus, to the more exaltant reminiscence of Tristan und Isolde (for which the former was a study) heard later on - and of course the score no doubt has more to distinguish it than these often alluded to war horses of movie music genre - special care has been taken.