Hard, Fast and Beautiful!

Claire Trevor stars and owns this movie about a woman who decides that the best way to get the good things in life is through her daughter's skill with a tennis racket. Sally Forrest is the daughter who if she had her own way would settle down with Robert Clarke the boy next door and play tennis for fun. Stan Musial had a great philosophy in that he knew it was time to quit when he no longer had fun just playing the game. Too many don't feel that way.

And too many live vicariously through their children. The best portrayal of that phenomenon was Jo Van Fleet in I'll Cry Tomorrow. But Lillian Roth's stage mother had nothing on Trevor as she guides and manipulates Forrest and her career.

Hard, Fast And Beautiful also joins the ranks of films that takes a solid look at our peculiar view of amateur and professional sports and the problems that causes.

The scene when Trevor and Forrest finally level with each other is a classic. So is the deathbed scene with them and her beloved but weak father Kenneth Patterson. Look for Carleton G. Young as well as the tennis coach also hoping to live off the Forrest gravy train.

Most of all this is for fans of Claire Trevor.

The combination of director Ida Lupino, stage/sports mother Claire Trevor and screenwriter Martha Wilkerson make this 1951 movie a winner. Although the story closely resembles the classic "Mildred Pierce", these three women and Sally Forrest who plays the railroaded daughter, combine to make the movie better than its B-picture status. The final shot of Trevor sitting in the empty stands, coiffed hair rumpled, perfect posture slouched and no one else in sight really gives a melancholy emotional conclusion to the film. Although alone, with newspapers and debris blowing across the empty tennis court, she still hears the sounds of her daughter's triumphs with tennis balls hitting racquets over and over and over. It's a fitting end to this monster of a mother movie. While it's not a great movie it is a good one and worth watching for the intense relationship/rivalry between the mother and daughter. Though we may have seen this "type" of movie before, the women involved bring it to a fever pitch and bring a uniquely women's perspective to this tale.

This movie turns its characters' souls inside-out, but never deviates from its pacing or its sports theme. Interesting performances punctuate an early 50's version of a woman trying to find her own way by eschew popular convention. The studio ending forced upon Lupino blunts some of the intended effect.

"Hard, Fast, and Beautiful" from 1951 sounds like one of those racy '50s films that has a luridly colored poster, some babe in a strapless dress being attacked by lecherous man. It is instead a film about a tennis player and her mother - go figure.

This is a small film directed by Ida Lupino. Sally Forrest plays Florence Farley, a young tennis player who shows real talent, so much so that the local country club gives her a membership and then offers to sponsor her in a competition.

Claire Trevor plays her ambitious mother, Millie, a disappointed woman who feels that her husband never amounted to anything. Now she has focused all of her attention on her daughter and plans on hitching her wagon to Florence's star.

Florence is eventually discovered by a promoter, Fletcher Locke (Carleton Young) who believes that with the right training on her backhand, she can go all the way. He also is very good at getting around Florence's amateur status and getting money for her.

All this is fine with Millie. Then Florence and her boyfriend decide to get married, and he wants her to quit tennis.

I love Claire Trevor, and it's a shame to see a talent such as hers in what is essentially a B movie. The film has a few problems, one of which is, seen today, it's badly dated.

A young woman who has devoted hours upon hours of work and wins the U. S. Open, and her fiancé tells her to quit, not bother with a European tour, and she's going to?

I understand it was a different time, and women often married and stopped pursuing careers. Nothing wrong with that, but in this case, with a professional career just beginning, it seems odd.

The best parts of the film are the scenes with Flo's father (Kenneth Patterson) who is a gentle man, very proud of his daughter, hurt by his wife, and who just wants Florence's happiness.

All in all, not a very convincing film, with an excellent performance by Trevor, and uneven acting by Forrest and her not very likable boyfriend (Gordon McKay).

Another of Ida Lupino's low-budget, guerilla entries she hoped would find an intimate place between the twin behemoths of 1950's TV and big screen Technicolor. Too bad her effort largely failed. The odds, I suppose, were just too great. Nonetheless, her productions typically tackled difficult subjects otherwise avoided by the behemoths, e.g. rape in The Outrage (1950) and bigamy in The Bigamist (1953). Unfortunately, this obscure entry, dealing with the perils of success, doesn't rise to the level of the other two, but does have its notable moments.

To me, those moments come with the effect that Florence's (Forrest) tennis star success has on her middle-class family, which to that point, seems fairly happy. However, with the success, Mom (Trevor) exults, because now she has a chance to escape a dull suburban existence and indulge her secret desire to social climb among the rich and famous. Meanwhile, daughter Florence starts out as a sweet, unassuming girl, but eventually has her head turned by the new world of big time tennis. These are interesting, but fairly routine developments.

Instead, the really compelling few moments come from Dad and the effect of his daughter's success on him. Now Kenneth Patterson is a name I don't recognize. But here he delivers a really affecting performance as a man who sees his family slipping slowly away from their conventional lives leaving him in an uncertain limbo. Worse, he sees his very manhood undermined by slick promoter Locke (Young) who politely but insistently takes over the lives of his wife and daughter. Catch those few close-ups of Dad trying quietly to comprehend while his home slips away beneath him. Whatever pain he's feeling on the inside, manfully, he won't let it show on the outside. These are minor masterpieces of the collaborative art of camera, script, and performance. The poignancy is made all the more intense by Patterson's refusal to go over the top, and Lupino's awareness that this should be the movie's low-key highpoint.

More generally, Forrest delivers a sprightly performance as an ace tennis player, even if she's not very good at being bitchy. On the other hand, Trevor knows exactly how to convey the self-indulgent behavior of an unfeeling woman, while Clarke has the thankless role of the patient boyfriend. Too bad, Lupino didn't try to buck the banality of the conventional romance, which mars the otherwise rather tough-minded 80-minutes. All in all, it's a well done little film from one of Hollywood's gutsiest figures, and is still worth catching up with.