Hard, Fast and Beautiful!

The acting and the viewpoint had me riveted in my seat in the first half of this little potboiler, before it turns turgid and never recovers. The tennis scenes are well done. This is one of those movies that seems headed for greatness, but in the end disappoints the viewer.

Despite the title, it's not a J.D. story....HARD: the egotistic, driven opportunist mother (Claire Trevor), FAST: the vacillating but easily influenced ace tennis player daughter (Sally Forrest), and BEAUTIFUL: the always polite, handsome boyfriend with the patience of Job (Robert Clarke) That just about sums it up. Viewers will marvel over how the girl's caring father is completely left out of the whirlwind tours and trips to Europe and ignored while pursuing her career. Outside of her devoted boyfriend, he's the only one who truly cares about her. It takes far too long for the girl to wise up and put her mother in her place, but it's worth watching to finally see it happen.

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.

In 1951, there were probably 400 movies released in the United States. This one is the only one that was directed by a woman.

Ida Lupino made seven low budget "B" films between 1949 and 1953. Despite working under terrible conditions, each one is fascinating and shows great directorial skill and creativity.

Notice how she actually makes the tennis sequences interesting. Notice how the characters often go beyond the plot and seem to be real people struggling with the world around them. Notice how there are good guys and bad guys, but all the characters have dignity and ultimately redeeming qualities.

Like Orson Welles, Ida Lupino was a directorial genius. Unfortunately, unlike Welles, she never got a chance to make her "Citizen Kane" All we are left with are seven small gems and the deliciously cute "The Trouble with Angels" that she did in the 1960's. She did direct some 60 television shows in the 1950's and 1960's, including 9 terrific episodes of Boris Karloff's "Thriller" television series.

As other people have noted, this is a good, but not great movie, with an outstanding performance by Claire Trevor as the mother. If Hollywood had not been completely sexist in the 1950's and if Ida Lupino had been given a budget 1/10th that hundreds of inferior male directors got, it could have been a great film. The fact that she was able to complete it and make it come out as well as it does is a testament to her genius.

Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951)

You might not think a tennis movie--that is, a movie about a young girl making her way up the tennis ladder to the championships--would go very far. And this is the main focus for the first half of it. But in the background some relationships are developing, and here is the real meat of this B-movie, with its slightly suggestive title.

At the core is a fairly new kind of stereotypical family, the kind broadened in 1950s television from the Donna Reed Show to My Three Sons to the Brady Bunch--a suburban utopia. Husband and wife in this case are politely happy, and the wife, played brilliantly by Claire Trevor, in particular is secretly frustrated. When her daughter begins her rise in the tennis world, and falls in love with the local pretty boy (a nice guy, too), she starts to be jealous, or at least to see what she's been missing in her own life. And then the power man comes along, a mover and shaker in the tennis world who see the daughter's talent and also the mother's hunger and charm.

It can only get interesting from there, and it does.

The tennis scenes are not terrible, but there are too many of them, I think, and we don't totally care who wins the matches. But again, this is backdrop, and as the ball is hit hard and fast, we see the subplots brood and get interesting, within the limits of the code still holding sway for another decade.

This is an Ida Lupino movie. You might not think it matters that a woman directed a fairly formula kind of film, but there are slight tilts to the attitudes that seem only possible by having a woman (and a woman like Lupino) in charge. And the characters who really rise to the most complexity are women, the daughter to some extent limited by her role as a young and naive whiz, but the mother, for sure. Between Trevor and Lupino we have an interaction that comes alive on screen.