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.

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" 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).

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.

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.