Hard, Fast and Beautiful!

Mom is very manipulative but film seems to say a woman's place is being married at home--yet the film was directed by Ida Lupino! Husband is a chauvinist I generally enjoyed "Hard, Fast and Beautiful". Its message about success and a 'stage mother' is timeless. However, it also gives an odd message about women and domesticity that really made no sense--but more about that later.

Sally Forest plays Florence Farley--a young lady who is incredibly gifted at tennis. However, her mother Millie (Claire Trevor) is bent on making her daughter a REAL success. Now this isn't just because she wanted to see the girl succeed but also because the mother loved all the perks that go with it--travel, nice clothes and attention. And, her husband really wasn't important to these plans....just Millie. Now I really liked this, as it seemed like a great indictment of the concept of the stage mother--those insane parents who wan to live vicariously through their famous kids.

There is a serious problem, however. At one point in the film, Sally's boyfriend becomes her fiancé--and he insists that she give up tennis and be the dutiful housewife. Now considering that she just won the US tennis championship and was about to go pro, this seemed just as selfish as Millie. He did NOT ask Florence what she wanted either. BUT, the film showed this as a GOOD thing--like Florence was a fool for not doing 'her master's bidding'--a typically sexist 1950s attitude. Think about it--she was poised at becoming world champion but he really only would accept her if she gave this up!! Now this is VERY hypocritical when you think about it, as the film was made by a woman and stars women! Ida Lupino directed this film--the same actress/director that blew through three famous actor husbands!! So, with this message of domesticity running through the movie, it all seemed like bull and really, really diluted the message.

I would have LOVED the film if it portrayed BOTH the mother and fiancé as selfish and had Florence at least once talk about what she wanted. Instead, the message seems to tell women watching the movie that the ONLY way to success is to completely lose yourself and your dreams to your husband's! It's focus on the manipulative mother and her quest for glory was great--the rest of it really seemed sexist--even for the 1950s. For a better but silly version of this sort of film, try watching "Pat and Mike".

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.

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.

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.

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.