Bonita e Audaciosa

This is one of those movies that is improbable but fun, with one of the most important features (in my opinion) for a movie - it is entertaining.

Bob's pairing with Jean Simmons is almost as good as his pairing with Deborah Kerr, although the chemistry is different; perhaps more paternal on his part.

I am, admittedly, a big Mitchum fan, but I won't buy a movie just because he is in it. The other actors in this film do a fine job and help give it a little more substance than the plot would have otherwise.

If this ever comes out on dvd, I'm buying it!

Jean Simmons and Robert Mitchum both lend star quality to this unassuming endeavor. It doesn't seem that they're lending it together. Mitchum was still playing characters, albeit here a country doctor, who'd have sex with anything in a skirt. Simmons seems less interested.

It's a sweet story. She seeks out a small town whose citizens had helped her when she was a sick child. Now, therein lies the single greatest flaw of this movie: Maybe the print I saw had been cut. However, exactly what this little town did to help a child of privilege is never made clear. And that kinds of eats away at the ore of the movie.

Still, her well meaning but ill thought-out good deeds make for a touching little story.

And the sequence in which people from all over the country drive up, trailers pulled behind their cars, hoping to benefit from her largess, sure is reminiscent of "Ace In The Hole"! That's an infinitely more cynical movie but these scenes have a dark quality too.

The other mystery is Simmons's clothes, especially in the first half. I am not one to pay much attention to ladies' fashions but she sure does appear to be pregnant hen she arrives in town.

She did have a baby not long after this. Maybe the movie was shot completely out of sequence; because in later scenes, she seems trim and chic. (She is chic in the maternity-style clothes, too, but they are hardly flattering to her.)

Corby Lane (Jean Simmons) is a 21 year old wealthy heiress. As a child, her hometown took up a collection to send her to get medical treatment. She intends to pay it back with her new wealth. The only person she knows is Doctor Robert Sellers (Robert Mitchum) who organized the collection but she doesn't actually know him.

I like this premise. I really like this premise for a light rom-com but the two leads are slightly out of phase. Jean Simmons is playing too angry. I don't like her being haughty either. Her character can be flighty. I keep thinking Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde or Clueless' Cher. Robert Mitchum is mostly fine but he falls for her a little too quickly. He's a little presumptuous. Their chemistry is a little wonky. This should be more fun.

This whimsical movie is set in a fictitious town in Arkansas called Progress. Places such as Little Rock and Pine Bluff are mentioned. Then in one part one of the locals talks about the location being a few miles northwest of Little Rock which would place it somewhere around Mayflower or Conway, Arkansas. The countryside depicted in the movie looks a whole lot like southern California. Possibly one reason the name Progress was chosen was not only to cater to the stereotype at the time of Arkansas as a backward hillbilly state but also because the "Natural State's" slogan in those days was "Land of Opportunity." Being a native Arkansawer (Arkansan), I was pleased to see a fellow Arkansan, Arthur Hunnicutt, and someone from Missouri, Edgar Buchanan, in the cast. Hunnicutt is buried in Greenwood, Arkansas, near Fort Smith. He was a wonderful character actor and added authenticity to the film.

"She Couldn't Say No" teamed Jean Simmons and Robert Mitchum once more and the pairing works fairly well, not as good as Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer but better than some of the other female partners assigned him over the years. Both Simmons and Mitchum were top of the line Thespians and much under appreciated, even today. The title is weak and keeps many from watching a somewhat clever and entertaining flick.

I agree with one of the IMDb reviewers that not enough time is spent by director Lloyd Bacon developing the theme of media sensationalism once the press gets word that an anonymous donor has given the 200 residents of Progress money (the exact amount is not revealed but it was obviously a large sum). There's an old W.C. Fields movie "If I Had A Million" and an early TV series "The Millionaire" that dealt with how a million dollars given to strangers would change their lives and rather than making their dreams come true would usually alter their dreams in negative ways. So there was much potential in the basic theme of "She Couldn't Say No" that was never realized.

The idyllic sporting life lived by the country doctor is exploited in interesting ways, especially when trying to hook the big fish in the creek. It blends well with the romantic attachment between the country physician, Dr. Robert Sellers (Mitchum), and the high society lady with a British accent,Corby Lane (Simmons). The repartee between the two is at times humorous, especially in the beginning when Dr. Sellers thinks she's a crazy patient who may have escaped from a mental ward. Digger, a forerunner of Opie, adds a little depth to Dr. Sellers' character and tends to be an asset. All in all this Howard Hughes throwaway is a good one to catch.

This was the hundredth and last of Lloyd Bacon's features (in 28 years!) and it's way down from his career summit, 1934's "42nd Street".

Set in Progress, Ark. (pop. 200), "She Couldn't Say No" concerns a revenant from childhood, heiress Jean Simmons. She learns that spraying her cash around anonymously causes more chaos than gratitude; but she finds love with local doctor and sage Mitchum, watched quizzically by assorted cornpone and cracker-barrel types.

There are few intimations of modernity. TV crews cover the mob hysteria when Ms Simmons's dollar-stuffed envelopes arrive in the citizens' mailboxes. Mitchum contemplates spending his bounty on "one of those bomb shelters". By and large, though, it's timeless, escapist hick hokum. The sun shines, no-one works too hard and the only blacks are a couple of goggling delivery men.

Having deprecated Audrey Hepburn in my comment on "Breakfast at Tiffany's", let me commend Jean Simmons as a British gamine with a wider range and a lot less self-satisfaction. She was suing to get out from under Howard Hughes's bizarre sway at RKO when "She Couldn't Say No" was shot (it was backburnered, like so many Hughes projects, while the boss dithered) and within five years she would do her best work in "Elmer Gantry" and "Spartacus". As usual in Simmons's earlier American movies, the script has to account for her English voice, and there's a clumsy bit of fishing slapstick to prove she isn't a stuck-up Limey; but her spirited sparring with Doctor Robert, her coolly measured tones (no hint of screech or shout) and smouldering sexiness win through.

Mitchum, limbering up for "Night of the Hunter", is his superbly somnolent, reflective yet dynamically masculine and mature self: this quiet man could make John Wayne look noisily neurotic. The couple, who had clicked in "Angel Face", keep the mild, pleasant and not too preachy romcom fresher than most from the McCarthyised, nuke-haunted Hollywood of the early Fifties, when America needed more laughs than it got at the cinema.