Even as the Hollywood studio system slowly but surely began to crumble in the 1960's, the still standing moguls thought they could continue to pump out the kind of pulpy, soapy melodramas that filled their box office coffers in the 40's and 50's.
They even though they could still shoot them in black-and-white, just like the old Bette Davis and Joan Crawford movies.......
Claudelle Inglish (1961) and Youngblood Hawke (1964) rolled off the Warner Brothers' assembly line three years apart, but they really belong on a double feature, side by side. In many ways, they're practically twins.......tantalizing audiences with sinful behavior before they deliver strict moral lessons demanded by the already out of date Production Code.
Bur both films suffered greatly from the weak casting of their titular characters, roles that called out for charismatic actors with radiant star power.
"Claudelle Inglish", taken from an Erskine Caldwell novel, hoped to aspire (or perspire) to the fake-naughtiness of 1958's previous Caldwell adaptation, "God's Little Acre" (see our post on 6/17.20).
Our eponymous heroine, daughter of a dirt poor Southern sharecropper (Arthur Kennedy) and his unhappy, fed-up wife (Constance Ford), has her heart irrevocably broken by a boy next door (Chad Everett). Seeking revenge on men in general, sweet naive innocent Claudelle transforms herself into the town slut, seducing a host of young studs......and even the middle-aged general store owner. (Frank Overton)
From that point, let's just say things do not go well for anybody, especially our overheated gal Claudelle.
Stuck with a low, low budget (taking place entirely on a few soundstage sets) , this movie desperately needed a hubba-hubba bombshell actress to play Claudelle, which might have rendered the whole thing a lurid guilty pleasure.
Didn't happen. This juicy role fell to a run-of-the-mill, minor league Warners TV show blonde, Diane McBain. Pretty enough, but the emotional heavy lifting required for this part was not in her skill set, though to be fair, she gives it her best shot with what little range she has.
That stalwart, unsung journeyman director Gordon Douglas moves this potboiler along quickly enough and it's always a pleasure watching terrific character actors Kennedy and Ford, who so well played the two separately spurned spouses in 1959's "A Summer Place" 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)
Moving right along, let's fast forward to the next big Warners soaper, "Youngblood Hawke" a much more expansive, ambitious effort, scripted and directed by "A Summer Place"s master of melodramatic suds. Delmer Daves.
Taken from a Herman Wouk novel which was a thinly disguised version of writer Thomas Wolfe's life, the movie follows the rise and fall of a brilliant young novelist. Youngblood Hawke (what a great name), is a hopelessly optimistic romantic rube from Kentucky who's soon undone by fame, fortune, bad business deals and an alluring married socialite mistress (Genivieve Page) who floats in and out of his life at regular intervals.
As in "Claudelle Inglish", the casting of the main role went off the rails. The studio lined up Warren Beatty but the ever capricious playboy-actor skated away from it at the last minute, as he often did with his announced projects.
For reasons we'll never know, the prime role, which needed an aggressive, powerful young actor with fire in his belly, went to the likable, extremely blonde and extremely bland James Franciscus.
We've nothing against Franciscus, a pleasant enough dashingly handsome TV guy with a moderate acting range.......but this was a role of a lifetime and he simply didn't have the chops or the dramatic heft to seize the day, tear into it and make it his own,
And 2 hours and 17 minutes is one hell of a long time to sit through a movie fronted by an actor who looks like he's just temporarily standing in for whichever star the crew is actually waiting to show up.
There are a few pluses along the way......the more than welcome, typically brassy Max Steiner score and a great part for that Babbit-like interpreter of pompous bigwigs, Edward Andrews, here playing an acerbic literary critic. (Depending on the material, Andrews could make this type of blowhard either hilarious or sinister.)
2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)....and that rating's mostly for the presence of the perpetually adorable Suzanne Pleshette and Andrews' excoriating takedown of Younglood Hawke's slim novella, falsely inflated to novel length by thick pages, large type and fat binding!
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