Margaret Sullavan on the Screen

Margaret Sullavan made only 16 films during her time in Hollywood; her performances are remarkable, as is the arc of her career. Spotted by talent scouts while doing Dinner at Eight on Broadway, she was promptly whisked off to the West Coast, where a leading role at Universal awaited her. She was top billed in her first film, and top billed in her last. She never had to work her way up through the ranks, and she was never relegated to supporting-player status once her career was on the decline. She arrived a star, and that’s how she left. She’s pretty much forgotten today — except for the Lubitsch classic The Shop Around the Corner — but her body of work remains something to be savored.

She was a strong, intelligent woman who knew her mind — anathema to studio heads. And she fought for what she believed in, because she had no fear of reprisal — if a studio suspended her, she could always return to the stage, where her heart belonged. She was known for being difficult and demanding on set, but if she felt passionately about something, she was typically right. She tutored many of her less experienced costars — Jimmy Stewart, Glenn Ford — and knew how to showcase herself to her best advantage. Although both Paramount and Columbia had come calling while she was on Broadway, proffering five-year contracts, she refused to be tied down for that long, and settled on a three-year deal with Universal that gave her summers off to return to the stage. In time, she did end up working for both Columbia and Paramount (and MGM too), but she never signed more than a short-term contract; she refused to be “owned” by any studio. Famed Hollywood fixer Eddie Mannix remembered her as “the only player who outbullied [MGM studio chief] Louis B. Mayer. She gave him the willies.”

Critics and audiences took to her at once — but Sullavan never took to Hollywood. Of her 16 films, she completed all but one in the decade between 1933 and 1943, then couldn’t wait to head back to Broadway. (“Acting in the movies,” she told one executive, “is just like ditch digging.”) Although her films are mostly of high quality — she was shrewd about the assignments she accepted — it’s her technique that continues to astound. At her best — which was most of the time — Sullavan had an intuitive sense of how to apply her stage training to the big screen, and a gift for making carefully rehearsed effects seem spontaneous. Her technique is formidable, but never ostentatious; she simply seems to explore her characters so fully that she offers a deeper glimpse into the workings of the human heart than you’re accustomed to seeing. And impressively, critics were well aware of her gifts, right from the start. Labeling her “a gal of future box office importance,” Variety proclaimed in 1933, “An analysis of why she is so promising would probably revert to the truism that the best actors work with their brains. Her beauty is not as stunning or vivid as others on the screen, but it may be more enduring because it is founded on character and personality.” Even the more reserved reviewers hailed her as the greatest find since Hepburn.

As for me, I won’t necessarily lay claim to Sullavan being Hollywood’s “finest actress,” although — on reflection — I may well feel that way. (She’s certainly among my top five favorites.) There are plenty of performers from Hollywood’s Golden Age whom I admire, but offhand, I can’t think of another who turned out such thoughtful, detailed and singular work in such a high percentage of quality films. I suggest seeking out Sullavan pretty much anytime she’s on the screen (she rarely strikes a false note, and you can grow dizzy just taking in that husky yet lyrical voice), but I also wholeheartedly recommend a full 3/4 of her films — and I can’t think of another actor of her generation for whom that’s true. Below, reviews of Sullavan’s films, in which I rate — on a scale of 1 to 10 — both the quality of the films and of Sullavan’s performances.

ONLY YESTERDAY (1933)
For a woman’s picture — a tearjerker — it’s decidedly unsentimental, and its leading lady uncommonly practical. Sullavan sets the template for all her films to come. And she goes for subtle effects that were almost revolutionary in 1933, when the grandiose gestures of silent films were still commonplace. There are a couple of extended set pieces that rival anything in director John M. Stahl’s catalog for sheer scope and impressiveness, including a party in a split-level New York apartment with seemingly half the town in attendance (including cameos from quite a few real-life Hollywood stars ). But ultimately, the success of the piece falls to Sullavan. It’s a role that calls for her to age over a decade — a task she was given regularly on screen — and she rises to the occasion beautifully. Sullavan seems to work from the inside out; you can’t quite tell what effects she’s using, but in the early reels, she very much convinces as a 19-year-old with very little worldview, and as the years go by onscreen, you really do seem to be getting a glimpse at the aging process, and not merely a look at a makeup and wardrobe team working overtime. Sullavan has moments that take your breath away: one where she learns more about the man she’s fallen in love with than she bargained for, and her face registers — in rapid succession — anticipation, confusion, shock, anger, mortification and resignation; a second a dozen years later, when she manages to catch his eye — silently — during the most tumultuous of New Year’s Eve parties and entreaties him not merely to join her but to seduce her; and a third when they arrive at his apartment and — seeing him at last for who he truly is — regards him like a hunter surveys its prey: registering, ever so gently, that she is now the one in charge, and relishing that power. Only Yesterday is the story of a woman who meets a man twice, the first time on his terms, the second on hers. Those two scenes essentially bookend the flashback that dominates the film. John Boles was a popular star of limited talent, but he’s rarely as effective as he is here. He’s a rogue when Sullavan first meets him, and when they reconnect a dozen years later, he hasn’t mellowed. Every compliment has purpose, every invitation is a proposition. He’s shallow and smooth and insincere, and the only real difference is that when she’s 19, she falls for it, and a decade later, she sees through it all and can simply enjoy their time for what it is: one night with no expectation of a future. Even for a pre-Code film, it’s impressively unambiguous about the fact that the two of them sleep together twice: once, when she’s too innocent to understand the repercussions, and once, when she’s too resolute to care. It’s an impressively frank and feminist film. (Once Sullavan learns that the man of her dreams is married, she instantly regroups and establishes herself as a successful businesswoman.) And Sullavan is a wonder. It’s not merely that she fully commands the screen; she’s already forged and mastered a style of unaffected, deeply affecting film acting that seems fiercely her own. Reginald Neal, Billie Burke and Ralph Meeker are on hand to provide sterling support.
Only Yesterday: 9
Margaret Sullavan: 10

LITTLE MAN, WHAT NOW? (1934)
It’s 1930 — the waning years of the Weimar Republic — and the rising unemployment and hyperinflation are bearing down on newlywed Hans Pinneberg and his pregnant wife Lammchen. The screenplay by William Anthony McGuire adheres to most of the key incidents in Hans Fallada’s 1932 novel: we see Pinneberg kowtowing to a manipulative corn merchant; accepting lodging from his stepmother, who — despite making good money — charges him exorbitant rent; and securing a position at a clothing store, where he finds it impossible to earn a living wage. The incidents are there — but the way the movie is “opened up” undermines the novel’s approach and appeal. As Fallada scripts it, the signs of a world going mad are felt but rarely seen; they impinge mostly from the fringes of the story. You sense them mostly in the way they gnaw at Pinneberg’s soul. The film, however, places the political and economic turmoil front and center; Pinneberg can scarcely leave his home without being swept into a soapbox speech or finding himself in the middle of a brawl. And McGuire strips the supporting characters down to their most garish or grotesque traits — whatever will cause Pinneberg the most grief. In the novel, his struggles are interlaced with moments of joy and pride and exhilaration; in the film, it’s one humiliating defeat after another. (The deck is so stacked against Pinneberg, any message about the exploitation of white-collar workers is lost along the way. Even Job had an easier time of it.) And an understated theme of the novel — how the threat of poverty can prompt even the most unassuming men to commit acts of violence — is undone by the casting. As Pinneberg, Douglass Montgomery is a lightweight: gangly and haunted. At one point, while applying for a job, Pinneberg admits he’s “afraid of the streets.” “Afraid of the streets,” a man wonders, “or afraid of yourself?” “Myself, perhaps,” he concedes, but there’s nothing in Montgomery’s performance to suggest a man who might be become dangerous if pushed too far. Sullavan fares better. She’s a little coy in spots, but mostly she’s exactly what director Frank Borzage wants her to be: the embodiment of what keeps every unhappy man going. The film begins with a scroll: “Against the tide of time and chance, all men are little — but in the eyes of a woman in love, a man can become bigger than the whole world.” It’s a theme nowhere to be found in Fallada, but it’s consistent with Borzage’s worldview, in which love can overcome any hardship. But it reduces Sullavan to a type, a prop: the thing that makes life bearable. In the novel, Lammchen is a whirlwind of messy emotion; in the film, she’s her husband‘s reason for living. And Sullavan succeeds, to be sure; she’s so incandescent, she make the agonies of life seem worth enduring — but you can only imagine how much more effective she’d be if she had a role to play rather than a function to fill. There’s a beautiful scene late in the film where Lammchen secures them an apartment over a furniture store, and having put a deposit down, gives her husband a tour, justifying each substandard item: the small stove, the tiny bed, the lack of light — all with a cheerfulness that’s almost unbearable. And he calls it a stable and walks away, and she starts to cry. She’s willing to live on next to nothing, but he’s too caught up in pride, guilt and rage to express his gratitude. At that moment, you truly get a sense of what makes the novel so disarming: its ability to chart — without growing didactic — the impact that economic hardship can have on the psyche of a young couple. It’s a balancing act that the movie struggles to maintain.
Little Man, What Now?: 6
Margaret Sullavan: 8

THE GOOD FAIRY (1935)
As screwball comedies swept Hollywood, the studios expected their female talent to fall in line, and there’s hardly a leading lady who escaped the craze, no matter how unlikely the casting seemed on paper. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford did it (The Bride Came C.O.D. and They All Kiss the Bride, respectively), as did dramatic divas Janet Gaynor (Three Loves Has Nancy) and Merle Oberon (That Uncertain Feeling). Even Garbo had a go at it (Two-Faced Woman) — and it ended her career. But of all the unlikely candidates, it was Sullavan — who, up to that point, had only suffered in period dramas — who had not only the talent, but the temperament. Preston Sturges took the Ferenc Molnar play of the same name, which had been presented on Broadway in an English translation during the 1931-32 season (lasting a whopping 13 performances), kept the bare bones of the plot, then rebuilt it from the ground up. Specifically, he rebuilt it to suit the talents of Sullavan, who had bewitched him in Little Man, What Now? As Sturges reimagines it, Sullavan’s onscreen persona re-emerges as a comic force: eager, impressionable, ruffled, frazzled — and too well-meaning to avoid getting into trouble. It’s 1930’s Budapest, and Sullavan — an orphan and usherette — has landed an invitation to a posh party, where she’s hit on by libidinous industrialist Frank Morgan (forever tongue tied, in the Morgan tradition). Engaging in a ploy that’s worked for her in the past, she insists she’s married, and when Morgan suggests a solution — that he could create a well-paying position for her husband, who could then lavish her with the luxuries Morgan feels she deserves — Sullavan sees a chance to do some good. Fancying herself a “good fairy,” she chooses a name out of the phonebook and claims he’s her husband, confident that her quick thinking will change a poor man’s life. And indeed it does, but not as smoothly as she’d hoped. The dialogue is delightful, the energy nonstop, and the misunderstandings and miscommunications flow lavishly from Sturges’s pen. As the recipient of the windfall, Herbert Marshall — as a stuffy lawyer with an unsightly beard, which he delights in combing for anyone who’ll watch — proves just as unexpectedly charming a screwball hero as he proved later that year opposite Jean Arthur in If You Could Only Cook. From their first encounter, you recognize the chemistry that Marshall and Sullavan share, but it’s on the shopping spree that follows (facilitated by Morgan’s money) that you sense their comic kinship. He purchases the automobile that he craves (but in the color she prefers), she needles him into shaving his beard — then persuades him to buy her the “genuine foxine fur” that’s captured her fancy. (It’s rather an atrocity, but being raised by nuns has clearly given her an idiosyncratic sense of fashion.) He postures that he’s in control, but he’s lived in isolation for so long (with a library of books his sole companion), he mostly wants to make her happy; she’s content to let him think he’s in control as long as she gets what she wants — which in this case is a foxine fur. Director William Wyler maintains his customary tight grip, even as the farce spirals deliriously out of control. Sullavan was uncharacteristically rattled during the first few days of filming; Wyler took her out to dinner to calm her nerves and win her trust, and was so successful that they were married shortly thereafter. Hampered only by the final tableau — a wedding ceremony — that brings the proceedings to a fitting close, when what you crave is for Sturges’s fairy to pull off one last feat of magic.
The Good Fairy: 10
Margaret Sullavan: 10

SO RED THE ROSE (1935)
Stark Young’s Civil War novel — some 500 pages long — was condensed into an 84-minute movie, and unsurprisingly, the film seems like it was cut to bits — not merely by the screenwriters, but by the studio, once filming had been completed. Scenes cut away so abruptly, you long to see what was left on the editing room floor. But when director King Vidor gets a chance to let a moment linger — particularly the purely visual ones he had mastered during the silent era — you get a glimpse of what the film could’ve been. (There’s a stunning tableau of dead and injured soldiers sprawled across what had once been a battlefield.) The book had focused on two plantation homes — one favoring secession and the other opposed; the film condenses it down to one family — but even so, the first half feels muddled and unfocused. But as the men of the house join up one by one — and the emancipated slaves take flight — the once-bustling plantation home becomes a ghostly mansion inhabited by only a handful of souls, and So Red the Rose suddenly becomes a more engrossing movie for scaling back its ambitions. The tale of a family decimated by war is the most compelling part of So Red the Rose; the women left behind — mother, daughter and maiden aunt — come to understand the complexities and subtleties of war better than the soldiers fighting on the front lines. There are ironies upon ironies that drive home of the cost of battle. No good deed goes unpunished. When a Yankee looter, badly injured, stumbles onto the front steps and warns he’s going to be hanged by the Southern army, the women — seeing in him an innocent not unlike Sullavan’s brother, who perished in battle — decide to protect him, and carry him up to the brother’s room, sheltering him from the inquisition that follows. But no sooner do the Southern soldiers leave — no sooner do the women breathe a sigh of relief, comforted by the thought that there’s still a place for compassion in this new and uncertain world — than they’re overpowered by Northern forces, who burn the plantation home to the ground. The ironies aren’t overstated or overplayed; they’re just left hanging in the acrid air. It’s Sullavan herself, sadly, who does most of the overplaying — all of it in the opening half hour. You can’t tell if she’s tacking the role of a “traditional” Southern belle in 1861, or a young woman uncomfortable with the flirtatious, self-involved role that society expects her to play. Her efforts at an accent render her unintelligible at times, and certain line readings (“Do my ears stick oat?“ she inquires of her standoffish suitor) sound vaguely Canadian. Silly self-absorption isn’t a trait that comes easily to Sullavan, and she works too hard at it, and takes it too far. As a result, the early passages are amateurish: hardly a word you’d use to describe Margaret Sullavan. And there’s no gradual transition into the caring, merciful woman she’ll become; one letter from a suitor, telling her that another suitor has died in battle, and suddenly she’s a model of thoughtfulness and restraint. The transformation of a Southern belle from a coquette to a woman of compassion is, of course, the template for countless screen epics — Jezebel and Gone With the Wind instantly come to mind. But both the book and screen adaptation of So Red the Rose preceded them by several years, so it’s easy to overlook the similarities. What’s less easy to overlook is how badly Sullavan handles the early passages, and how unconvincing her ensuing transformation is. She’d already played a 19-year-old Southern belle — largely oblivious to the ways of the world — in her first film, and splendidly — so why was it such a struggle for her here?
So Red the Rose: 5
Margaret Sullavan: 4

NEXT TIME WE LOVE (1936)
It’s about a mismatched pair trying to build a life. In their efforts to be both gracious and ambitious, they’re left with nothing but their love — and its hold on them that they can’t seem to break. They love each other so much, they want the other to feel creatively fulfilled, to live up to their potential — but they don’t think it through. They don’t realize the toll that will take on their marriage, or the sacrifices they’ll have to make. They don’t know when to say no, and they don’t know when to get out of their own way. They’re selfish in all the right ways and selfless in all the wrong ones. Their timing is consistently horrible, but deep down, there’s an attraction that they can’t resist. And you see it on the screen. You see the real-life affection that Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewart had for each other, and it’s irresistible. You’re also aware that she’s guiding him a lot of the time. Her technique is far beyond his at this point — he’d only had a few small roles at his home studio MGM, and no one there thought he showed much promise — but she coached him so clearly and precisely and successfully in this, his first leading role, that he returned to MGM a new man. (“It was Margaret Sullavan who made James Stewart a star," the film’s director Edward H. Griffith later admitted. And famed MGM casting scout Bill Grady concurred: “That boy came back from Universal so changed, I hardly recognized him.”) There’s almost nothing Sullavan did in her career that’s more charming than the two of them sitting in Penn Station, waiting for the train to take her back to college, and each teasing the other about all the temptations they’ll face before she graduates in a little over a year. Picking nervously yet nonchalantly at her fake fur collar, Sullavan is at one self-deprecating and self-sacrificing, dreamy-eyed and pouty. She’s altogether enchanting, and you understand completely why Stewart can’t let her go. Only on occasion does she reach for an effect that he isn’t prepared to match; she’s left hanging emotionally, and it’s a shame, because you’re aware that if Stewart were up to Sullavan’s level, the movie could’ve soared in ways it doesn’t quite get a chance to. But if it doesn’t ever quite soar, it glides so effortlessly that you don’t much care. During one of their many separations, when she admits — with guilt and embarrassment — that days go by when she doesn’t ever think of her husband, it approaches a kind of honesty about marriage that was almost unthinkable in the post-Code ’30s. It’s those sorts of illuminations at which the movie excels. What the movie is missing, and what limits its effectiveness, is any kind of focus on their careers (she’s an actress, he’s a reporter) — the very thing that’s keeping them apart. You see them waiting for each other, or pining for each other, or returning to each other — but you never come to care about the work that’s so important to them both, it seems worth sacrificing a marriage for. As a result, it’s a lopsided movie, and a somewhat unsatisfying one. But in the themes it explores, and the delicacy and ambiguity with which it infuses those themes, it remains eminently watchable — not to mention highly relevant — some 90 years later.
Next Time We Love: 7
Margaret Sullavan: 9

THE MOON’S OUR HOME (1936)
In her most wickedly satiric performance, Sullavan is Hollywood star Cherry Chester (née Sarah Brown), given to fits of rage and flights of fancy. (At times you can feel her riffing on Carole Lombard in Twentieth Century, and there are shades of Hepburn and Harlow in there, too; Sullavan leaves no star unburned.) Henry Fonda — her ex-husband in real life — is arrogant “boy adventurer” Anthony Amberton, who’s given to penning novels about his expeditions and who — besieged by female fans eager to paw and pursue him — retreats into the nom de plume “John Smith.” The movie’s conceit is that Cherry Chester and Anthony Amberton hate each other sight unseen, but Sarah Brown and John Smith manage to fall in love without being aware of each other’s public personae. The original treatment of Faith Baldwin’s novel was by the husband-and-wife team of Isabel Dawn and Boyce DeGaw, but at Sullavan’s request, Dorothy Parker and spouse Alan Campbell were brought in to do the rewrite, and few screwballs ever got off to a better start. The first 15 minutes are one clever quip after another, as Cherry engages in her penchant for hyperbole — without one person in her coterie willing to indulge her. (As her handler, Beulah Bondi seems to relish her uncharacteristically wry role. When Sullavan laments to the gods, “Oh, to be alone on a mountaintop with the moon and the snow and the sunshine,” Bondi deadpans, “At the same time?”) In short time, Cherry is on a train to New York, where Amberton is in the adjoining compartment. They each hear for the first time about the other (Anthony from the train stenographer, Cherry from the jacket of the book Bondi is reading), and the barbs fly: “Cherry Chester?” “Anthony Amberton?” “Nobody's named Cherry Chester.” “Sounds like a hero in a costume picture.” “What is Cherry Chester? Some kind of new soft drink?” “‘Great adventurer.’ Probably afraid to cross the street.” “Marshmallow-faced movie stars make me sick.” “‘Lots of hardships’ — I’ll bet he's lost without his hot water bottle.” But when twilight ascends, and they stand face-to-face in their adjoining mirrors, we see a couple doing their evening ablutions in perfect harmony. In New York City, Smith meets Jones, and Sullavan and Fonda show the kind of easy rapport — both while courting and while clashing — that you can only imagine comes from having lived through their own (by all accounts) tumultuous relationship. Soon she follows him to a snow-covered New Hampshire retreat, and it’s here that love blossoms, and we transition from verbal to visual humor. Their romance basically develops through pratfalls, because it’s then that they abandon their pride and their pretenses. Sullavan reveals a gift for enduring humiliation without ever seeming victimized: she takes countless headers into the snow without losing her authority or sacrificing her femininity, and a set-piece where she takes a tumble while skiing — then tries to get back on her feet — feels so well-rehearsed, it regains its feeling of spontaneity. It’s like watching a comic ballet. The beauty of Sullavan’s performance is that she creates a character who’s not just one but two clichés — the hot-headed Hollywood star and the spoiled little rich girl — and makes them both deeply entertaining. But the minute she meets Fonda’s character, she starts to fill in the blanks, and bit by bit, scene by scene, pratfall by pratfall, you see her in new ways — curious, self-deprecating, generous — that you haven’t been privy to: qualities that fit snugly alongside the ones you’d already seen, that flesh out the character. But she never loses her edge. The last fifteen minutes are a letdown, and the final five a calamity. But no matter: you’re left with far too many wonderful memories, and the sense of Smith and Jones as comic soulmates.
The Moon’s Our Home: 8
Margaret Sullavan: 9

THREE COMRADES (1938)
The very qualities that defined Margaret Sullavan on screen — a fortitude moderated by fragility, a decisiveness tempered by thoughtfulness, an outer strength that belied her insecurities — become the foundation of an entire film, and the synergy is powerful. In movie after movie, Sullavan demonstrated an ability to create characters who tried desperately to live in the present, even as they anticipated and often feared the future. (And she did it without histrionics, without theatrics.) And that becomes the premise of the film, an examination of three friends — three comrades, as it were — who served together in World War I, and have stayed close, opening an auto repair shop. They’re former soldiers finding their way in the aftermath of war, making plans that are outrageous or amorphous, lacking direction. Sullavan focuses them; she inspires them. They’ve lost their brothers, their youth and their idealism. She manages to bring out the best versions of each of them. And they find their muse in her. She’s a mystery who can’t help but reveal parts of herself, and everything she reveals — the loss of her fortune, the loss of her health — only serves to make her somehow more enchanting. She doesn’t seem brave, exactly, but resolute — as if the immediacy and quiet cruelty of life have given her a wisdom that the rest of us struggle to find. Both angel and waif, she has an intuitive understanding of the importance of living life to the fullest — and of the price of doing so — that she’s not even aware of herself. Spending the war on the brink of losing everything has given her an intangible understanding of what matters. She tempers and focuses the former soldiers’ obsessions; she grounds and directs their wanderlust. They’re markedly different in outlook and temperament, but the bonds they forged in war hold them together — and those bonds are further cemented when they meet Sullavan. We’re mercifully spared the cliché of three men fighting over a woman; on the contrary, it’s obvious early on which one will win her heart, and his friends not only cheer him on, but facilitate the romance. And yet it’s her friendship with Franchot Tone that proves the most fascinating and rewarding — that in some ways holds the film together (moreso than her romance with Robert Taylor). Producer Joseph Mankiewicz rewrote large portions of the script — F. Scott Fitzgerald figured perhaps 30% of his original screenplay remained — and one of his key moves was to shift a lot of the weight to Tone, sensing perhaps that what Sullavan needed was a kindred spirit and confidant, much more than a lover or husband. (Amusingly, some of Sullavan‘s most intimate confessions, delivered to Taylor in Fitzgerald’s original, are delivered to Tone in Mankiewicz’s rewrite.) But the romance with Taylor reaps its own rewards. In a scene late in the film, lazing on a beach during her honeymoon, Sullavan hears a cuckoo bird in a nearby tree and counts its calls; that number, she informs Taylor, can predict how many years you have left. It’s rubbish, of course, but at that moment, sick with consumption, she chooses to believe it; she gives herself over to the fantasy. You’re fully aware how fleeting the moment is, and yet she intoxicates you just as she does Taylor — and despite everything you know about her health, you find yourself quite willing to believe in happy endings. Suddenly you yourself are one of Fitzgerald‘s famed Lost Generation: seeking assurance, clarity and direction in an uncertain world — and looking to Sullavan to see you safely home. (The film earned Sullavan an Oscar nod for Best Actress, and she took home trophies from the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics.)
Three Comrades: 9
Margaret Sullavan: 10

THE SHOPWORN ANGEL (1938)
Stage star Daisy Heath (Margaret Sullavan) has been carrying on a courtship for so long with impresario Sam Bailey (Walter Pidgeon) that it’s grown stale. Enter Texas farmer Bill Pettigrew (Jimmy Stewart), who’s stationed in New York before being shipped overseas; he and Daisy have a “meet cute” in a taxi, and she finds herself taken with his naïveté. This World War I tale — from a 1918 short story, already adapted into a silent film in 1928 — was growing musty by the late ’30s. It’s only the second effort from screenwriter Waldo Salt (his career continued long enough for him to collect Oscars for Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home) and the fifth from director H.C. Potter — but their youthful enthusiasm and irreverence turn out to be just what the material needs. They manage to disguise its mawkishness. They cut through the treacle and find the sincerity and simplicity, and when they can’t do that, they cut away to lively montages that invite you to bask in the jingoism of the period, that leave you excited and terrified by Bill’s prospects. (Their vision of wartime manages to be both high-spirited and fatalistic.) And Sullavan and Stewart know how to infuse the material with just enough satire to give it a little pep. Like her Cherry Chester in The Moon’s Our Home, Sullavan’s Daisy — a Broadway star who’s never had to imagine the realities of life, let alone the horrors of war — walks a fine line between sendup and sincerity. Sullavan balances her heartless and hardhearted worldview (all she thinks of a parade of soldiers about to ship overseas is that the noise is ruining her sleep) with an almost childlike sense of reverie and wonder — and for humorous effect, she manages a few full-throated outbursts at the oddest times. (Hattie McDaniel is there to parrot and parody her.) And Stewart knows just how to pitch his countrified yokel. Has any doughboy ever been quite so naïve, even to the point of not knowing to avoid crossing the street in front of oncoming traffic? Stewart is playing a little too much of a rube to be believed, but the pretense he and Sullavan effect keeps the proceedings from feeling too moldy. And all the participants keep a watchful eye on the shape of the material. This is not a triangle, they make clear. The Shopworn Angel is not the tale of a jaded Broadway actress whose frosty hide is thawed by the country soldier on his way to war — or at least, that’s not all there is to it. It’s the story of how one man unwittingly touches two people who’ve shut themselves off from their emotions, and gifts them a future. Although Bill has a guilelessness that opens the hearts of the people with whom he interacts, he’s no saint; he’s living and perpetuating a lie — letting his fellow soldiers think that Daisy is his girl — and he has no compunction about it. And as much as Bill humanizes Daisy — as much as he reawakens her to a world of enchantment — you never once believe that, once the war is over, she’ll find contentment on a Texas farm milking the cows before dawn. Bill renews her, but he doesn’t redirect her heart. The Shopworn Angel is fully aware of all the contradictions and complexities embedded in its storyline; in fact, it deepens itself by embracing them. (Sullavan’s singing was overdubbed by Mary Martin; in her final refrain of “Pack Up Your Troubles,” Martin’s voice — to today’s audiences — is unmistakable.)
The Shopworn Angel: 9
Margaret Sullavan: 9

THE SHINING HOUR (1938)
Margaret Sullavan was incapable of artifice; Joan Crawford, at this point in her career, was all artifice. What a strange idea to top-bill them in a film as romantic rivals. Throw in a bland Robert Young and a boorish Melvin Douglas, and you’ve got a film that’s no one‘s shining hour, least of all Frank Borzage, who directs like he lost a bet. In one of the most laughable pieces of A-list melodrama to emerge from the MGM factory, industrialist Douglas woos and weds showgirl Crawford, then Douglas’s brother Young falls for Crawford (“I always want what I can’t have,” he laments, in what passes for motivation) — and the screen has rarely seen a less compelling love triangle. (Claudette Colbert had been pursued by Douglas and Young a year earlier in I Met Him in Paris, to tepid results; when those two are your best options for “rival suitors,” you might as well scrap the film before it goes into production.) Crawford and Young’s characters are meant to develop some deep desire that they can’t control, but you’d be hard-pressed to find evidence on the screen; so many scenes open with Young alone at the piano playing Chopin — a sign of his suppressed or renewed passion, depending on what you want to read into the script — that the only thing you sense developing as the film proceeds is your own hatred of classical music. Crawford — at that still-early stage in her career when her sexuality had already degenerated into self-parody — struggles to convey the mix of uninhibited abandon and maidenly reserve called for by the script, but really: could anyone have pulled it off? As written, her character is too decent to give in to her brother-in-law’s advances, but not too modest to keep from prancing around the living room in a tight dress on a hot night, waving a scarf from side to side like a dizzy bubble dancer. Fay Bainter is the bitchy aunt given to quoting Shakespeare and making pronouncements like “send her away, Henry, before she destroys us all.” (At one point, she informs Crawford that she has “the faint aroma of the stables.” She could be speaking for the film itself.) Only second-billed Sullavan, as Young’s wife, offers up a warm and intelligent performance; it feels like she was beamed in from another universe, one with better films. Sullavan is about the only reason to watch, and sadly, even she is defeated by the material two-thirds of the way through. From the moment her character declares that she has found “clarity” and decides to become the noble, self-sacrificing wife (so that Crawford and Young can be happy together), Sullavan seems unable to give her lines much life; her self-pity diminishes her. In the final reel — after a house fire worthy of Rebecca — Crawford, Douglas and Young finally start to imbue their lines with a little urgency, but any hopes of a strong finish are foiled when Crawford convinces Young to reunite with Sullavan, and he turns up solemnly at her bedside, where she’s bandaged from head to foot, her body badly burned in the fire. And by that point, what’s meant as a happy ending has grown too absurd for words: Marcus Welby meets The Mummy.
The Shining Hour: 3
Margaret Sullavan: 6

THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (1940)
Hailed by many as one of the greatest of romantic comedies, but what impresses most is how unromantic it is. Or more specifically, how long it takes to get to the romance. If you want a love story about two work colleagues whose bickering betrays a burgeoning affection, then check out the stage adaptation She Loves Me, in which the relationship is fleshed out into a genuine courtship. What’s compelling about The Shop Around the Corner is that the lead couple — Klara and Alfred — hardly have any scenes that would qualify as romantic. The Shop Around the Corner has endured not because its head is in the clouds, but because its feet are planted so firmly on the ground. It’s about the aspects of our lives we don’t like to talk about: the importance of holding a job, the difficulty of making ends meet — the fact that we always feel one paycheck from insolvency. (And worst of all, the need to get along with colleagues with whom we would otherwise have nothing in common.) Throughout, we see employees scurrying to curry favor. Who’ll be the first to open the door for the boss? Who’ll claim credit — even falsely — for something he praises? Who’ll modify their outlook to conform to what they think he wants to hear, and who’ll run from the room rather than risk venturing an opinion? When we first meet Klara Novak (Sullavan), she’s come to apply for a job at Matuschek’s gift shop; we don’t know how long she’s been out of work, but her appearance and demeanor — and refusal to take no for an answer — reek of desperation, and she’s gratified when Matuschek decides to take a chance on her. Klara and fellow clerk Alfred Kralik (James Stewart) — unbeknownst to each other — have been engaged in an anonymous correspondence: not (necessarily) as a means of finding true love, but as a means of escape — as a way of focusing on something other than the scramble to put food on the table. When Klara implores Alfred in one of her notes to say nothing about his life (“because why are those facts important?”), he hears it as a romantic gesture, but to her, it’s more than that; she desperately doesn’t want them to be defined by what they do — because what she does is work in a shop, and she hates it. (When they fight, the most cutting thing she can think to call him is a “little insignificant clerk.” It’s a line filled not just with loathing, but with self-loathing.) Klara and Alfred both lie in their letters, puffing themselves up, trying to make themselves seem loftier than they are — desperate to disguise the dull, workaday realities of their lives. (At one point, she admits falling for one of his most beautiful pieces of poetry, and he confesses that he cribbed it from O. Henry.) The Shop Around the Corner hits home because it captures our commitment to believing that we’re more than our jobs, that it’s not just our work that defines us. But, of course, the film sees through the lie; the sad truth it acknowledges is that we are very much defined by the company we keep, whether that company is forced on us or not. In some awful, unthinkable way, we are what we do. Yet within those parameters, it’s still possible to find and experience wonderful things: even true love, perhaps — once we let go of our illusions. There’s an unusual amount of cruelty in the relationship between Alfred and Klara. He keeps stringing her along well after he knows her identity, and takes great delight in puncturing her pretenses. But he needs to see it happen, and so do we, because Margaret Sullavan is such a force to be reckoned with in this film — so confident in her own aspirations and delusions — that you need to see them almost surgically extracted. With most of her great roles (and there are many), it would be difficult to imagine any other actress playing them as she does — but you could see others playing them differently. Here it’s unthinkable that anybody could plumb the depths of the character — making her so delusional, yet so formidable and even admirable — as Sullavan does here. It’s a film — like Three Comrades — that seems tailor-made to her talents.
The Shop Around the Corner: 10
Margaret Sullavan: 10

THE MORTAL STORM (1940)
It’s 1933 in a small town in the German Alps, where Professor Victor Roth (Frank Morgan) is celebrating his 60th birthday surrounded by loved ones. During dinner, word comes on the radio that Hitler has been appointed chancellor, and suddenly half of his family and friends turn into full-blown Nazis. If it weren’t staged so confidently by the director Frank Borzage, it would be a laugh. The Mortal Storm is a fine piece of propaganda. It lacks the piquancies that distinguish Three Comrades, but within the parameters it sets early on, it succeeds masterfully. The history of the Nazi party is missing: all the events from the end of World War I that enabled Hitler’s rise to power. But it’s not so much about educating audiences as politicizing them, and all the atrocities that accompany and follow Hitler’s ascendancy — the purge of academic staff, the book burnings, the concentration camps — are presented forcefully and effectively. There are moments of excitement, suspense and even tragedy, but when you look back, you realize the film has succeeded largely because of the preconceptions you brought to it (and in 2024, because of its continued relevance) — but not because any of the roles were particularly well drawn. There’s a hollowness at its core; it’s the rare film that’s simultaneously too much and not enough. As one of Hollywood’s first pieces of anti-Nazi propaganda, it proved so incendiary that it triggered the first hostile Congressional investigation of the film industry for ostensibly pushing for war. And yet as an adaptation of Phyllis Bottome's staunchly anti-Nazi novel, the piece is so diluted that some of the most crucial themes and characters are lost. Professor Roth’s daughter Freya is the centerpiece of the novel: an independent-minded feminist who shares a love of science with her father. The feminism is dismantled for the movie, her love of science discarded, and the resulting character handed to Sullavan is much more traditional and passive; she’s placed in the standard “torn between two men” scenario and stranded with lines of the “are you afraid?” “not with your arms around me” variety. (And whereas the novel is quite clear about the fate of the Jews from the moment Hitler rises to power, the film avoids saying the word “Jew” altogether, merely referring to Sullavan and Morgan‘s characters as “non-Aryan.”) The love affair between Sullavan and James Stewart is skeletal at best; they’re called upon to fill in the blanks, which they do with assurance. Sullavan’s eyes quietly tear up one or two times, and the subtlety and lack of excess takes your breath away. And there are a few moments that are unlike anything you’ve seen her do, as when she ponders a moment, thoughtfully, at the bottom of a staircase, like a woman in full command of her fate — then dashes up the stairs like a schoolgirl terrified by the unknown. You can see Sullavan‘s determination to make the most of her part, but the role is so underwritten, there’s only so much she can do. Whether she’s breaking up with a suitor or lying to the Gestapo to protect a friend, her lines are rudimentary at best, and the extent of her outrage is limited by what Hollywood would permit of women at the time. Pretty much everyone registers as types, but rarely as characters — or at least, not as characters as compelling as Bottome conceived them. The film had to be watered down to get made, but some of the ways in which it was diluted seem unnecessary and unfortunate.
The Mortal Storm: 8
Margaret Sullavan: 8

SO ENDS OUR NIGHT (1941)
It charts the plight of refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe with a kind of poetic despair; as John Cromwell films it, nighttime shadows keep melting into memories that refuse to be stilled, and steady wipes convey a merciless trek with no end or relief in sight. It boasts an extraordinary cast of actors at the top of their game: Fredrik March, Glenn Ford, Frances Dee, Anna Sten. Everyone is in peak form, strangely, except Sullavan. Her character is the only one who can’t seem to find the joy in the moment — the only one who can’t let go of the pain of the past and their fear of the future. Her character is ultimately paired with Glenn Ford’s, and it was at Sullavan’s insistence that Ford — who had initially been playing his role rather dapper and sophisticated — adopted a more youthful and callow approach, which proved unmistakably right. But Sullavan then misthought her own role. She probably decided that accentuating her character’s solemnity would balance Ford’s impulsiveness, but it doesn’t. It deadens it. Her performance is so muted, you can’t get a read on it. There don’t seem to be wells of suppressed passion or anger or even love. She merely seems sullen. It’s unclear why the strapping Ford pursues her so relentlessly. She doesn’t have outbursts that might make her seem fascinating — that might make him yearn to see what’s inside. Halfway through the film, she has a glorious speech in which she describes how Ford’s presence has transformed her: “Let me tell you something. Before I knew him, I felt old and full of suspicion, and he’s made me young, and he’s made me laugh again. I was hopeless and without faith in kindness and humanity, and he’s made me cheerful and full of life. Yes, and he’s done it with his simple and straightforward instincts.” And indeed, at that very moment, she seems transformed. And as she talks about the person she was before she met him, you sense that that’s what she thought she was playing, but it didn’t quite come off. There was solemnity, but no intensity. You never got a sense of all that she had lost; you merely saw a person with nothing to offer. From that point forward, her character lightens up, and she and Ford become a convincing couple. But the first hour of their relationship is tough sledding, and Sullavan has to bear the brunt of the blame. So Ends Our Night is one of the earliest movies to take a stance against Nazism. (It premiered nine months before the United States entered the war.) At times, it’s as ponderous as the various treks that it dramatizes, but the way its characters’ lives alternately intersect and diverge lend it unpredictability and an air of authenticity. It achieves epiphanies you don’t see coming; for a propaganda picture, it’s unusually subtle in achieving its aims. You don’t feel like your responses have been practically preordained — as, for example, in The Mortal Storm. Instead, you’re permitted to tag along on an uncertain journey, and asked to observe patterns that the characters themselves are unable to spot. The stark contrast between their vantage point and your own makes you strangely protective. You truly come to feel that these are souls not merely in need of — but very much worth — saving, and that it falls to you to look after them.
So Ends Our Night: 9
Margaret Sullavan: 7

BACK STREET (1941)
It’s a story about how a man can break a woman — destroy her confidence, rob her of her independence, sap her self-esteem. It’s about the sacrifices we make for love that aren’t returned, and the lies we tell ourselves to justify them. It’s a remake of the 1932 film — itself an adaptation of a Fanny Hurst novel — about a woman so infatuated with a married man that she allows herself to be kept for some three decades. A lot of the details from 1932 are reworked, and most of the subtleties and ambiguities are written out — but the film is no worse for it, and in a number of ways, it’s better. Charles Boyer, top billed (Sullavan knew she would have to sacrifice her customary billing to get Boyer on board, but she knew it would be worth it), is a much more vital presence in the remake than his predecessor John Boles. (Boles is so rarely on screen in 1932 that their affair seems more a premise than an actual storyline; it plays out as the fantasy she believes it to be.) That means you get much more of Boyer’s natural charm and humor, and you understand exactly what Sullavan’s character sees in him; at the same time, because he’s there more persuasively, you understand all the ways in which the relationship is one-sided and controlling. In 1932, it’s implied that she leaves her job simply because she can’t risk being seen around town; in 1941, he specifically asks her to give up a lucrative career as a clothes designer — because he wants her to be available to him whenever he’s available to her. If you’re Charles Boyer, you get to be that presumptuous, and if you’re Charles Boyer, the audience is prepared to forgive you. In the 1932 film, director John Stahl conveys the passage of time beautifully through the shifting styles and attitudes — in a way that Robert Stevenson never manages in the remake, where the characters seem to exist in a state of suspended animation until they’re suddenly aged by 30 years. But it doesn’t much matter: the film takes full advantage of Boyer and Sullavan’s chemistry, and their performances are beyond reproach. At its heart, the film charts a troubling journey: from him compartmentalizing her in a way that doesn’t satisfy her, to him finding a way that does. But the movie acknowledges all the issues inherent in the storyline — above all, the misogyny disguised as romance — yet still convinces you that you’re witnessing one of the headiest of love stories. She’s clever and ambitious, and you see all the ways that he depends on her to boost his career. She helps him write his slogans, and edits his speeches. She prizes his ultimate rise to power in the political world just as much as he does, and she privately, proudly shares responsibility for his success. There’s something both affecting and upsetting about the film; you’re quite aware that the film is as manipulative as he is, but both Sullavan and Boyer are so upfront about it, and her character seems to accept it so gracefully and gratefully, you somehow give in to it all, quite despite yourself. (By movie’s end, as she imagines the life she could’ve had had their worlds not collided, you might find yourself annoyed at how moved you are.) About the only thing the film doesn’t get right is the final scene. In 1932, Irene Dunne had a full-on breakdown that led to her demise; a full-on breakdown would be all wrong for Sullavan, who suffered much too subtly for theatrics. But in its place, the film needed something to justify its conclusion, and the final flashback — although exquisitely rendered — can’t do it alone. But it’s still one of the most enchanting and intelligent of tearjerkers.
Back Street: 9
Margaret Sullavan: 10

APPOINTMENT FOR LOVE (1941)
The movie kicks into gear halfway through, when newlyweds Margaret Sullavan and Charles Boyer (her, a doctor; him, a playwright) arrive back in New York City, and she decides she wants to keep a separate apartment in the same building as him. Her reasoning is eminently practical: they each have very different schedules, and as she explains it, there will be times when she’s called away to the hospital in the middle of the night and won’t want to disturb him, and other times when she’ll come home after such a long shift, she’ll long to unwind in private. She’s right: their schedules are incompatible, and there’s no reason the convenience and privacy of a second apartment wouldn’t be helpful to both of them. At no point — despite what nearly a century’s worth of film criticism has maintained — does she suggest she has any indication of putting off the wedding night; that would become one of the tiresome trends of early ’40s screwballs — where couples rush into a marriage, sham or otherwise, that remains unconsummated until the final moments, due to the woman’s neuroses — but that is most assuredly not Appointment for Love. On the contrary, Sullavan clearly intends to enjoy all the pleasures of married life. It’s actually Boyer who ends up delaying their wedding night when he finds her request so emasculating, he keeps bellowing and bolting from the room. (That puts the film firmly in the tradition of ’30s screwballs, where it’s the man’s ego that gets in the way of the happy ending.) The first half of the film has some pleasant set pieces, but there doesn’t seem to be any rhythm or momentum. (Even Eugene Pallette feels wasted.) But the minute Boyer gets on his high horse, the movie takes off. Lighting a fire under him lights a fire under them both, and they light a fire under the film in return. The movie suddenly finds a sense of pacing that it’s been missing, the lines flow smoothly, and the scenes move along giddily — and they’re aided immeasurably by Frank Skinner’s score. From the halfway mark, Appointment for Love is pretty heavenly. It’s still silly stuff, but watching Boyer rattled, irrational, needy and neurotic — and seeing Sullavan so self-assured, self-satisfied and oblivious to his needs — is such a delicious turnaround from their relationship in Back Street, it’s all but irresistible. They seem to take great delight in subverting our expectations. Throw Reginald Owen into the mix, and get Eugene Pallette back on his game, with a purring Rita Johnson anticipating Janis Paige in Silk Stockings, and you’ve got quite a nice little screwball. The issue that plagues Appointment for Love is that writers Bruce Manning and Felix Jackson (who also did Back Street) have 45 minutes to set up the premise, and never do. They waste the first few reels on his pursuit of her, and her acquiescing to his advances. The courtship could’ve been cut in half, then — once they’re married — Manning and Jackson could’ve taken the time to show how sound her suggestion really is. All they needed was one scene where she’s trying to nap, but can’t because he’s typing out a new play; or he’s trying to focus, but can’t because she’s observing a patient in the next room. And instead of us having to take her at her word when she says they need the extra space, we would’ve had the proof. It wouldn’t have diminished his oversized response — nor the hijinks that ensue — but it would’ve made her request seem less like a plot contrivance, and more like a reasonable demand that he dismisses out of hand. It might just have elevated Appointment for Love into a screwball classic.
Appointment for Love: 7
Margaret Sullavan: 9

CRY ‘HAVOC’ (1943)
Sullavan has a few melodramatic outbursts near the start that are unusual for her and too much for the moment. (At one point, she presses the back of her hand against her forehead, signaling her fatigue: the kind of clichéd gesture she typically eschewed.) You sense this isn’t going to be the easiest of assignments for Sullavan — both on screen and off. An MGM production, it’s the epitome of the studio system at its worst. Sullavan is Lieutenant Mary Smith (she goes by the nickname Smitty, so let’s call her that), holding down a military field hospital in Manila so short-staffed that she takes in a group of civilian volunteers as nurses. The volunteers include an aging stripper (Joan Blondell), a big-city socialite (Ella Raines), a Southern dimwit (Diana Lewis) and a man-hungry blonde (Ann Sothern). Sothern seems there mostly to diminish womankind; the Japanese are intent on vanquishing American forces, but it’s Sothern who seems likely to take down the film. (She goes by the name of Pat here, but Sothern still seems to be playing the same wisecracking showgirl Maisie that she played in nearly a dozen films — so let’s call her that.) When one of the female recruits, upon rounding up the volunteers, describes the chain of command, she notes that Smitty is the one they’ll be taking orders from. “What orders is that?” Maisie demands: “We’re volunteers, aren’t we?” “Yeah, we’re volunteers,” the recruit concedes, “but we take orders like the rest.” To which Maisie retorts, “From a dame?” In just a few lines, writer Paul Osborn — adapting a play by Allen Kenward — manages to establish Maisie’s apparent embrace of chaos and her disdain for women in power. And this from the character, mind you, clearly designed as the audience surrogate. The whole script is constructed on a faulty premise. It’s established early on that Smitty is holding up under near-impossible conditions, all while battling malignant malaria. She’s as impressive as all Sullavan heroines are. Yet the arc of the film is about Maisie — who acts the way women should: flirtatious, petty, judgmental — getting the recognition she feels she so rightfully deserves, and her learning to appreciate Smitty, who behaves abnormally: responsible, commanding, officious — you know, like a man. The misogyny — for a movie heralding its all-female cast — so overwhelms the film that it overrides anything good you can say about it. Naturally, Maisie grows fixated on the officer Smitty is married to (Smitty can’t reveal their relationship, because nurses aren’t allowed to marry), and her pursuit of Smitty’s husband — which gives her great delight because she thinks Smitty has a thing for him — takes up a preposterous amount of screentime. From her first lines, Maisie seems incapable of talking about anything other than men; she’s a walking, breathing example of the dire need for a Bechdel test in ’40s cinema. As conditions worsen, as the women’s isolation increases, she laments to her fellow volunteers, “Of course I knew all along I never had a chance with the guy. He never took me serious.” As the Japanese forces grow closer, as any chances of a rescue diminish, she blasts Smitty for not informing her she was married, so she could’ve been spared pursuing a man who was not merely uninterested, but unavailable. (Oh yeah, and she could even have focused on — you know — saving lives, too.) And in the film’s final misguided moments, as the pair climb out of their trench to meet their fate at the hands of the Japanese — who will, at best, imprison them in an internment camp — Smitty pauses long enough to apologize to Maisie for not revealing she was married, and Maisie looks like the cat that swallowed the canary. Forget the outcome of the war; Maisie has had her moment of victory. (The scene is underscored by “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It’s surreal.) MGM had already released Bataan earlier that year, covering much the same (literal) ground. Cry ‘Havoc’ takes the first major land battle for American forces in World War II — one of the most devastating military defeats in our nation’s history — and turns it into the story of two women fighting over the same man (and an unseen man at that, as if a man doesn’t even have to have a physical presence to bring out the worst in women). To be sure, there are elements that work; as you watch the volunteers adapt to the lack of sleep, decent food and supplies, or try to survive the frequent bombings and attend to the growing list of casualties, you recognize how a smart, effective movie could’ve been made — but that would’ve required Sothern’s character to be blown up within the first five minutes. Sullavan wouldn’t return to Hollywood for seven years; watching Cry ‘Havoc’, you can’t blame her.
Cry ‘Havoc’: 5
Margaret Sullavan: 7

NO SAD SONGS FOR ME (1950)
A housewife and mother discovers in the opening reel that she’s dying of cancer. But she doesn’t suffer nobly: she suffers sensibly. No one suffered as many fatalities as Margaret Sullavan — losing her life or her lover’s life in pretty much every film. (It’s like she was under a gypsy curse.) Right from the start, you’re aware that her acting has grown even more naturalistic than the last time she was on the screen — and you never imagined that was possible. (Upon finishing Cry ‘Havoc’, she’d gone right back to Broadway, where she’d starred in John Van Druten’s The Voice of the Turtle, winning herself the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The production ran just over five years, making it — to this day — the ninth longest-running play in Broadway history.) It’s easy to see what this movie would have become later in the ‘50s if, say, Ross Hunter and Douglas Sirk had their way with it; it would’ve become a lavish melodrama about a woman’s last days. But it becomes nothing of the sort. That drab look of so many midcentury Columbia pictures works to its advantage; nothing is glamorized. The tragedy is not exploited for the sake of tears. The story just unfolds purposefully, and the purposefulness is something that Sullavan’s character brings to it. And it may not be a big-budget undertaking, but she’s surrounded by A-list talent — among them, Rudolph Maté, the acclaimed cinematographer who had just transitioned to directing (1950 was a very good year for him, with both this and the superlative noir Union Station), and the great Joseph Walker (Capra’s favorite) as Director of Photography. Wendell Corey gives a particularly good performance as the husband and Viveca Lindfors gives a characteristically fine one as his newest hire. And the script by Howard Koch (The Sea Hawk and The Letter, among others) is rich in character details and sharp observations. There are exchanges that take you by surprise; you feel privy to the way people actually behave and interact, as opposed to the way movies have always presented them behaving and interacting. At a clothing drive, when Sullavan overhears gossip that her husband might be having an affair (he isn’t), she turns to her best friend for reassurance, and the best friend — to our surprise — doesn’t tell her to put it out of her head. Instead she suggests she keep her eyes open: “Where there’s a lot of smoke, sometimes there’s a little fire.” And Sullavan doesn’t overreact; she processes the thought, then gets back to work. And so she proceeds with the daily routine of suburban living: the rummage sales, her daughter’s piano lessons, the New Year’s Eve celebration where she allows herself to get a little tipsy. And everything looks as it always did, only just a little bit different. (There are no sudden epiphanies, although on a trip to visit her father in San Francisco, she makes a useful discovery about the cost of grief.) Sullavan had forged a career playing brave heroines: heroines who summoned the will to face the most challenging of circumstances — be it a man who abandoned her, or a war that robbed her of her health and her home, or the pressures of a long-distance marriage. No one was put through the wringer quite like Margaret Sullavan — but her character remained defiant all the way to the end. She went out on her own terms, frequently disobeying doctors’ orders — intuitively knowing what was best for her and those she loved. And Koch’s script trusts us to expect Sullavan to behave true to form — and doesn’t feel a need to state the obvious. She doesn’t keep her condition a secret because she wants to suffer in silence; it’s because the work she has to do — work she herself can’t quite put into words — is best done without the imminence of her death looming over everyone she loves. And it’s not until the movie is nearly over that you realize how — as the months have gone by — she’s been properly preparing her family for life without her: instilling in her daughter a measure of independence, encouraging her husband to open his heart again. It’s in some ways the perfect final vehicle for Sullavan; no actress ever suffered so much on the screen, but she muted her suffering, believing it was a private matter: a burden best borne with dignity and practicality. As such, No Sad Songs for Me is the perfect epitaph for Sullavan’s film career.
No Sad Songs for Me: 9
Margaret Sullavan: 10

Want more? If so, I serve up The 10 Best Screwball Comedies here, and The 25 Best Film Noirs here, and some of the titles are sure to surprise you. My other essays are all about TV, past and present, but if you take to TV as much as film, there's an index of the more than 100 TV essays I've written; you might see something you like, be it a drama series or a sitcom or one of my “best of” lists.