The File on Thelma Jordon (7:00pm)
1950 / 100 mins / b/w
Dir. Robert Siodmak / Sc. Ketti Frings /
Cine. George Barnes / Prod. Hal B. Wallis
Cast: Wendell Corey, Paul Kelly, Barbara Stanwyck
Based on an unpublished story by Marty Holland
DCP courtesy of Swank
Introduced by Soheil Rezayazdi, Gotham Film & Media Institute
“Maybe I’m just a ‘dame’ and didn’t know it!”
Our festival begins with a double bill showcasing two women screenwriters: Ketti Frings (writer of The File on Thelma Jordon) and Lenore Coffee (writer on Sudden Fear). Of the two, Frings was the neophyte, Coffee the veteran. Frings first cut her teeth writing for fan magazines in the 1930s before the success of her first novel, Hold Back the Dawn (1940), brought her inside the studio gates to sell the rights to Paramount. (She also wrote a draft script of her property, which was subsequently rewritten by Billy Wilder and Charles Bracket for the 1941 film of the same name.) Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Frings alternated between novels, film scripts, and theatrical plays, ultimately winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her 1957 stage adaptation of Thomas Wolfe’s semi-autobiographical first novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929). Her best-known screenplays were also connected to theater – the film adaptations of the Broadway successes Come Back Little Sheba (1952, based on the 1950 play) and The Shrike (1955, based on the 1952 play).
The File on Thelma Jordon was something different. For this film, Frings was tasked with adapting a story idea by female pulp novelist Marty Holland, author of Fallen Angel (which Otto Preminger had filmed with Gene Tierney in 1945). Holland had been commissioned by Hal Wallis to come up with a story for Barbara Stanwyck, already well established as one of noir’s premier female leads thanks to Double Indemnity (1944) and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946). Further strengthening the film’s noir credentials, Wallis brought in director Robert Siodmak in what would prove to be his last film within the cycle. (“We’ve killed ‘em every considerable way,” Siodmak explained at the time. “We can’t fool an audience any more.”) What Frings brought to the genre, meanwhile, was a reimagining of Stanwyck’s noir persona in a script that reflects repeatedly on the duality of its protagonists: the character of Thelma (Stanwyck) is in the end both a good and a bad person, for whom, as her lawyer explains, “the right hand never knows what the left is doing.”
– Rob King
Sudden Fear (9:00pm)
1952 / 110 mins / b/w
Dir. David Miller / Sc. Lenore J. Coffee, Robert Smith / Cine. Charles Lang / Prod. Joseph Kaufman
Cast: Joan Crawford, Gloria Grahame, Jack Palance
Based on the novel Sudden Fear (1948) by Edna Sherry
DCP courtesy of Cohen Media Group
Introduced by Hilary Hallett, Columbia University
“HEARTBREAK… Poised On A Trigger of Terror!”
Lenore Coffee’s writing career withstood many industry changes, lasting from the late silent era through to the end of the studio system. She got her start in 1919 after responding successfully to a screenplay competition for Garson Studios, where she began writing scenarios and more. In her work for director-producer Henry Garson, Coffee was, as she recalls in her memoir Storyline, “the only girl assistant director in the business.” She would work for a total of twenty-two production companies during the silent era alone. In 1938, she moved to Warner Bros., where she was, again, the studio’s only woman writer. In her first year at Warners, she co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Four Daughters (1938) alongside future Casablanca scribe Julius Epstein. Her talents also extended to the Broadway stage (the play Family Portrait, 1939) and novel writing (Another Time, Another Place, 1956). Yet the more established she became, the more she realized her skill lay in repairing others’ stories. As a result, her legacy lies in great part in her adapted screenplays from women’s literature.
Originally a 1948 novel written by Edna Sherry, Sudden Fear belongs in this Coffee-specialty category. The film was a vehicle for Joan Crawford, who had previously starred in Coffee’s adapted screenplay Possessed (1931). Crawford was, by this point, on the comedown from her Oscar-winning performance in Warners’ Mildred Pierce (1945). Frustrated by the quality of scripts she was being offered, Crawford summarily left Warner Bros. in 1952 for RKO, with Sudden Fear as her planned comeback role. As the film’s uncredited executive producer, Crawford was closely involved in many aspects of the production and personally hired Coffee as the film’s screenwriter. She also received her third and final Academy Award nomination for her role in the film, in which she breaks the mold of the “woman in distress” by turning the table on her faithless husband with intelligence and canny planning.
– Paige Wills