Daisy Kenyon

In a year when Douglas Sirk and George Cukor were directing film noirs (Lured and A Double Life respectively), the abrasive, boundary-pushing director/producer Otto Preminger made a melodrama and quite a good one. Applying much of the noir styles seen in his iconic Laura (1944) and Fallen Angel (1945), Preminger digs into the story of a love triangle between three unhappy people living in post-war Manhattan. Joan Crawford plays the titular Daisy Kenyon, a fashion magazine illustrator living in a present walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village. She's been carrying on with a hotshot lawyer named Dan O'Mara (Laura and Fallen Angel star Dana Andrews). Dan is an attractive man in a loveless marriage to the daughter of his older law partner. His job situation and the two children he adores means Dan isn't going to leave his wife for Daisy, and she knows it. So despite being in love with Dan, she dates other men, including Peter Lapham (Henry Fonda), a handsome but dull widower just back from the war. Daisy finds herself caught between two suitors who both have plenty of drawbacks. Dan is confident and attractive, but arrogant and domineering. Peter is loving and patient but passive-aggressive and so seemingly unphased by everything outside of his control that you want to smack him. Daisy begins to lose her mind dealing with these two.

This is a classic "woman's picture" told in a frank, stark fashion. There are many melodramatic flourishes and aspects that contemporary audiences may find corny—the amount of milk drunk in this movie would certainly bring on cheers and guffaws in a rowdy crowd. But no one moves the camera in this decade like Preminger, and it's thrilling to watch his directorial touches applied to potentially soapy material like this. As with nearly all of Andrews' characters, Dan is the kind of cad you can't take your eyes off. His dialogue is hardboiled and literate like in his many detective roles. Peter may seem like an unusually weak character for Fonda, but he's a man of many surprises, and Fonda plays this emotionally stifled man as if a long-repressed passion lurks beneath his numbed exterior. But the film belongs to Crawford. Daisy is a showcase role for the great star. The part calls upon her to go almost totally mad from the emotional extremes her two lovers pull her in. She is caught between one man who wants to strip her of her agency and another who gives her far more than she wants. The choice she makes at the end feels both very much in line with the demands of the production code and a clever way of subverting it.