The Twenty-Third day of our Holiday outing finds us enjoying a "panto"--(pantomime to Americans) at this time of year very popular theatrical set-pieces with all sorts of magical, rude, and funny stories enacted by some of the best of British theater--here we see Welsh born Peggy Cummins as Alice in Wonderland in a Christmastime, 1945 stage production of Lewis Carroll's evergreen exploration of all things seen through the looking glass. Perhaps this role prepared Ms. Cummins for her head spinning ride through Hollywood as she was soon plucked from English movies and stage work by Darryl F. Zanuck for the dubious privilege of playing orphaned Amber St. Clare in Forever Amber (1947), the scandalous bodice-ripper set in Restoration England that was delivered in novel form to an apparently panting public by Kathleen Winsor. Zanuck, well aware that the novel had been banned in fourteen U.S. States, but was a best seller in 16 countries, believed that Cummins sweet, blonde charms could make the events of the novel palatable enough to bypass the Production Code.
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| Peggy Cummins in her early, glamorous days in Hollywood |
While the book was said to raise the spirits of women in wartime, having read it one long ago teenage moment of curiosity, it has since then dawned on me that the book was patched together from Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year and his The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, as well as generous helpings from The Diaries of Samuel Pepys. There's quite a lot of sex, yes, but lots more grime, grit and politics in the streets and the bed chamber, especially since Amber seems to be using what nature gave her to make a niche for herself in a fairly rigid, though often chaotic society. Given the over 700 page book that the screenwriters had to whittle down into a workable movie, it's not surprising that Cummins, under the rather leaden direction of Otto Preminger, was not able to satisfy Zanuck's wishes. Deciding that she wasn't pretty enough, sexy enough or perhaps malleable enough after about 20 minutes of film had been completed, the mogul placed the lovely but very American Linda Darnell in the coveted part, giving Cummins the boot, and, pretty much ending any chance of her ascendancy in the Hollywood firmament.
Adding insult to injury, the actress was given the demure part of a farm girl in the pleasant The Green Grass of Wyoming (1948), in which she competed with a horse for the affection of Robert Arthur. Another tepid entry in the American phase of her career included one of the great Ronald Colman's lesser vehicles, The Late George Apley (1949), in which Ms. Cummins sought to spread her wings a bit as a staid Bostonian's slightly rebellious daughter by marrying someone from Worcester(!).
Too bad Zanuck didn't have the ingenious Joseph Lewis under contract as a director. The imaginative director found unplumbed depths of sex, anger and willful destruction in the angelic looking Peggy when he cast her in the low budget cautionary tale about moral weakness, obsessive relationships and poor impulse control, Gun Crazy (1950). Based on a short story by MacKinlay Kantor, the screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo using the pseudonym of "Millard Kaufman" while he was on the film industry blacklist. The story focuses on the adventures of a lonely boy Bart (Russ Tamblyn plays him as a lad, with a rabbity John Dall as the adult version) whose fixation on gunplay finds a match in Annie Laurie Starr, (Peggy Cummins) the star of a carnival sharp shooting act, who takes aim at his heart and need from the instant that he sees her. Explaining herself a little, the manipulative Annie Laurie assures Bart before they marry that "...I've never been much good--at least up till now I haven't. You aren't getting any bargain, but I've got a funny feeling that I want to be good. I don't know. Maybe I can't. But I'm gonna try. I'll try hard, Bart. I'll try."
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| Above: Hark, the angel of death has arrived, played by Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy (1950). |
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