Warner Bros's teenage ingenue of the early 1940s, cast as the sweet girl opposite much older men and better than the parts allowed: quick, plain-spoken and never sugary, whether crying on cue for Bogart or keeping pace with Cooper.
Fi1m perspective
Gracie Williams in Sergeant York (1941) is written as a prize. She is the reason Alvin York wants the bottomland, and the script asks nothing more of her than to be wanted. Joan Leslie, sixteen and playing opposite Gary Cooper, gives the part a quickness the writing has not asked for, so that Gracie seems to have made her mind up about Alvin some time before he has made his up about anything. Cooper gave her a doll on the set. "That's how he saw me," she said later, and you can see why; you can also see, in every scene they share, that she is the faster of the two.
She had been on stage since childhood, in a vaudeville act with her two older sisters, and in small film parts from 1936. Warner Bros signed her in 1941, changed her name from Brodel, and put her into Raoul Walsh's High Sierra and Sergeant York in the same year. In High Sierra she is Velma, the club-footed girl Humphrey Bogart's gangster takes a shine to, and the studio had noticed she could cry on cue. Then came Michael Curtiz's Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), as James Cagney's wife, and The Sky's the Limit (1943), on loan to RKO, dancing with Fred Astaire and singing 'My Shining Hour' for the first time. She was a star while still a teenager.
What she does that the other studio ingenues did not is decline to be sweet. The parts are wholesome; the playing is not sugary. She listens, she answers plainly, and she holds a frame against Bogart, Cooper and Cagney without flirting for it or shrinking from it. We went into Sergeant York expecting to wait through Gracie's scenes and found we were watching her instead, because she is quicker than her lines and she plays a girl who wants something rather than a girl who is wanted. The Hard Way (1943), opposite Ida Lupino, showed she could do harder melodrama when someone let her.
Nobody let her for long. Warner kept her as the girl, and by 1947 she had tired of it and left the studio, working afterwards at Eagle-Lion and Republic, where the films were smaller and the parts no bigger. She more or less stopped after The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956), with television guest roles into the 1980s and 90s. The complaint that follows her is not that she was ever bad, since the notices were almost uniformly kind, but that she was under-used, and the complaint is fair.
Start with the two 1941 films, then The Sky's the Limit, and see how long it takes you to wonder why nobody gave her more to do.
Biography
Joan Leslie (born Joan Agnes Theresa Sadie Brodel) was an American actress and vaudevillian. She began performing as a child in a family vaudeville act known as the Brodel Sisters and appeared in uncredited film roles from the mid-1930s, initially billed as Joan Brodel.
She achieved prominence in the early 1940s under contract to Warner Bros. Her notable roles include Velma in High Sierra (1941), Gracie Williams in Sergeant York (1941), and Mary in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). She also appeared in The Male Animal (1942) and The Sky's the Limit (1943). Leslie later worked in television, with guest roles in series such as Charlie's Angels, The Incredible Hulk, Simon & Simon and Murder, She Wrote.
