Linda Darnell

A train goes past, the crockery jumps, and Linda Darnell finishes her lipstick. That is the scene from A Letter to Three Wives (1949) that people remember, and it holds most of what she was good at. Lora Mae Hollingsway lives beside the railway with her mother and sister, and she has decided to marry Porter Hollingsway, who owns the department store where she works. Arthur Charles Miller keeps the camera on her face while the house shakes, and she does not blink. Darnell plays a woman who has already decided.

She had been at 20th Century Fox since she was fifteen and made her first film in 1939, and for years the studio cast her as the sweet young thing, Lolita Quintero alongside Tyrone Power in The Mark of Zorro (1940). She said later that people got tired of those parts, and she was not wrong. The turn came in 1945: Stella, the tough waitress of Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel, and Netta Longdon, the manipulative music-hall singer of Hangover Square. My Darling Clementine (1946) put her opposite Henry Fonda in John Ford's Western as Chihuahua. By the end of the decade she was playing the hard, ambitious women she should have been given from the start.

What she did in her best parts was let the calculation show. Lora Mae wants money and says so, and Darnell never lets a flicker of apology into it. Paul Douglas, in his first film, plays Porter as a loud man ashamed of what he is buying, and the two of them turn a courtship into a negotiation both sides know they are having. Kay Nelson's costumes climb a rung with every scene and Darnell wears each new one as if she had always owned it. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wrote and directed and worked with her twice, is the director who got the most out of her. We laughed at the first train and were quiet by the third, because what she was showing us was a woman who would never live in that house again, and it was not funny.

The complaint that follows her is that Fox never knew what it had, and it is fair. Through the early 1940s she was cast for her face and kept out of the harder parts by the terms of her contract, and fourteen years is a long time to spend waiting. Her career slowed in the 1950s, and she kept working in features and television until her death in 1965.

So the record is thinner than the talent. Start with A Letter to Three Wives, which we scored 79 and which owes much of that score to her and Douglas, then go to Fallen Angel and Hangover Square for the women she played once the studio stopped asking her to be sweet. The lipstick does not smudge. Neither, for the rest of the film, does she.