Tawdry Audrey
Poor Audrey Totter, always getting pushed around. When she died last December (at age 95) I began writing this tribute, then suddenly gave my attention to the deaths of superstars Peter O’Toole and Joan Fontaine. After those memorial pieces were posted, my blog was hacked, meaning that the half-written Totter piece was floating in cyber-limbo, yet another example of hard-knocks Audrey getting little respect. So, here I am, back where I was, trying to right a wrong and give Ms. Totter a fitting, if belated, farewell.
Audrey Totter was the last-remaining of the three screen actresses who constituted Hollywood’s Trashy Trinity. Marie Windsor died at 80 in 2000, and Jan Sterling left us at 82 in 2004. I use the term “trashy” most affectionately. After all, I’m beyond grateful to this trio for bringing plain-talking directness, teasing sexuality, streetwise guts, sarcastic wit, and, oh yes, unbridled nastiness to movies of the 1940s and ’50s. Though they were rarely on the A list, this trio often made B pictures the cooler place to be, not to mention the more ideal place for gals like them to thrive. Their bruised glamour often looks better than the more manufactured assets of many a perfect-looking leading lady. Windsor always looked to me like Joan Crawford’s scheming kid sister, while Sterling and Totter specialized in peroxide blondes. Totter never gave a performance as brilliant as Sterling’s rotten wife in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), or one as picture-stealing as Windsor’s rotten wife in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), but she usually, at the very least, made her presence known, whether as a rotten wife or not.
Here’s a rundown of some typical Totter roles: John Garfield’s rebound girl in the noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946); a cool magazine editor (and seeming femme fatale) in Lady in the Lake (1946); Claude Rains’ bitchy, slutty niece in The Unsuspected (1947); Richard Basehart’s cheating wife in Tension (1949); a mother who abandons her son in The Blue Veil (1951); a heart-of-gold floozie and lounge performer in The Sellout (1951); a fashion editor, on hand for wisecracks and cocktails, in Assignment—Paris (1952); a greedy, trampy ex-wife (of Richard Widmark) who returns for dough in My Pal Gus (1952); a hooker in The Carpetbaggers (1964). Totter could sometimes go over the top, often a perk but sometimes a handicap when playing roles like these. But, hey, who wants “ordinary” when you can get some flashy excitement?
Totter did get some good opportunities beyond the bounds of her typecasting. In High Wall (1947), MGM’s answer to Spellbound (1945), she’s in Ingrid Bergman territory as a psychiatrist who falls in love with her patient (Robert Taylor) and helps prove him innocent of murder. It’s somewhat farfetched and overly convenient in its plotting, but it’s also a highly effective and exceedingly stylish film noir (directed by Curtis Bernhardt), a pleasurably tangled mix of pulpy and high-minded elements. If the film had been a big hit, MGM probably would have given Totter more of a push, teaming her with additional A-list male stars.
The peak film for Totter was another atypical assignment: Robert Wise’s boxing picture The Set-Up (1949). Unlike Body and Soul (1947), with its penchant for moralizing, and Champion (1949), with its hyped-up melodramatics, The Set-Up might be called a “pure” boxing film. It plays like a short story, a distilled bare-boned representative of the boxing genre. At just 72 concentrated minutes, it’s tight, fluid filmmaking, essentially a seamy, primal piece of film noir. It follows the lead-up to Robert Ryan’s final fight, a grim climax to a career. This is an ugly two-bit world fueled only by pipe dreams. The Set-Up feels like the second half of a boxing movie, the part about the protagonist’s decline and his last-stand chance at redemption.
Totter plays Ryan’s long-suffering wife, yearning for him to quit, unable to watch him get beat one more time. She walks the streets during the match, with Ryan staring down from the ring at her empty seat. If you’re expecting Totter to two-time Ryan or poison him or bet against him or punch him out herself, well, you’ve come to the wrong movie. As in High Wall, we see glimmers of her potential as a dramatic leading lady, though it must be said that she indulges her temptation to overact. This doesn’t matter too much because, after all, it’s Ryan’s movie all the way.
No one could have been surprised to see Totter turn up as an inmate in Women’s Prison (1955), actually sharing a cell with Jan Sterling herself! Totter is in for gun possession (though she’s innocent) and Sterling for forgery. Following her recent parole, Sterling says she’s back for a “post-graduate course.” I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again: Women’s Prison makes Caged (1950) look like a documentary. (Sterling was serving time in Caged, too.) This is absolute junk enlivened by a cast of mostly likable “dames.” The great but undeniably slumming Ida Lupino is the evil superintendent, even though she looks and acts more like the fashion editor at Vogue. She’s a stylish glam-bitch, making life miserable for her girls, including sweet-young-thing Phyllis Thaxter (in the Eleanor Parker role).
Totter manages to get pregnant behind bars when her criminal husband—a prisoner on the men’s side of the facility—sneaks over for a laundry-room conjugal visit. Harassed and slapped around by Lupino, Totter meets a bad end, resulting in a riot led by her pal Sterling. Saved from marauding inmates, Lupino promptly goes insane. It does seem appropriate when one of the matrons says, “They never get things right in prison pictures.” I do have to say it’s disappointing that Totter is playing such a victim. Sterling, also playing an honest and good-natured young woman, at least gets to be fun and cut loose with some wisecracks.
Yes, it was nice for Totter that she got some variety in her assignments, but I still prefer my Audrey Totter hard and calculating, cheap and lowdown, and completely unredeemable. That would make Tension, The Unsuspected, and My Pal Gus prime candidates for the quintessential Totter picture. All I can say is that Hell just got a little more heavenly, now that Audrey Totter has crossed to the other side. I hope Jan Sterling and Marie Windsor are looking for a roommate.
