Linda Darnell’s Tough and Timeless Women

Darnell paid her dues in a pair of 1939 releases, both directed by Gregory Ratoff and filmed before her sixteenth birthday: Hotel for Women, in which she played a model, and Day-Time Wife, in which she starred as one half of a married couple. Then, after Star Dust signaled the emergence of her talent, she brought similar sincerity to Rouben Mamoulian’s Blood and Sand (1941), a lush Technicolor fantasia in which she plays the childhood sweetheart of a Spanish bullfighter whose roving eye makes her feel neglected and undesirable. But Darnell was growing increasingly aware that, while her beauty was her chief negotiating asset, it also put a ceiling on what the industry thought she could accomplish. Producers told her she was “too sexy” to play the roles of substance that she wanted. (Keep in mind that she was still in her teens when she made these films.) “As I learned more about acting and came to respect it deeply, I found that my looks stood in the way of my ambition,” she’d later write in an article for the Los Angeles Times.

Working with the director Otto Preminger slaked some of Darnell’s thirst to be taken seriously. By most accounts, they didn’t get along; she found he directed with an iron hand, while he later said that she was “a rather colorless personality.” But even he conceded that she was committed to her craft, and among her quartet of collaborations with Preminger, the first, Fallen Angel (1945), is a real standout. She plays Stella, a streetwise waitress in a dead-end California town. In her electric introductory scene, she casually strolls into the diner after being presumed missing; wearing a jumbo picture hat, she sits down and removes her heels to massage her aching feet. “I knew you’d be back,” a retired police detective slimily coos as he sidles up to her. She glances at him, almost in disbelief at his corniness. “Okay?” she says, brusquely. “I’m back.” She delivers the line like a verbal eye roll.

Darnell gives the dialogue a tartness that feels utterly lived-in, not like the affectation of a little girl playing dress-up. Wearing flowers in her bouffant hair, Stella is the film’s most beguiling presence, a woman who has every man around her in thrall to her self-possessed stride. (Darnell played another sultry vixen earlier that year, a conniving singer who toys with the feelings of a murderous man in John Brahm’s Hangover Square, to similarly powerful effect.) But Darnell takes her character beyond the hazy realm of enigma, limning her performance with a subtle undercurrent of longing. For all her tough talk, Stella covets a less shabby existence and a man who can give her what she needs: a ring on her finger, and a home. She states these transactional requirements clearly and plainly, yet Darnell makes you feel for this character’s desire to escape her circumstances and find security, which is why her ultimately tragic outcome lands with such force.

Though Darnell was exceptionally skilled at infusing heart into such sirenish roles, she could play purity with just as much texture, evident in Preston Sturges’s delightfully loose-cannoned Unfaithfully Yours (1948). In that film, she is the loyal wife of a British symphony conductor (Rex Harrison) who believes, erroneously, that she’s been cheating on him. This paranoia results in him dreaming up various—and increasingly unhinged—scenarios in which he punishes her for this alleged act of infidelity, such as playing a game of Russian roulette against the man he believes she’s cheated on him with.

Darnell sells her character’s decency with conviction; her ​​shouting matches with her surly and increasingly irritable husband resemble games of ping-pong, only she’s outclassed. “Have you ever heard of Russian roulette?” he asks her in one scene, holding a pistol. “Why, certainly. I used to play it all the time with my father,” she earnestly responds, thinking of the card game Russian Bank. Their cultural differences are a wellspring of marital tension—and, for the viewer, a source of humor, which Darnell draws out in small details. Her response, for example, when her husband tells her that he can’t take her dancing (dahncing, as Harrison pronounces it) one night: “Who told you I wanted to go dahn—dancing?” she says, mimicking her husband’s genteel British accent before correcting herself. Seemingly throwaway nuances like these showcased Darnell’s ability to imbue even the most morally sacrosanct characters with specificity.

But an even greater indication of Darnell’s comedic chops comes in a fantasy sequence in which Harrison’s character starts to picture himself planning to catch her in the act of adultery. In this daydream, Darnell—speaking to her husband as he tries to concoct a plan for her to meet up with this suspected lover of hers—shifts her expression on a dime from one of wide-eyed virtue to one of knowing calculation. Her intonation changes too: she lifts her voice from its naturally deep register to a spicy whisper. In this passage of the film, Darnell, whose character is in reality unquestioningly devoted to her husband, fully inhabits the false image he has of her as a viperous two-timer, proof of Darnell’s dexterity.

One year later came what cinephiles tend to regard as the quintessential Darnell performance. In Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s A Letter to Three Wives (1949), Darnell plays Lora Mae Hollingsway, one of three women who wonder if their husbands have left them and run off with the town flirt. The character talks as if she’s the wisest girl in the room, wearing a permanent smirk that might seem offputtingly smug on anyone else but Darnell. Lora Mae is a variation of Darnell’s character in Fallen Angel: prior to her marriage, she’s a lower-class salesgirl who wants out of her hardscrabble surroundings. She resides with her family in a house that’s so close to railroad tracks that it quakes sometimes, rattling the contents of the cupboards and swinging the fridge door open. She hatches an exit plan by yoking herself to her much older boss. After a succession of businesslike dates, he proposes to her unromantically. “Okay, you win,” he sighs. “I’ll marry you. How about it?” Her response drips with characteristic Darnell vinegar: “Thanks for nothin’.”