Shutterbugs: Katie and Her Camera and Sharon James, Freelance Photographer

Posted on by
3

Katie And Her Camera (1955, Lois Hobart)

The Story: Dad has died and Katie has to get a job in order to finish college (a weak or absent patriarch is always a good excuse for a career). Inexperienced Katie applies for a part-time job as assistant to photographer Rolfe Esperson, who not only hires her but proceeds to teach her everything he knows, loans her his equipment, and pays her to boot. At one point he says she looks worn out and gives her a hundred dollars with instructions to go on a shopping spree.

My kind of boss!

Katie takes to photography like a duck to water and by mid-book has set up a darkroom in her basement and sold a bunch of photos to Life Magazine. After graduation she gets a job on a small-town newspaper because, despite having only a minor in journalism and no newspaper experience, she has her camera and that Life credit under her belt. Again, she becomes experienced in an incredibly short time, impressing her new editor and his daughter: “Dad says it usually takes months for a cub reporter to take hold and really become useful, and you were learning the ropes in a matter of weeks.” The moral of this book seems to be that if you’re smart and work hard you can do anything.

Romantic Interest: Paul Serrill, introduced to her by her perfect boss, natch. He’s an established journalist who Katie believes is out of her league, and he spends most of the book dishing out good career advice before suddenly realizing he’s in love with her. This changes little, their dates continue to be career counseling sessions: “Remember, you don’t make a living in photography by concentrating on major markets!” All goes swimmingly until he sends sophisticated Diana Caldwell to pick up Katie from the train station. Katie is instantly suspicious and jealous: why hasn’t he mentioned Diana? Has he been seeing her all along? Always insecure about her naivete, she’s convinced Paul has thrown her over for glamor-girl Diana.

Oh, Katie, of course not. Diana’s just been helping Paul and Rolfe on an investigative story about drug rings, which Katie discovers when she finds Rolfe unconscious in his studio, with all his negatives tossed about. However, she still feels too mad and hurt by Paul’s insensitivity to apologize, and she and Paul break up. No worries; a chapter’s worth of time to think and Katie is ready to make up. Paul produces his mother’s opal ring, the end. They will clearly be one of those complementary working couples who read and critique each other’s work. Once they’ve paid their small town dues, they will head for Chicago, or New York, “since it’s a publishing center” and move from success to success.

Income: Katie is paid $25 a week for five afternoons, 1pm-5:30. That is equivalent to $205, or about $9/hour, in today’s dollars. When Mom asks how much she’ll get for the Life photos, Katie replies: “Goodness, I don’t even know. But a good price I would think, one hundred dollars or one hundred and fifty dollars a page, and this is always a two-page feature.” So a total of $1600-$2400 in today’s terms.

Career Crisis: Katie only has the romantic crisis, she has been the recipient of too much good advice to make a mistake in her career. At one point she notices some smudges on a print and chides herself for not dusting the negative.

Career Advice: That’s what this book is all about—the plot is secondary. Rolfe is writing a book about photography and large chunks of it make their way into the story. Learn different cameras. Keep your negatives organized and tidy. Don’t make duplicate submissions. My favorite: remember the secondary markets, i.e. recaption, regroup, and resell your photos to non-competitive publications. I was just reading the same advice (directed at writers) in the ASJA Guide to Freelance Writing, 2003.

Industrial Credibility: Lots. Cameras are named and discussed (I now know the Rolleiflex viewfinder reverses the image, although I’m still not sure what a Speed Graphic is); The pros and cons of natural light, flashes, and strobe lights are weighed; Steichen and Brodovitch (I don’t even know who the second guy is) are mentioned. One chapter describes the developing and printing process in excruciating detail.

Comment: This is one of my favorite career girl books. It’s not just boss-from-heaven Rolfe, or the wish-fulfillment of getting published in Life Magazine the very first time you submit a photo story. Hobart gets away with these delightful fantasies because she describes Katie’s ideas and work process so thoroughly, capturing the moment Katie falls in love with her new vocation—the excitement and joy of finding something you really like to do. Most books in this genre start when the heroine has finished her schooling (in home economics, or physical therapy, or architecture) and has to find a job. Those books sometimes overdo the de-glamorization of a career, and emphasize the disappointments and hardships. Katie doesn’t undergo any of the humiliations career romance authors often put their heroines through. Sure, she has her moments of insecurity and doubt, but even the one real crisis, her sudden jealousy and distrust of Paul, has its positive side. Just as well to test the relationship, she thinks, and dates a series of other fellows before deciding that yes, Paul was pretty great, and she screwed up. She writes him a letter apologizing (mostly because it will help her move forward and get on with life), and he comes running. This is one level-headed girl who has her priorities straight.

Sharon James, Free-lance Photographer (1956, Elizabeth Wesley)

The Story: Like Katie, Sharon is working her way through college, this time because Dad had a heart attack and can’t work. Unlike Katie, she already has the dark room in the basement and a thriving freelance clientele, an exhausting schedule of scurrying around takng pictures of school pageants, birthday parties, family portraits. The career excitement in the book is that she sells herself as a fashion photographer to Nina Paxton, owner of an exclusive dress shop. However, this is dwarfed by the mystery plot, a fairly common feature in career girl books–too many authors share the widespread view of work as boring and feel they need to spice things up by dragging in drug rings and kidnappings, or at the very least a little corporate spying. While Katie’s connection to the drug ring investigation is fleeting and beside the point, the mystery in Sharon James takes over the book.

Sharon accidently photographs a kidnapper while taking pictures of kids playing in the park. Soon her dark room is trashed (just like Rolfe’s), and that’s only the beginning of Sharon’s Wonder Woman style adventures. She decides to go photograph an old farmhouse in the country and guess what, it turns out that the kidnapper is keeping his victim there! Sharon gets knocked out and tied up, manages to crawl from a burning barn, dragging with her the police officer who was supposed to be guarding her. But it doesn’t stop there, even though the kidnapper has released the kid because (due to Sharon) the cops were getting too close. Wanting to revenge himself on Sharon, the villain attempts to lure her out to another deserted farm by pretending to be a potential client who wants a photograph of his prize-winning cow. “Cows were supposed to be especially photogenic” thinks Sharon, as she gets ready for her new assignment, before realizing at the last second that it’s a trap. But the kidnapper has as much stick-to-itiveness as any career girl. He breaks into the department store during a photo shoot, knocks out M. Reynaud of the French Room, and kidnaps Sharon. In the thrilling climax Sharon is left to die of exposure in a snowy woods, but is found by bloodhounds and those slow-witted police. With all her unexpected absences and destroyed negatives, it’s a wonder she manages to graduate from college, let alone keep any clients.

Romantic Interest: Sharon James features a favorite career girl trope—the bad boyfriend who resents the heroine’s career and is replaced by the good, supportive boyfriend. As the book opens, Sharon is dating Ed who complains “Don’t you think a guy gets tired of dating a camera?” when she turns down a dinner invitation to work in her dark room. He is quickly replaced by policeman Steve Winston, who sees Sharon’s dedication to her career as similar to his own. They take a walk one snowy evening and laugh about the fact that she is thinking of the picturesque qualities of snow while he is thinking about potential traffic accidents. At the end of the book, they stand together admiring her new studio and the sign “Sharon James, Photographer.” Steve doesn’t have an opal, but he suggests, “On the window Sharon James, just so she’s the same person as Mrs. Steve Winston—a deal?” Sharon gets married but keeps her own name, at least professionally.

Income: No information given. Sharon gets the Paxton job by offering to take sample fashion pictures for free, and the next thing she knows is Paxton has used them in an advertising spread in the Sunday supplement. Presumably she gets paid at some point.

Career Crisis: Again, there really isn’t one. Nina loves her pictures, she recovers her negatives in time to fill a reprint order, and doesn’t seem that unhappy over losing Ed to rich girl Linda. Especially with Steve following her about like a faithful dog, except for the couple weeks he spends on fingerprinting course in Washington D.C.

Career Advice: Again, keep your negatives organized (a sisyphean task when thugs are continually breaking into your darkroom). Get a release from the parents of that baby so you can sell his picture to an ad agency (I wondered if the parents got a cut). “They probably won’t buy it, but if you keep your name and your work before them, one of these days they will.”

Industrial Credibility: Less than Katie. Sharon uses a Speed Graphic (someday I’ll find out what that is) and reminds herself that if you make a mistake on the negative, you can’t fix it in the print. She also thinks about Matthew Brady, civil war photographer. And frets about a low ceiling with plumbing pipes in the background of a photograph.

Comment: Fascinated as I am by the world of work, those mystery plotlines seem unnecessary and tacked on. Enough with the kidnapping already! Tell me more about Nina Paxton, fashion photographer Nora Roberts (before her career as a romance author evidently), and how much you charge for photographing the Women’s Club Luncheon. My favorite details were probably the descriptions of the clothes Nina Paxton sells: “a stunning black velvet suit,” “a green and gray glen plaid skirt and a soft green cashmere cardigan” with “a scarf of the same enchanting green.” Then there’s the “pale pink wool dress with frosty collar and cuffs” which Sharon likes so much she buys (so I guess Nina did finally pay her something).

One thing I noticed about both books is how tiring photography is. Both Katie and Sharon are described as exhausted (all those late nights in the dark room) and both of them take naps (Katie falls asleep at work on Rolfe’s couch–naturally he just covers her with a blanket). Potential Camera Girls take note.

The Wonderful World of Work

Posted on by
2

Maureen Corrigan, in her review of recent novels about the unemployed, started by saying that historically “the workaday world…has been considered too mundane to be of much interest.”  Poor Maureen–another otherwise well-read person completely unaware of the world of Career Girl books. I’m talking about books like Betty Loring, Illustrator (1948), Patti Lewis, Home Economist (1956), and A Flair for People (1955–the heroine is a personnel director). Despite growing up with the Beany Malone books (which she analyzes in her memoir Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, Maureen somehow missed out on books like Date With A Career (1958), and Phoebe’s First Campaign (1963).

These are the books a girl might pick up if she wanted to find out, say, what it was like to work for the foreign service (Assignment in Ankara) or whether she should be a lawyer (Linda Jordan, Lawyer) or a doctor (Doctor Barbara). Or if a nurse, which of the many varieties of nurse? Navy Nurse? School Nurse? Visiting Nurse? But make no mistake, these books offer more career possibilities than Cherry Ames ever dreamed of.

I always regret that I was already well-launched on my own disorganized version of a career when I began to explore these books, frequently referred to as “Career Romances.” For me, the advice and career tips came too late.

Seems like from the forties through the sixties any juvenile publisher worth its salt was publishing this subgenre of teen lit. Julian Messner, a division of Simon and Schuster, led the field, putting out a whole slew of them under the series title “Romances for Young Moderns.” They follow a fairly standard formula. A young woman begins her professional career (“On Monday morning she was going to New York, quite on her own, to look for a position as private secretary. The thought was thrilling.”), encounters setbacks and obstacles (“The cake layers came out of the oven flat as pancakes. How was she going to save her face with the audience?”), but eventually finds a measure of success (“Oh Marcia, I always knew you’d make good!”) and romance—generally some sort of proposal from the fellow who’s been hanging around advising or distracting her for most of the book (“this is an opal ring my mother used to wear and I’d like you to have it.”).

I love these books—obviously, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery. To understand why, you have to compare them to other typical teen fare of that era—A Date for Marcie, Senior Prom, and The Boy Next Door, to name just a few. Unlike the boy-obsessed teenagers (who I still have a soft spot for), the career-minded heroines of these books are not frittering their time away on dates and clothes. They have purpose. They are ambitious. They are working.

Here is Katie (Katie and her Camera) on the subject of dating: “There are so many things happening in my life, so much I want to learn about, so many people to meet, so much to do, that I’m not searching for other complications.” At least not until the end of the book, after she’s sold her photographs to magazines and gotten a job as a photo-journalist.

One of the most charming things about these books is the clumsy way they cram useful advice into the plot. “You’re not thinking of starting in Chicago or New York, are you?” boyfriend-to-be Paul asks Katie as they discuss her job search. Katie, no fool, answers correctly, “Heavens no, with no experience? And all that competition? I think the first thing for me to do is get some experience locally.” It’s like the enriched soy flour biscuit mix that makes Patti Lewis’s reputation as a home economist. Good for you, and tasty too!

And for a fascinating view of the era when women were streaming into the work force, these books can’t be beat. Contradictory advice, mixed messages, and ambivalence, here we come!

Visit this blog tomorrow when I’ll be posting book reports on two career-minded shutterbugs in honor of my photographer friend Rebecca’s slide show at the SFPL!

Career Girls, 1942 Style

Posted on by
Reply

First edition of Laura, Eyre & Spottiswood, cover by Bip Pares

There was a double feature playing a few nights ago, Laura and Bedelia, both based on books by Vera Caspary. I was so exhausted from the grueling Noir City Film Festival pace (four movies on Saturday) that I thought I’d skip the movie version of Laura (which I’ve seen more times than I can remember) and read the book instead.

Caspary wrote Laura in 1942, and the eponymous heroine is a curtain opener for the career girls who would later flood the fiction market. In 1943 the New York Times called this story of an advertising executive who is presumed murdered and then turns up alive and becomes a suspect “quite different from the run-of-the-mill detective story.” The book spends more time on Laura’s modernity as an “independent woman” and “bachelor girl” than the film does. Preminger followed the plot-line pretty closely (for all that he claimed that he made up everything but the basic premise himself) but he was uninterested in exploring the social problems of working women and favored the twisted relationships and necrophilia angle–all very titillating and good movie fun.

Popular Library edition, 1950, with sex-appeal now added. Cover artist Sam Cherry

Vera Caspary asked Preminger (after reading a first draft of the script) “Why don’t you give her the character she has in the book?” He said, “In the book, Laura has no character…Laura has no sex.” I guess it depends on your point of view.

In the book, Waldo tells us, much as he does in the movie, about Laura’s transformation from naive newcomer to sophisticated New Yorker, although in the book there’s more detail and again that slight change of emphasis that makes all the difference. We’re told Laura came from Colorado Springs when she was eighteen or nineteen possessed of a “magnificent will” and “willing to suffer endless rebuffs in order to prove her talents.”

In the movie, Laura says of her mother, “She listened to my dreams of a career and then taught me another recipe.” in the book, there are two mentions of Laura’s mother: Laura remembers her advice, “Never give yourself, Laura, never give yourself to a man” and recalls how her mother would lock herself in the bedroom with “a sick headache”–a hint, perhaps, as to why Laura was so eager to leave Colorado Springs.

In the movie, Laura is basically hoodwinked by Shelby Carpenter, the handsome southern cad on his way to becoming a gigolo whose ultimate destiny is Laura’s aunt, Ann Treadwell (Aunt Susie in the book). In the book, Laura thinks back on their relationship, two years of quarrels and reconciliations and reflects, “I had used him as women use men to complete the design of a full life….Going on thirty and unmarried I had become alarmed.”

In the movie, Laura excuses her weekend away by saying she needed to think. In the book, Caspary is at pains to explain that Laura’s weekend away by herself before her marriage to Shelby is the equivalent of a bachelor dinner, a last celebration of freedom before submitting to the matrimonial noose. “Owning myself, possessing all my silly and useless routines and being the sole mistress of my habits…freedom meant my privacy.”

Both movie and book do a lot of hinting at alternatives to the heterosexual pairing; hints that don’t always make sense in the context of the plot, except to add to the “sophisticated” ambiance (and believe me, if I could make something of the description of Bessie as “more than a maid to Laura” I would). In the book, Laura thinks of the “way we proud moderns have twisted and perverted love, making arguments for this and that substitute.” In both book and movie, Mark is positioned as successor to Laura, Waldo’s next protege, although it’s a lot clearer in the book. One of the lines the censors wanted cut from the movie is Mark telling Waldo, “You like your men better if they’re not a hundred percent,” which the censor said had “the unacceptable flavor of a possible pathological sex angle so far as Waldo is concerned.” Of course the movie has what is worth a thousand suggestive lines, the performance of Clifton Webb as Waldo Lydecker.

Which makes the whole plot unconvincing. Waldo is supposedly in love with Laura, and wants to kill her because he can’t bear the thought of her in another man’s arms. And yet in the early scenes of the movie, Waldo is practically courting Mark; Then, confusingly, he declares his love for Laura with his last breath at the film’s conclusion. It’s perhaps a case of Hollywood (and Caspary it must be said) not daring to take the titillating storyline they’ve created to its logical conclusion. The only way to make sense of this “psychothriller” as the publishers billed the book, is to suppose that Waldo’s admiration for Laura has a flip side–envy for her ability to attract men like Mark (and perhaps Shelby and Jacoby). Laura is the rival Waldo wants to eliminate, but due to a bad case of freudian transference-love-object-substitution…

I did end up seeing Laura, the movie, at least the second half, after running across the street for a bite to eat. I made sure to get back in time to watch my favorite scene (not in the book), in which Judith Anderson as Ann Treadwell makes a speech about how she’s no good and Shelby’s no good and they belong together, all while looking in the mirror, adjusting her hat and redoing her lipstick. I love it in part because the first time I saw Laura, a matinee at Theatre 80 St. Marks in New York in the late eighties, the entire audience of primarily gay men burst into applause at the speech’s conclusion.

Further Reading: Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King, Foster Hirsch; The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger Chris Fujiwara

Dating Advice

Posted on by
2

Once you learn what it is about yourself that needs improving, there's no longer any reason to feel helpless or hopeless.

I watched The Bachelor a few days ago, probably for the last time. It turns out my enjoyment of the premiere episode had more to do with being on vacation and seeing old friends than the show’s intrinsic qualities; and like the pleasure of watching HGTV every night in the hotel room, is not to be recaptured now that I’m back in my normal surroundings. On Monday night after the host advised the assembled women to make the most of whatever fleeting moments of contact they had with the bachelor, I found myself asking, “How could you ever hope to have even a semi-normal interaction in these circumstances?” — a question which I realize is very much beside the point.

Pondering the show, I was struck by how closely the ladies resemble girls like Sue in The Popular Crowd (Anne Emery, 1961) Sue is determined to date a boy she’s only seen from a distance, football star Pete Carroll. “I’ve got as good a chance as anyone,” she thinks. Except for the whole sex thing — what these books refer to as “heavy petting” if they refer to it at all — the bachelor contestants are the soul sisters of all those teen heroines desperate for a date to the prom (A Date for Marcy, Senior Prom). To aid them in their quest, I rounded up some period advice on man-catching.

Pursuing a man: Emily Post (1945 edition) asks, “How far may a girl run after a man? Catlike she may do a little stalking! But ‘run’? Not a step.” This advice is universally echoed until Accent on April (Betty Cavanna, 1960) in which Kathy is perturbed because her best friend Brenda has given her (Kathy’s) obnoxious brother Jon an expensive wallet. She complains to her mother that Jon can’t even return the wallet because it has his initials on it. Kathy’s mother says,”Maybe he doesn’t want to take it back.” To which Kathy responds, “Then there’s something wrong with all the books on teen-age etiquette. He should want to!” Her mother replies: “Boys are unpredictable. Some of them actually like to be chased.” Exhibit A: the Bachelor.

Grooming: In The Unchosen (Nan Gilbert, 1963) a group of wallflowers transform themselves with the help of magazine advice columns. “She’d given up spike heels with sportswear and exchanged her near-purple lipstick for a new pink-pearl. Her hair shown with brushing. Her hems and seams didn’t so often show the silver glint of safety-pin repair.”

That girl was clearly following the advice of McCall’s Guide to Teen-Age Beauty & Glamour (Betsy Keiffer, 1959) which outlines a long list of don’ts, including smeary lipstick, charm bracelets that clank and grubby handkerchiefs. The book then sums up the ideal girl’s appearance with a somewhat vague description: “she is neat, she is sweet, she is clean, and perhaps most important she is understated.”

I must say I prefer the fashion advice in My Sister Mike (Amelia Elizabeth Walden, 1956) another tomboy-to-temptress transformational tale. “She learned the feel of a cashmere sweater, the smell of good leather, the simple elegance of a dress that was all line…she caught the knack of individualizing herself…Plain colors, stark simplicity, a bright splash of color in a Chinese gold or chartreuse scarf, these were part of the casual sophistication she strove to attain.”

I’ll leave it to regular viewers to judge where the contestants stand on the spectrum running from spike heels with sportswear to casual sophistication.

Dating: McCall’s Guide to Teen-Age Beauty and Glamour advises you to accept an invitation promptly and enthusiastically, which advice the bachelor contestants all follow to the letter. No way they’re going to be the McCall boy’s “pet peeves: the girl who tries to stall” or “the girl who won’t accept a date until she knows what the date is for, making it clear that the pleasure of having the boy’s company is not her primary interest.” Other verboten behavior on the McCall list includes correcting your date, eating the most expensive dish on the menu, and “the girl who keeps a stranglehold on her date all evening.” Watch it ladies! At least those huge group dates have the What To Do on a Date (Coronet, 1950 ) seal of approval. The narrator raptures: “A group…doing things together — pretty good idea for a first date!”

Other Girls: McCall’s says: “Girls are even more important in your life right now than boys are.” If only the Bachelor’s harem would heed that advice! But I fear that the tiny bit of lesbian titillation in the premiere is not to be repeated. Jealousy is the theme, as it was back in Double Date (Rosamond du Jardin, 1951). In that book Mike can’t decide between twin sisters Pam and Penny. First Mike dates Pam, then he dates Penny, then he dates Pam again, then he dates Penny. “Of all the double-crosses!” shouts Pam at Penny after the final switch. Penny to Pam: “It’s not as if you owned Mike or any other boy. I guess he has the right to like me best if he wants to.” Remember that ladies, as well as this from the “Popularity Plus” chapter of Hi There, High School! (Gay Head, 1960):  “Don’t wear your feelings on the outside. If they stick out like a porcupine’s needles, they’re going to bump into plenty of trouble.” And you’ll be crying in the bathroom knowing there’s a camera waiting on the other side of the door and a mike picking up your every sob.

Sex: “A kiss is not the price of a date,” McCall reminds us all, before handing out advice on how to adroitly dodge said kiss without hurting the boy’s feelings. How To Say No (Coronet, 1951) covers drinking (the Bachelor ladies could use some help there), smoking and finally the unmentionable: “Just give him half a chance alone and there’s no stopping him,” complains one girl. The solution is to distract him, in one example by peppering him with questions about the track meet. “You girls seem to think it’s always the boy who starts things,” complains one fellow. One girl admits the truth of that: “if you really like a boy, you want to be close, hold hands with him and give him a goodnight kiss.” And so the dilemma begins. How far is too far? (as the song goes).

In Make A Wish for Me (Lenora Mattingly Weber, 1956) Mary Fred tells her sister Beany, “unless it’s the real thing and you can start plans for getting married, all this amour-amour seems a little on the cheap side.” After discussing the ersatz popularity of the Hot Lips (slang for the local campus hussies) Mary Fred lowers her voice to add “Let’s face it, hon, it’s the heavy loving scenes that lead up to–well, last year one of the Hot Lips had to get married in a hurry.” Pregnancy, the medical condition that dare not speak its name. Ladies of The Bachelor, check your birth control supplies.

Sue in The Popular Crowd probably has more in common with the Bachelor contestants than Mary Fred. When her boyfriend Pete asks another girl to a dance, she decides to “make him do what she wanted–and now she knew how.” The “how” turns out to be this: “He grabbed her and kissed her with grasping violence. His hands fumbled inside her coat, reaching for her in ways he had never tried before.” Sue ends up breaking up with Pete, mostly because he’s a big jerk, even putting his inept attempt at amour-amour aside.

I have a feeling these television gals are going to ignore the lessons Sue learned the hard way in favor of single-girl guru Helen Gurley Brown. “Quite a few ‘nice’ single girls have affairs and do not suffer at all!” she says in Sex and the Single Girl–rather daringly for 1962. Gurley Brown’s remark seems quite sweet beside The Sex Life of the Career Girl (Roy Lee Sherman, MD and Lillian Preston, 1965) whose authors leave the question of sex to the individual girl, asking pragmatically, “Does the projected affair promise real help to her in her career?”

Good luck, ladies.

Pining Lesbians

Posted on by
5
Dora and Inspector Antoine

Dora and Inspector Antoine

Lesbians pop up when you least expect it. Back in the old days, we used to call this “content,” (shorthand for lesbian content) as in “that book/movie/tv show has some content.” Last night I tripped, quite unexpectedly, across some content.

I was at the movies, a 1947 french film called Quai des Orfevres. And there she was–an attractive blonde in pants and thick-soled shoes all mixed up in a murder for love of her upstairs neighbor, the aptly named Jenny Lamour.

Suzy Delair plays Jenny, who has a musical act with her jealous husband Maurice. Dora, the lesbian (Simone Renant), is friends with both, but it’s Jenny she’s crazy about. The story involves a murder that none of the three committed but all of them are implicated in, mostly because they were all at the crime scene at different times. It’s a silly plot, just an excuse for the great characters to interact.

I loved the way the lesbian had her name–Dora–appliqué’d on her sweater, and that she was a working girl, running a little photography studio (her client, a creepy, wealthy pornographer, is the murder victim). She comes across as reserved, a little world-weary, but loyal, and she gets some great scenes. After Jenny comes to her for help, she goes to the victim’s house to retrieve a tell-tale piece of evidence Jenny has left behind, and gives her ex-client’s body a disdainful kick while she’s at it. Then she returns to the studio and gives Jenny the evidence. “Why are you so good to me?” sobs Jenny. “Because I…I–” Dora stops just short of confessing her passion for Jenny, instead passing it off as friendship for both her and her nebbishy husband Maurice.

And then there’s the climactic scene (climactic in a lesbian rereading anyway) when the detective (played by the fabulous Louis Jouvet) tells Dora he identifies with her, that they’re two of a kind. For a breathless moment, I wondered, was director Henri-Georges Clouzot so advanced as to cast Jouvet as a sympathetic closeted gay cop? No, not quite. The detective identifies with the lesbian because they’re both unlucky with the ladies.

My filmgoing companion dismissed Dora as a “pining lesbian.” Well, sure–that’s what lesbians did in books and movies of that era. They pined, endlessly and hopelessly. And that’s if they were lucky.

But for 1947, Dora got pretty sympathetic treatment, paricularly when you compare Quai des Orfevres to Hollywood’s Young Man with a Horn which came out three years later, and has Lauren Bacall playing jazz musician Kirk Douglas’s warped first wife, Amy. After destroying him psychologically, Amy abandons Kirk to go to Europe with a lady friend. “You’re a strange girl, Amy,” says Kirk, muscle working in his cheek.

Kirk finds comfort in the arms of Doris Day. I like to think that Amy met up with Dora in some left bank bar and shared a few drinks–and perhaps a little comfort as well.