Why does Doris Day ‘deserve’ a major season at the National Film Theatre? Why is she the subject of an 80-page dossier from the British Film Institute? Why is an actress with a ‘virgin-next-door’ image being ‘reclaimed’ by feminists? Why does she warrant a two-page magazine feature?
Each time I have had to answer these questions it has become more apparent that Doris Day is remembered in a certain way: as the boring ‘Good’ girl, who hung on to her virginity through thick and thin; as the wholesome, All-American heroine of the ’50s who embodies everything the ‘liberated’ ’60s generation set itself against; and by film-buffs, as the dated star of some hammy musical comedies – ‘women’s films’, but not good cinema.
The determination to see Day as the ‘clean, unsexy’ stereotype with little serious significance, is a fascinating phenomenon: because few of these presumptions are borne out by the films themselves. In a 20-year career Day made 39 films, including thrillers, melodramas, and sophisticated sex comedies, in which she plays roles as diverse as a lobster farmer and a night-club singer. Her more conventional social roles, where she’s ‘just’ a wife, are in the thrillers; where in each case she is subjected to violence from men – in three cases, from her husband. In the lighter films, she almost invariably plays an independent working woman (teacher, shop steward in a pyjama factory, lumber-yard owner), whose involvement in her work, and independence of thought, are presented in direct contradiction with the ideas of the men who want her, and expect her to fall mindlessly into their arms. She resists not sex, but submission: ‘Just because I kissed you, does that make me your girl?’ (Pajama Game, 1957). And where she does figure as a girl-next-door in suburbia (e.g. Young at Heart, 1955) she fails to fulfil expectations and on the day of her wedding to the ‘boy-next-door’ figure, elopes with the cynical, suicidal Frank Sinatra.
The discrepancy between the image of Day and her actual films raises much more interesting questions than those about Day ‘herself’. How is the star’s image ‘fixed’ in a way that can exclude many of her film roles? Why is the kind of woman Day plays so often (funny, independent, bright) seen as not sexy (whereas Marilyn Monroe, from the same era and with no greater acting ability, now has a great following)? Why are these kinds of films so scornfully regarded as ‘dated’? Is there a vested interest in ‘forgetting’ the many problems and conflicts raised in them?
All stars and public figures have images which are lop-sided and partial, but women, whether stars or not, are subject to sets of images which are mutually exclusive: the clever, ‘unfeminine’ girl/the dumb blonde; the good wife and mother/the nymphet, etc. In another ’50s film, The Girl Can’t Help It (1956) the punchline is that sex-bomb Jayne Mansfield actually loves fixing turkey dinners and keeping house: the fact that it’s meant to be amazing shows how these qualities are seen as opposites. And what oppositions of this sort have in common is the separation of sexuality from other qualities. Since when were ‘nice’ men not sexy? Or sexy men ‘dumb’?
Taken together, the images of Doris Day and Marilyn Monroe (who were equally successful) can be seen as a manifestation of precisely this split: Monroe is ‘dumb, innocent, sexy’ while Day is ‘freckled, pert, wholesome’. On the literal level, it was the publicity machine at Warner Brothers which ‘created’ her clean, sunshiney image: stills always show her smiling (smiling isn’t sexy – look at the pouting models in any magazine) and decently dressed – but it was her role as a mother which endowed her with virtue and cleanliness (though clearly not virginity!). A typical publicity still shows her scrubbing behind her small son’s ears: ‘Between her Warner Bros screen career, co-starring on the weekly Bob Hope radio broadcast, and satisfying the demands of fans the world over, blonde singing star Doris Day is a pretty busy young lady – but never too busy to neglect her duties and pleasures as mother to 7-year-old Terry.’ Warners may have plugged this image, but the attitudes already existed which ensured it popular currency. (This was the era of Bowlby’s influential theories on the necessity of mothering, etc). Audiences adored the ‘girl-next-door’ figure and were disturbed by anything out of ‘character’ – as when Day received thousands of letters from fans distressed by her role as Ruth Etting, the night-club singer raped by her lover (James Cagney) in Love Me Or Leave Me (1955). Most of the rape scene was cut, which Day herself regarded as ‘chickening out’.
This was by no means the only ‘dark’ film of Day’s. How about Storm Warning (1951) in which Day is married to a Klu Klux Klan member who shoots her and tries to rape her sister? Or Midnight Lace (1960) where Day plays a wife persecuted by threatening phone calls, which turn out to be from her husband, trying to drive her to suicide? When this film ran on TV recently, it was announced as ‘a tense, psychological thriller set in London during the famous fogs of the 50s, starring Rex Harrison, and, in an untypical dramatic role, Doris Day.’ The final image of the film, Day walking towards camera with tears on her face, was hurriedly replaced with a still of the ‘famous grin’ and the assurance that ‘Doris Day can be seen in a more familiar role later this season when the BBC will be showing a season of Doris Day musicals.’
Monroe, The Seven Year Itch
Day, The Pajama Game
This perpetual attempt to pin down the image of Day as sunny and straightforward shows that something must be at stake: the public image could not be contradictory. With Day’s own life, her motherhood was stressed, but her two earlier, unhappy marriages were concealed – just as recent news has shown that a TV personality and Mayor’s wife cannot be an insecure woman who shoplifts. The possibility of contradictions within public figures threatens the status quo, because if people are capable of inconsistency and change, so is the whole of society.
Change, and the remoulding of sexual roles, are at the centre of most of Day’s films. In the sex comedies the plot always involves change on both sides, but for Day, this is usually an increasing sexual attraction for the man, while he is forced to modify his world view in accordance with her social outlook. In The Pajama Game Day plays a shop steward involved in a battle for a 7½ cent per hour rise. The new, young factory supervisor falls for her: ‘If we love each other, nothing can come between us’. But she, although equally ‘in love’, warns him: ‘7½ cents is going to come between us. The contract is important to me … no matter what’s with us, I’m going to be fighting for my side and fighting hard.’ There is no happy ending for the love story until he has come round to backing the workers’ claim. In Teacher’s Pet (1958) Clark Gable is made to rethink his cynical ideas about the role of education – and about sexual stereotypes, as he assumes the ‘least attractive’ woman in the classroom to be the teacher – and is stunned to find that it’s blonde, high-heeled Doris Day who is ‘Professor Stone’.
The questioning of sexual roles during these films is partially undercut by the endings, where invariably the antagonists pair off, and the Day figure loses her (material) independence. We are given no reason to assume she will lose her independence of mind: still, the fact that she is ‘brought round’ at all can be seen as reassurance to the male ego. But it is a peculiar feature of films that often the image you are left with is not the final one. Calamity Jane (1953) may be frilled up and married off after 101 minutes, but she can equally be remembered as the buckskin-clad stagecoach guard of the first hour and a half.
Which image is ‘remembered’ depends on what’s in it for you, and what the current set of ideas about women happens to be. The 1950s emphasis on Day’s healthy young mother image was bound up with the renewed stress on family life after the social upheaval of the Second World War. The desire for a reassuring picture of the ‘girl-next-door’, with an unthreatening sexuality, was clearly strong enough at this time to produce a particular, selective viewing of Day’s films. The notions of balance between the male and female protagonists in the comedies, and the ‘civilizing’ effect of the female’s ideas on the man, demonstrate another aspect of ’50s thought: that men and women were ‘Equal but Different’ in their domestic and social roles.
If ’50s ideas about femininity produced the first ‘repression’ of issues raised in Day films, the ’60s era of ‘liberation’ put the lid on them completely. The fact that most of the Day characters battle for their own views to be accepted before ‘giving’ themselves sexually was forgotten as the advent of the Pill made any reason for saying ‘No’ seem out of date; and another partial view of Day, the ‘Constant Virgin’, developed. It is interesting that in 1967 Day turned down the part of Mrs Robinson in The Graduate not because it was a sexual role but because the way it depicted sexual relations was exploitative – an evaluation many feminists would now agree with. But by the late ’60s the Day image was on its way out, no longer corresponding to a popular mythology of women. And the demise of the Hollywood studio system at around the same time meant that the kind of stars who had held such sway as public idols for over four decades were on the way out for good.
So why are women, particularly, becoming interested in Doris Day films again? Perhaps the decade of films that followed the end of her career has something to do with it. The post-’68 years provided us with films like Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, A Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs, Dirty Harry, The Collector, Five Easy Pieces, The Sting, Butch Cassidy – not a period noted for its variety and scope in female characters. And there is no equivalent of the Day figure even in contemporary ‘women’s’ films (An Unmarried Woman, The Turning Point, Girlfriends, etc) which lack the humour and vitality of the successful ‘genre’ films (musicals, sex comedies etc) of the ’50s. The ground of earlier ‘women’s films’, domestic comedy and ‘weepies’, has now moved into TV: it’s no coincidence that the BBC is running their current Day season in a 6.30 weekday slot – competing with the daily soap opera Crossroads.
Reclaiming Day’s films in no way means disowning this connection – or this audience. It means claiming the validity of the apparently trivial struggles at work and in personal relationships, which are still regarded as ‘women’s areas’ (as opposed to the dramatically macho terrain of most popular cinema). Most of all it means welcoming any image, for they are scarce enough, of a woman who steers her way through these struggles with generosity, humour and self-respect. Day never played the part of a character who knowingly betrayed her own principles. This may sound old-fashioned, but at a time when so many movies, not to mention the ruling political climate, are more brutal than ever, it is a policy and a group of films not to be sneered at.
(First published as ‘Reclaim the Day’,
Time Out, 1980)