That Kind of Woman (Paramount, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards I ran Charles a 1959 movie I had hoped would provide a lighter contrast to the Sturm und Drang of Waking Up to Danger, but instead of the comedy I’d been expecting, it turned out to be a rather soapy melodrama called That Kind of Woman. I’d picked this up from a grey-label DVD source mainly because I was amused at the odd pairing of stars above the title: Sophia Loren and Tab Hunter. What on earth, I wondered, could Hollywood filmmakers have done to fit those two into the same film? It turned out That Kind of Woman was a World War II-era drama (set in the immediate aftermath of D-Day in June 1944, though one of the servicemember characters says he has a buddy fighting with the Marines at Iwo Jima, a battle that didn't occur until February 1845) in which two Army buddies, Red (Tab Hunter) and George Kelly (Jack Warden, who not surprisingly totally out-acts the male lead), are taking a train from Miami to New York when they run into two women, Kay (Sophia Loren) and Jane (Barbara Nichols in a quite good performance; she’s obviously modeling herself on Marilyn Monroe but she manages to put her own “spin” on the dumb-blonde clichés). The gimmick is that both Kay and Jane are “that kind of woman,” long-term mistresses to rich men who seem to pass them around as party favors to all the middle-aged male horndogs they’re doing business with.

By 1959 the Production Code had weakened enough that the quite talented filmmakers behind the camera (the writer was Walter Bernstein, adapting a story by Rich Lowry, and the director was the young, up-and-coming Sidney Lumet) could present the situation with at least some degree of honesty – though I suspect Loren was thinking, “If I were back home in Italy we could really make this movie without having to dodge around the central premise” (and Loren’s real-life husband, Carlo Ponti, has a co-producer credit) – and through much of it, especially the way the women are used by the men who keep them to help them get over business deals, I was reminded of the marvelously subversive “pre-Code” film She Had to Say Yes from 1932. (In that film, co-directed by Busby Berkeley – his first non-musical – Loretta Young played an executive with a fashion company, and the men she had to say yes to were department-store buyers her company was relying on to place orders for its clothes.) The person we see with Kay for most of the movie is Harry Corwin (Keenan Wynn), but it’s clear that he’s only accessing her in reserve for a godlike figure identified in the credits only as “The Man” (George Sanders in yet another superb performance – yes, it’s one of his typical “cad” roles, but he brings real pathos to it and at least some degree of emotional and moral complexity), and the whole point of their relationship is not only to give himself a hot babe to have sex with but also to offer her services to others in order to grease the corrupt deals he and other war profiteers are making to sell arms and materiel to the U.S. government.

The film is essentially a rehash of La Traviata – once again we have the whore with a heart of gold (though at least this time she’s not also dealing with a life-threatening illness) having to decide whether she wants the riches her “keeper” can give her or she will leave him for the true love of Tab Hunter – which on screen is as ludicrous as it sounds. Charles joked that Loren and Hunter really had something in common – they both broke into the movies on the strength of their looks – but Loren could act and Hunter couldn’t. At one point That Kind of Woman struck me as the sort of film James Dean would have been making in 1959 had he lived – the character needed his nervy mix of intensity and naïveté and got Hunter’s bovine immobility (with Dean dead the producers would have been better advised to seek out someone like Paul Newman or Steve McQueen, both of whom were young and on their way up when this film was made) – and of course Charles and I couldn’t help but make jokes about Hunter’s real-life sexual orientation. When Loren’s character explains to him, “I’m being kept by a very rich man,” I had him saying, “That’s funny – I’m being kept by a very rich man, too.” (Maybe Tab Hunter got cast in this movie because co-producer Carlo Ponti didn’t have to worry about him trying to romance Mrs. Ponti off-screen the way some of her hetero co-stars did.)

Any film written by Walter Bernstein, directed by Sidney Lumet and including Sophia Loren and George Sanders in the cast (even though Sanders was already showing signs of the boredom with both life and acting that would lead him to take his own life a decade later) would have to have some good moments, and they come here in the upper-class restaurant Sanders and Wynn have taken their kept women to and Hunter’s and Warden’s characters crash (and Bernstein is a good enough “planter” he’s let us know how these two proletarian servicemembers have the money to eat there at least once: Warden won it off his buddies in a poker game), only they make a scene, start a fight and got thrown out; and the lower-class restaurant that looks so New York sleazy it seems like Edward Hopper could have painted it. That Kind of Woman was only Lumet’s third theatrical feature, and his first, Twelve Angry Men, had originally been a live TV show (though Lumet didn’t direct the TV version – Franklin J. Schaffner did – but the two used the same script by Reginald Rose) – and one can tell from the closed-in settings and the way virtually the entire film takes place in confined spaces: the train taking the principals from Miami to New York, the two restaurants and the apartment Kay and Jane share while anxiously waiting for their sugar daddies to arrive and send them out on their latest assignment.

And it ends pretty much the way you expect it to, though with some neat variations: the Sanders character (called simply “The Man” in the film’s credits but “A. L.” on the imdb.com cast list) actually proposes to Kay – indicating, especially in this raffish context (he’s worldly enough to be aware that a marriage proposal to his mistress might well lead to a divorce or breach-of-promise suit and a major cash outlay to get rid of her again), that on some level he’s genuinely fond of her – but, as we’ve known she would all along, she walks out on the life of riches and ease he offers her and hooks up with Tab Hunter instead. Meanwhile, Jane gets sent out on a date with a general (who, by some crazy whim of the casting department, looks remarkably like then-President and former World War II Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower) who proposes to put her up in an apartment in Washington, D.C. even though he’s already married (which reminded me of Marilyn Monroe – the real one – in The Seven-Year Itch, explaining why she only dated married men: because “they can’t ask you to marry them because they’re already married”). Also Charles spotted the young Bea Arthur – salty enough in the way she became famous for I wished her part had been bigger – as a WAC in two brief scenes: she’s not there long but she’s a breath of fresh air and I wish the film had included more of her.