Daddy Long Legs (20th Century-Fox, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Saturday, August 19) afternoon at 5 I put on Turner Classic Movies for a film they were showing as part of their all-day “Summer Under the Stars” tribute to Fred Astaire, Daddy Long Legs, made in 1955 at 20th Century-Fox (Astaire’s only musical for them) with Leslie Caron as his co-star. The story began as Daddy-Long-Legs (the hyphens were part of the original title), a so-called “epistolary novel” (i.e., written entirely in the form of letters ostensibly written by one or more of the characters) by Jean Webster in 1912. It’s about an orphan girl named Jerusha Abbott (so named not by her parents, who seem to have croaked before they had the chance to name her, but by the headmistress of the orphanage) who lucks out when one of the four trustees who fund the place notices her, decides she has a potentially great gift as a writer, and decides to give her a college education. But his conditions are that she may never know who he is, she will write him a letter addressed to “Mr. John Smith” every month because he thinks letter-writing is great practice for a professional author, but he will never reply to her letters. Webster herself adapted her novel into a stage play in 1914, and the first film of the story was made in 1919 with Mary Pickford (who else?) as the heroine. In 1931 it was remade with Janet Gaynor in the lead, and in 1935 it was refashioned into a vehicle for Shirley Temple as Curly Top (yet another Temple remake of a Pickford role!). In 1938 a Dutch company made yet another movie version, Vadertje Langbeen, and since the Astaire-Caron version in 1955 there’ve been Bollywood and Japanese animé adaptations.

In the 1955 film, directed by all-around hack Jean Negulesco and written by Henry and Phoebe Ephron (Nora Ephron’s parents), the benefactor is Jervis Pendleton III (Fred Astaire), who discovers heroine Julie André (Leslie Caron) at a French orphanage named after Joan of Arc. He’s a super-rich Wall Street financier whose grandfather founded, among a lot of other things, an all-girls’ college called Walston, and because he’s taken with the young girl (who grew up at the orphanage and later became a teacher there, like Jane Eyre) he agrees to finance her education at Walston but to do it secretly. One difference between Webster’s story and the Ephrons’ screenplay is that Julie isn’t told that her benefactor isn’t going to reply to her letters, so there are heart-rending scenes of her checking a P. O. box regularly but seeing nothing from him. She calls him “Daddy Long Legs” because she only saw him once, with his back to her, and got the impression he was an old, tall man with very long legs (one of the few details from Webster’s novel that found its way into this movie). Instead, the letters Julie writes get intercepted by Jervis’s business manager, Griggs (Fred Clark, not as outright crooked as he was in The Solid Gold Cadillac but still an asshole), and they collect in a huge file kept by Griggs’s secretary, Alicia Pritchard (Thelma Ritter in one of her typical voice-of-reason roles). Alicia chews Griggs out for heartlessly refusing to show Jervis his mentee’s letters, but the letters just accumulate until Jervis himself demands to see them all just as Julie is about to graduate from Walston. Julie has lived at the school with two roommates, Jervis’s niece Linda (Terry Moore, gooey-sweet as usual) and Sally McBride (Charlotte Austin). She’s tried to set up Julie with Sally’s brother Jim (Kelly Brown), who’s attending an adjoining male college and training to be a mining engineer. Jervis goes to Walston to attend a big school event featuring dancing to Ray Anthony and his band (playing themselves), and there he meets Julie (again) and is immediately smitten with her – and she with him, despite him being sufficiently older that the other college kids assume he’s a professor.

He knows who she is but she doesn’t know who he is, and to get rid of the competition Jervis offers Jim a job at his company’s tin mines in Bolivia – a move Griggs compares to the Biblical story of David, Uriah and Bathsheba (though this seems a bit unfair because at least Jervis isn’t sending Jim on a suicide mission the way David did with Uriah). Eventually Jervis thinks better of it and summons Jim back to the U.S., where he pairs up with Linda Pendleton. There are the usual Astaire dance-seduction sequences with Caron, including one to a song by Johnny Mercer (unusually for him, Mercer wrote not only the lyrics but all the music to this film’s songs as well) called “Something’s Gotta Give” which was recycled as the title for Marilyn Monroe’s last, unfinished movie at 20th Century-Fox seven years later. There’s also a great number called “Sluefoot” which first indicated Astaire’s growing interest in rhythm-and-blues, leading to a spectacular dance sequence between him and Caron while Ray Anthony’s band rocks out. And there are two big ballet sequences for which Astaire brought French choreographer Roland Petit for, one dramatizing Julie’s dreams of what her anonymous benefactor is like and one set in Paris after Jervis bails on their relationship (only temporarily, it turns out) and is photographed in the tabloids with other women. Seen today, Daddy Long Legs dates rather badly, though the aspect of it that would make a modern audience uncomfortable – the extent to which Jervis seems to be “grooming” Julie for sexual exploitation – was an issue then, too. It’s addressed in the film by the man who essentially brought Jervis and Julie together, Alexander Williamson (Larry Keating), the U.S. ambassador to France who arranged for Jervis’s trip there.

It also features Astaire’s third appearance as an on-screen drummer, after A Damsel in Distress (1937) and Easter Parade (1948); he plays along with Ray Anthony’s records in a secret room in his live-work space whose ground floor is a semi-public art gallery with a docent giving guided tours. (There’s a cute sequence in which one of the exhibits is the family portraits of the three Jervis Pendletons: I is painted by James McNeill Whistler, II by John Singer Sargent, and III is a Picasso-esque cubist version because, the docent explains, the current Jervis Pendleton has broken with the family tradition.) Daddy Long Legs was a movie with an unusually troubled production history; before he started it Astaire had shown the script to his then-wife, Phyllis Potter, and she had loved it and urged him to do it. Then, while he was on vacation, he got word that she had taken ill and eventually she died. Astaire would frequently break off shooting and go to a corner of the set and cry, and at one point he asked to be released from his contract and was willing to pay the studio whatever it cost to replace him. He was talked out of it by being reminded that his late wife had loved the script and therefore he would be honoring her memory far more by finishing the film than abandoning it. Director Negulesco and cinematographer Leon Shamroy manage to tame the unwieldy shape of the CinemaScope screen (which Alfred Hitchcock once said was usable only for “snakes and funerals”), and though Astaire was 55 when he made this film and no longer the spry young thing he’d been when he danced with Ginger Rogers, as compensation he used a lot more drops and other modern-dance moves. I was also amused that Leslie Caron was short enough Astaire let her dance with him wearing high heels – despite the by-now moth-eaten joke that “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels,” the fact is Astaire didn’t like his dance partners wearing high heels opposite him because he worried that he was so short heels would make them tower over him.