Evelyn Keyes spent fifteen years playing the good woman who waits, and played her well. The studio system rarely asked more of her, and the one film that did, The Prowler (1951), is not the one she is remembered for.
Fi1m perspective
In Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), Evelyn Keyes plays Bette Logan. She is good, and worried, and grateful, and Alexander Hall's script has no other notes for her. What she does with the three she is given is worth noticing: she listens to the man opposite as if he might turn out to be someone other than he appears, which, since the whole joke of the film is that he is, gives the scenes a charge the writing did not put there. We liked her more than the part deserved, and came away mildly annoyed on her behalf, because the romance is settled by Claude Rains telling the lovers they belong together and Keyes is left to take his word for it.
That was the pattern. She came to Hollywood at twenty after dancing in Atlanta clubs; Cecil B. DeMille put her under personal contract and into The Buccaneer (1938) and Union Pacific (1939). She auditioned for Scarlett O'Hara and was given Suellen, Scarlett's sister, in Gone with the Wind (1939), a small part in a long film that nonetheless fixed how the public thought of her for the rest of her life. Columbia signed her in 1940. For the next decade and a half she led B-pictures and supported in bigger ones, most successfully The Jolson Story (1946), where she played Julie Benson.
The usual complaint is that she was typecast as the girl who gets the boy, and that Harry Cohn's Columbia rarely handed her anything harder. On the evidence of our two reviews the complaint holds: neither film needed her to be more than pleasant, and one of them barely needed her at all. Glenn Ford was her most frequent partner, six films together, which gives you the shape of the decade.
The exception is The Prowler (1951), a thriller in which she plays a married woman, Susan Gilvray, and which she herself considered her best performance. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here, beyond saying that it is the one film in which she is credited with carrying the weight rather than waiting for it. Her last major part was Helen Sherman in Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch (1955); she retired from features the following year.
Looking back, she said she got to star in her own films. She did, and few people remember them; the part everyone remembers is the one where she stood behind her sister. If you want to know what she could do, find The Prowler, then return to Mr. Jordan and watch how much she gets out of grateful.
Biography
Evelyn Louise Keyes was an American actress. Born in Port Arthur, Texas, she began as a chorus girl and was signed to a personal contract by Cecil B. DeMille after arriving in Hollywood. She made her film debut in The Buccaneer (1938) and was cast as Suellen O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939).
Keyes signed with Columbia Pictures and appeared in films including Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), The Jolson Story (1946) and The Seven Year Itch (1955). She retired from major film roles in the mid-1950s but continued occasional acting and later wrote memoirs, including Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister (1977). She was married to directors Charles Vidor and John Huston, and to bandleader Artie Shaw.
