Hollywood hired Rhonda Fleming for how she looked in colour and spent a decade proving itself right, which is not the same as using her well. The films of hers that last are two black-and-white thrillers in which she has small parts.
Fi1m perspective
Put Rhonda Fleming in a Technicolor picture and the picture organises itself around her. Red hair, green eyes, a face the colour stock might have been developed for: Paramount worked this out in the late 1940s and built a decade of westerns and musicals on it, and Hollywood called her the Queen of Technicolor. The joke, and it is a slightly sad one, is that the two films of hers people still sit down to watch are in black and white, where nobody could see the hair.
She was found at Beverly Hills High School by the agent Henry Willson and signed by David O. Selznick without a screen test, and Selznick put her into supporting parts before anyone had decided what she was for. In Spellbound (1945) she is Mary Carmichael, a patient in Hitchcock's asylum. In The Spiral Staircase (1946) she is Blanche, in Robert Siodmak's thriller. In Out of the Past (1947) she is Meta Carson, sharing the frame with Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas. Then came Paramount and colour: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949) with Bing Crosby, where she sang, and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) as Laura Denbow, the woman Burt Lancaster's Wyatt Earp is meant to love. She freelanced, went to television, and made her last film in 1980.
What the colour films did not do was ask much of her. She said so herself: "I made the mistake of doing lesser films for good money. I was hot – they all wanted me – but I didn't have the guidance or background to judge for myself." That is about as clear-eyed as a star gets about her own filmography, and it matches what is on screen: glamorous women, seductive women, women placed near the leading man for the reverse angle. Hitchcock at least gave her something to be shocked by. Told she would be playing a nymphomaniac, she went home and looked the word up. Watching Spellbound again, we found we would have traded a reel of Bergman's psychoanalysis for another scene of her, because the film sets her up as a case, files her, and moves on.
Out of the Past is the one to start with, and not only because it is the better film. Tourneur's thriller is built out of people making bad decisions for reasons you can follow, and she is standing close by while some of them are made. It is a supporting part, and it is the part she is remembered for, which tells you where the studios went wrong. Watch the Technicolor pictures for what she looks like in them, since that is why they were made. Watch the two black-and-white thrillers for the actress the colour kept getting in the way of.
Biography
Rhonda Fleming, born Marilyn Louis, was an American actress and singer. She appeared in more than 40 films, primarily during the 1940s and 1950s, and also worked in television. Discovered by agent Henry Willson while still at Beverly Hills High School, she was signed by producer David O. Selznick, who changed her name.
Fleming's early roles included Mary Carmichael in Spellbound (1945) and Blanche in The Spiral Staircase (1946). She played Meta Carson in the film noir Out of the Past (1947). Later credits encompassed Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) and The Nude Bomb (1980). She was known for her red hair and work in Technicolor films.
