This dumb blonde is nobody’s fool. Meet the great, underappreciated, underseen Judy Holliday. On the centennial of her birth, I decided it would be a great time to revisit her all-too-meager filmography.
Born Judith Tuvim on June 21, 1921, in Queens, she was a delightful musical-comedy performer of stage and screen. A nice Jewish girl with a screwball voice and a modelesque frame (5’8”), Holliday is an entertainer primed for rediscovery by future generations for her range of feelings, but most especially her alchemical comedic abilities. She was a performer who proved that it takes real brains to play it dumb in roles like Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday and Doris Attinger in Adam’s Rib.
Her entertainment career began as part of the Revuers, a 1938 nightclub act that introduced her to future collaborators Adolph Green and Betty Comden. Think of the Revuers as an embryonic Saturday Night Live where they did some skits and sang some songs. She would eventually reflect on these early years with terror describing her stage fright, hostile crowds, and amateur skills as an actress as the main reasons why. A year after the group’s disbandment, Holliday made her Broadway debut in 1945’s Kiss Them for Me. After this, Holliday would ride a rapid-fire rise from neophyte to Academy and Tony Award winner.
She made her film debut doing an uncredited bit part in Too Much Johnson (wow, that title...), followed by further bit parts in Greenwich Village and Something for the Boys. Her first proper role was in 1944’s Winged Victory, a Broadway transplant to the big screen that brought along most of the cast for the transition. Based on a Moss Hart play, Winged Victory is the story of men in the Army Air Force that essentially functions as wartime propaganda. There was a lot of that in the mid-40s, for obvious reasons.
It is also the lone film of hers that I was unable to find anywhere. Digging through the history of the film it appears that rights issues keep it from airing regularly on television or seeing a home media release, which would explain how something starring Holliday, Lee J. Cobb, Edmond O’Brien, Red Buttons, Gary Merrill, and Jeanne Crain right on the cusp of stardom is something of a footnote in all their careers. It would be five years before Holliday would return to the screen, but what a reintroduction!
Holliday was a last-minute replacement for the notoriously skittish Jean Arthur in the play Born Yesterday. Columbia studio chief Harry Cohn bought up the rights and refused to screen test Holliday for the role that made her a star on Broadway. Eternally charming (the legend goes that Frank Sinatra attended his funeral just to make sure he was dead), Cohn apparently said to Holliday, “well, I’ve worked with fat asses before,” and described her as “that fat Jewish broad.” Eventually, he relented only to use her screen test as the measuring stick to judge actresses such as Jan Sterling, Lana Turner, Lucille Ball, Rita Hayworth, and numerous others.
Adam’s Rib may star Hepburn and Tracy, but Holliday’s supporting part was engineered as a scene-stealing sensation. A kind of roundabout screen test to prove Cohn’s sexist, antisemitic views of Holliday as a film personality were unfound and deplorable. In fact, the film begins with Holliday largely performing silently and she is transfixing from the start. She stalks her cheating husband with plans to shoot him then tremulously reads the instructions for firing the gun before firing it and barges in on him and his mistress.
She then gets to do that magical thing she does where she precision swaps between comedy and drama or mixes them together to create something interesting. Her two major scenes, one where she takes the witness stand and the other where she provides testimony to her defense lawyer, are essentially monologues where the camera focuses in on her. The rookie screen actress can be seen shaking with nerves in some scenes, but it works for the character. After giving an affecting account of the emotional and mental cruelty inflicted on her by her husband, she ends it with the proclamation that all the snooping and chasing him around the city left her hungry. That is the magic of Judy Holliday as a comedienne: she pulls at your heart one second before making you laugh the next.
(She can also be briefly heard in On the Town as the voice of Daisy, Simpkins’ MGM date. This is more of a fun factoid than any kind of further illumination of her (too brief) film career. That blaring, cutesy character voice is immediately recognizable when you hear it.)
1950’s Born Yesterday had the kind of desperate search for a leading lady that only Gone with the Wind had rivaled up to that point. Hilariously, they ended up right where they started with Holliday reprising her iconic role and eventually winning an Oscar for her trouble. From the opening scene it is easy to see why audiences, critics, and the Academy fell in love with her. She transforms her New Yawk squawk into an entire one-woman concerto of shrill upper registers, husky roars, and chirps.
She plays Billie Dawn, a gangster’s moll in search of personal betterment and culture. Her unpolished demeanor is charming from the get-go, especially when she imitates the round tones of a high society lady. Her toe-to-toe rumbles with Broderick Crawford’s brute gangster trying to buy influence are hilariously bellowed. We never believe for a second that Holliday is any danger when going against Crawford, but it is most pleasing to watch her continually vex him. That is until late in the film when he strikes her, and she breaks down in tears. Eventually, she gets the best of him with an adorably polite “drop dead” in a reoccurring motif of Holliday’s performances – dimpled optimism buttressing against life’s strife.
Sure, it helps that her tutor is the hunky William Holden. Holliday’s Billie is always self-aware throughout, especially noted during her introductory scene with Holden where she lays out her worldview up to this point. She knows she is dumb but uses it to her advantage to get what she wants. So, is she truly dumb? One of the first things he does is compliment her and provide a room for her to express herself freely. He nurtures a space for her self-exploration in both matters of politics and her own interior life. He sees the potential waiting to be unlocked in her and helps her strive for it.
Holliday eagerly takes in his lessons on civics and culture. Her declaration that a magazine piece he wrote was “the best thing I ever read. I didn't understand a word” always makes me snort. It is in the effervescence that she delivers it, I believe. It is the transitional point in her character where she goes from crasser chorine to something approximating worldly sophisticate.
Just as great are her numerous bits of physical comedy including a game of gin with Crawford where she makes a meal out of stubbing out a cigarette, folding cards, and humming a song. We remember her gritty “WHAT” just as much as her awkward, half-hearted curtsy, or her eagerly dancing and singing along to the radio in spite of what is going on around her.
With a performance this carefully thought-out and calibrated it is no wonder she was nominated for an Oscar. But Born Yesterday was something of a minor controversy in its era as its plot dealt with government corruption during a time when uber-patriotism was at an all-time high. McCarthyism was spreading throughout and a film, and character, who dared to question the mechanics of Washington was primed for a scandal.
It did not help that Holliday appeared in the infamous Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and TV. To escape getting blacklisted Holliday did what she did best on film: played dumb. She managed to avoid negative career consequences and wrote to her friend that she was not ashamed of playing dumb as doing so allowed her to not name names. She was eventually cleared after no discernible link with the Communist Party could be identified.
Anyway, she won the Oscar that night in one of the most hotly debated wins to this day. Her fellow nominees included Bette Davis and Anne Baxter for All About Eve, Gloria Swanson for Sunset Boulevard, and Eleanor Parker for Caged. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper decried her win as an immoral disgrace, but one viewing of Born Yesterday puts that thought to shame. Holliday is luminous, hilarious, and simply divine here. She deserved her Oscar as far as I am concerned.
If you have ever questioned why she won an Oscar over such stiff competition, then I would point you to 1952’s The Marrying Kind, perhaps her finest hour as an actress. Billie Dawn is a showier role than her hardworking wife slowly finding life’s little struggles transforming into something she, and her marriage, can barely stand. Florence “Flo” Keefer is one-half of a tenement couple, working class and clearly ethnic in the way 50s media coded them, who meet cute, get married, and encounter a never-ending parade of small hardships, mainly with money, that eventually become overwhelming.
Her collaborations with Cukor were extended trust exercises in her abilities as an actress. If his work with Katharine Hepburn was a career-long partnership that nurtured and brought out the best in each other at various stages of their lives and careers, then his partnership with Holliday was just as similar. After all, he knew Holliday was a masterful musical-comedy actress and asks her to strum a ukulele and caterwaul a rendition of “Dolores.”
Then comes the sucker punch, and her most spinetingling and expressive moment as an actress, where she discovers her son has drowned. She snaps between playful strumming to gut-wrenching crying. But this is not the master stroke of the sequence. It comes when we cut back to the courtroom framing device. Holliday opts to have Flo breakdown in animalistic sobs and look up with a pained smile and half-hearted laugh. She hollowly intones, “I don’t know how we lived through it. Maybe we didn’t.” It is as if she trying to convince the divorce judge of this as much as she is trying to convince herself.
It is in these shocking changes of mood and emotion that Holliday manages to find depth in her bubbleheaded blondes. These moments present the humanity lurking just under the adorable dimples, buoyant curls, and loveably daft exterior. They reveal of the layers of her heroines.
In 1954’s It Should Happen to You Holliday plays one of her few roles that skirts with duplicity but is continually pulled from the brink of unlikability by her ability to mine a sweetness even from the sour. Here she is a model that is fired on her first day on the job, gets sad about it, and decides to rent a billboard and emblazon her name upon it. Along the way she develops a love triangle with a documentary photographer (Jack Lemmon) and an ad executive (Peter Lawford), a case of influencer celebrity, and discovers the downside of public life.
Cukor, Kanin (this time without wife Ruth Gordon), and Holliday made for a reliably solid team, and they get a lot of mileage out of a variety of gags here. The best might involve Holliday’s increasingly awkward and frantic cue card reading on live television. She initially starts out stilted and slow before getting told to pick up the pace from off camera. It is then that she, with a mild case of panic in her eyes, takes a huge gulp of air and proceeds to unleash a rapid-fire line reading that is all in one breath and devoid in punctuation.
Matching her every step of the way is Lemmon, in his film debut. His performance is so assured and equal to her comedic skills that it is nearly impossible to believe this was his debut. A scene where they duet on “Let’s Fall in Love” is equal parts romantic, sensual, silly, and charming in their hands as she rests her head on his shoulder. Holliday and Lemmon are a meeting of simpatico performers bringing out the best in each other.
Everything runs so smoothly here that even Peter Lawford, normally handsome but dour as a screen presence, manages to make a positive impression. It helps that Holliday routinely seems to be taking the piss out of him. A scene where he picks her up in his car and she responds by wanting to nap and he insists on taking her out finds her accidentally mimicking his accent. She seems entirely unaware that it has happened as though it just popped out of her mouth before her brain had time to catch up to what was happening. You can tell Holliday was a gifted singer in these moments as her voice’s modulations can place the emphasis or provide a flourish in the most unexpected places. It Should Happen to You is featherweight, but sometimes that just what you want, and it is quite the tasty little treat.
Comedies of remarriage are the backbone of the screwball genre, and there have been several classics mined from the material (The Philadelphia Story, The Awful Truth). Phffft is not one of these films, as it takes a couple of amusing gags, strong comedic actors, and then sticks interminable pieces in-between. The title’s high concept is more thoughtful than much of the writing. The title comes from a newspaper article describing the noise made when a marriage ends in divorce. It is a little ridiculous, and the title is more than a little stupid, but that is the level of commitment we are working with here.
Holliday and Lemmon reteam as a couple whose marriage goes bust, find it difficult to readjust to single life, then come back together. Holliday plays a soap opera writer, and she gets a lot of mileage out of jokes about her work. She does her best work in a lunchtime drunk scene where she spots her ex-husband, stops at his table, slathers butter all over her ring finger, and removes her ring to throw it at him. Her frenzied glee in the act is beguiling and amusing, she is so spiteful while smiling sweetly.
A dance scene between Lemmon and Holliday is the clear high point of the film. They begin on separate dates, combative and antagonistic with each other, before winding up in each other’s arms, filled with a comfort and joy, flirtation and surprise. It is also two actors in clear enjoyment of each other’s company, and one wishes that Holliday and Lemmon had gone on to become one of the great cinematic pairings, but we will always have the two films they made together.
The first of her two films in 1956, Full of Life is a little oddity that is not quite a comedy but also not a drama. It exists in the nether realm between the two. It is partially a domestic comedy, the tale of a husband’s ethnic and religious background that he had minimized in the years since leaving home, and a quiet tale of an expectant couple prepping for their first child.
What is most shocking about Full of Life is how it does not shy away from showing Holliday’s character increasing pregnancy belly. The 50s were a strange time where a married couple on television could not say the word pregnant and had to dance around it as if it was something shameful. And Holliday expresses physical and mental discomfort with the pregnancy throughout, again something shocking for the time. I wonder how her (nearly) barefaced post-delivery scene was received at the time.
What becomes starkly obvious is how Holliday’s Judaism was flirted with in other characters through lines of dialogue or telegraphed through coding, but Full of Life all but comes right out and says it. Holliday never bothered hiding her heavy New York accent, here in its natural state and not played higher for laughs, nor did she bother hiding her background. The few times she comes close to saying it, Full of Life provides an out or an interruption for a society that was fine with antisemitism and perfectly squeamish about childbirth.
In her second film that year, The Solid Gold Cadillac, she plays a loose screw who upends a corrupt board of directors at a big business by exposing their fraud. Except, her loose screws are probably more akin to off kilter wisdom than anything else. Like a Billie Dawn who worked straight jobs instead of being a kept woman her Laura Partridge draws a straight line to the likes of Fran Drescher in The Nanny, another Queens gal with a funny voice who provided a pop of color and flash to a stodgy world.
The Solid Gold Cadillac mines some of the same territory as Born Yesterday but without the guiding hand of George Cukor. Although Paul Douglas, her co-star from the Broadway version of Born Yesterday, and Holliday do play off each other beautifully. Their chemistry is like that of old friends reunited and simply enjoying the company of each other. The warmth of her working girl presence is balanced out his sensitive big gorilla.
Right out the gate Holliday proves that no film in her meager body of work is entirely without merit based purely on her warmth and comedic talents. Her opening salvo of questions is about why the board of directors makes big bucks for doing relatively little work. By the time Holliday and Douglas are taking the board to trial for illegal lobbying we understand why the HUAC came knocking on her door.
Holliday seemed like a natural fit for MGM and the Arthur Freed unit. While prior films had given her minor chances to sing and dance, this is the only film that exhibited the full-range of her musical-comedy talents. While she is at her perkiest, sweetest, nakedly vulnerable best, Bells Are Ringing is a bit too long and lacking in a memorable score.
Dean Martin makes for a nice partner for her as his laconic breeziness is tethered by her empathy. Director Vincente Minnelli managed to plumb the depths of Martin’s star persona in surprising ways in the films they made together, and he trusts Holliday enough to be true scene partner to ease Martin’s anxiety about going solo. Their romance is a believable outgrowth of their contrasting performing styles meeting in the middle. They also make for aurally pleasing duet partners on songs like “Better Than a Dream” and “Just in Time.”
The plot largely concerns Holliday’s switchboard operator who is overly invested in the personal lives of her various clients, including Martin’s dramatist. There is also a subplot about a bookie disguising his horse bets with mail-order classical records as an elaborate code. It is thanks to Holliday that we buy into these wacky situations. If the movie is a perfectly serviceable musical, then she manages to elevate it through sheer force of personality.
Of all the quirky characters she meets in the film none of them make me laugh quite as hard as Frank Gorshin’s Marlon Brando parody. Holliday drops her voice down to her deepest register and mumbles while dressing like an extra in The Wild One. Her character spends most of the movie trying to improve the lives of her clients and her dare for Gorshin to go square lands him numerous roles. That is, when she isn’t romancing Martin. Their dance in “Just in Time” is romantic, sweet, and playful enough to cure your depression.
Bells Are Ringing is also added poignancy by virtue of being the final film of the Arthur Freed unit and Holliday’s last film role. She spent her final years recording albums and performing in theater. She died at age 43 from throat cancer. Much like the other great Judy, she died far too young but left behind a body of work that abounds with some of the finest screen acting ever committed to celluloid.
While she only made less than a dozen films each of them is worth viewing simply to marvel at her underrated talents. Holliday is not a household name from the classic era in the same way that Lauren Bacall, Angela Lansbury, Debbie Reynolds, or Doris Day are, to pick just a small sample of actress who debuted in the 40s, but she deserves to be. And she deserves to be more than a trivia factoid about who beat Davis and Swanson for the 1950 Best Actress Oscar.
She was an absolute doll. From her girlishness and wit spring the likes of Melanie Griffith in Working Girl, Goldie Hawn in Cactus Flower, and any other actress who takes their scatterbrained parts and infuses them with humanity and depth of feeling. Her characters were recognizably real people more so than the untouchable glamour goddesses of the period. They worked, struggled, worried about money and love, and came from modest backgrounds and never bothered to disguise their lack of refinery or higher education. Holliday was a real person up there on the screen with conflicting senses of melancholy and eccentricity. She made the ordinary appear extraordinary and deserves your attention.
Essential Viewing:
Adam’s Rib
Born Yesterday
The Marrying Kind
It Should Happen to You
Bells Are Ringing
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