Noir with that feminine touch

The three female-centric titles released this week in the ongoing Fox Film Noir series seem to have been somewhat mislabeled -- melodrama is perhaps a more appropriate designation in each case. But one of them, Otto Preminger’s “Daisy Kenyon” (1947), with Joan Crawford in the title role, is something of a forgotten masterpiece, as wise, credible and finely shaded a portrait of romantic conflict as Hollywood has ever produced.

Nunnally Johnson’s “Black Widow” (1954) is a soapy murder mystery set among Broadway grande dames (including an imperious Ginger Rogers) and their cuckold husbands, while Joseph Newman’s “Dangerous Crossing” (1953) borrows the missing-person plot from Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes” (later used in such films as “Bunny Lake Is Missing” and “Flightplan”). Here an heiress (Jeanne Crain) “loses” her new husband minutes into their honeymoon aboard a transatlantic cruise, only to be told by the crew that he never came on board.

Both films are passably diverting. Before it becomes a transparent whodunit, “Black Widow” revels in some enjoyably overcooked dialogue, and “Dangerous Crossing” dresses up its flimsy ship-bound tale with fog-shrouded atmospherics. But their woefully drawn female characters only emphasize Preminger’s singular achievement with “Daisy Kenyon.”

By all accounts, the all-star members of its love triangle -- Crawford, Dana Andrews and Henry Fonda -- were not overly impressed with the film. As is noted in the DVD’s making-of featurette, Fonda only took the role (even agreeing to third billing) because he was eager to serve out his contract at Fox. Andrews, who had worked with Preminger on “Laura” and “Fallen Angel,” considered pulling out when he read the script. Crawford claimed that Preminger’s direction saved the movie from being “a mess.” And as for Preminger, whose critical champions have for years extolled the likes of “Laura” and “Anatomy of a Murder” while routinely ignoring “Daisy Kenyon,” he once claimed in an interview to have no memory of this film.

Unexpected depth

Based on a 1945 bestseller by Elizabeth Janeway, “Daisy Kenyon” was all too easy for critics, audiences and even its makers to dismiss as a “women’s picture.” Crawford’s Daisy is a New York City illustrator, an independent woman with a busy career and an equally full if less straightforward love life. She is having an affair with Dan (Andrews), a suave and gregarious married lawyer, when she also begins a relationship with Peter (Fonda), an Army veteran still traumatized by the death of his wife. (Fonda was just returning to movies after serving in the Navy during World War II.)

Seen today, “Daisy Kenyon” seems thoroughly modern, with characters who are more complex than they first appear and who find themselves in thorny situations with no obvious ways out. Directed by Preminger with his customary blend of sinuous visual eloquence and analytic intelligence, it’s a film full of lucid revelatory moments that register as a series of tiny shocks: Peter’s blurted, tipsy declaration of love at the end of his first date with Daisy; Daisy’s silent epiphany in the snow; the two suitors finishing a game of cards as they wait for the heroine to pick one of them.

Andrews and Crawford are excellent (her trademark histrionics dialed down to a poignant intensity), but the richest role, and the most moving performance, is Fonda’s. Peter is an unusually haunted and passive romantic hero, and for most of the film his motivations are partially obscured. As the complications pile up -- Peter and Daisy’s entry into a marriage haunted by absent lovers, Dan’s crumbling domestic sphere, the increasingly overt struggle between the two men -- there is a genuine suspense as to the outcome.

Preminger gives equal weight to the desires and insecurities of all three characters and refuses to make their choices seem any easier than they are. Less interested in celebrating ideals of true love than in investigating the conditions under which it might exist, “Daisy Kenyon” is not unromantic. But it is that rarest of Hollywood entities: a realist romance.