Well knock me down and call me shorty! I was researching something unrelated to
Ann Sheridan when I came across a comment from director
Vincent Sherman about
Mr. Skeffington--you know, the agony fest when Bette Davis marries Claude Rains and punishes him for the next 25 years for a.) not being a Gentile and b.) not being an empty suit like her brother, the bad seed. Then Bette slaps on the latex, greasepaint and fright wig for her later scenes (a touch of diphtheria, don't cha know) when she really chews the scenery.
Long story short, according to Director Sherman,
Mr. Skeffington "could have been greater with
Ann Sheridan in the lead. That’s who I wanted. The part of the most beautiful woman of her day would have suited Ann but Bette (Davis) heard of it and demanded it and she was box office at the time. The sets were up but had been designed for Technicolor. Because of wartime restrictions, we had to shoot in black and white and that changed things. I warned Bette that the title was "
Mr. Skeffington." Her part was longer than Claude Rains’ but she had to defer to him."
Well, if you've seen the movie, (my condolences) you know Claude and the little girl who plays his daughter (Marjorie Riordan) shared the best scene in the movie, which you can see
here.
When asked what
Ann Sheridan was like,
Sherman said:
"Completely different from her
femme fatale image. She was bright, lively, opinionated, sheer joy, had terrible trouble with the men in her life. She wound up with
George Brent at one point! Blah! She had this wicked humor the screen couldn’t capture. Oh, (maybe it did) later in that movie with Cary Grant ("I Was A Male War Bride"). (Studio Head) Jack (Warner) said she was the studio vixen and that was that. In "
Nora Prentiss" (1947)
Kent Smith had the good part. Ann was just there radiating glamour. I’ve never heard from anybody who ever liked it and I was stuck with
Robert Alda in the second lead. He was all wrong and later became a big Broadway star. Oh, there’s photography by
Jimmy Wong Howe that makes the film almost watchable."
I can't say that I agree with Sherman about
Nora Prentiss. Sheridan is fine in all her scenes, when I could see her. I do think that James Wong Howe could have used a bit of restraint with the lighting effects in certain sequences--though most scenes were beautifully filmed. And you probably don't want to hear how I like Kent Smith for some reason....James Wong Howe, btw, once said that Sheridan had one of the few truly symmetrically beautiful faces in movies. He thought that she could be filmed from any angle and look lovely.
More Ann Sheridan references:
I was reading a book by writer
Stuart Jerome called "Those Crazy, Wonderful Years When We Ran Warner Bros" (Lyle Stuart, 1983) about his time as a mail room messenger boy in the late '30s and early '40s at the studio.Among the mailroom boys,
Ann Sheridan was just about everyone's favorite person. Not because she drank milk and scotch in the afternoon with her cohorts on and off the set, but because she was so down to earth, kind, and funny. One example from the book (which is fairly naughty, giving a teenage boy's worm's eye view of the world of Warner Brothers), of
Ann Sheridan's honesty and humor:
A messenger boy delivered some script changes to her bungalow on the lot around five in the afternoon after filming had finished for the day. The adolescent wasn't particularly shocked by the sight of Annie with her feet up, reading the paper and sipping an adult beverage. He was startled by the unsettling sight of a foam outline of Miss Sheridan's artificially generous and very bosomy torso stuffed into a wastebasket. Ann had never pretended to be zaftig. She vocally and repeatedly told others that she loathed the fact that she--the alleged "oomph" girl--wore this annoying apparatus at the behest of Warner Brothers since they deemed nature inadequate. Noting the youth's acute embarrassment,
Sheridan simply raised an eyebrow, and said, "Well, I've got to put it somewhere and it won't fit in the toilet."