Doris Day: the wholesome face of postwar American optimism

The Guardian ^ | 05/13/2019 | Peter Bradshaw

[SeekAndFind]

The actress, who has died aged 97, worked with the greats of Hollywood’s golden era and rivalled the crossover success of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley

The face of Doris Day, eerily beautiful in all its buttery-blond wholesomeness, beamed over Hollywood in the 50s and early 60s like a gigantic roadside billboard advertising the American way. In that extraordinary period of white America’s postwar prosperity and patriotism, Doris Day was the biggest box office and recording star in the US: easily equalling the music-movie crossover success of alpha males such as Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, although somehow without being entitled to the guys’ iconic status.

Day’s career was a roll call of studio-era greatness. She worked with Michael Curtiz (who discovered her) and Alfred Hitchcock, and played opposite James Stewart, Clark Gable, James Cagney and Cary Grant. But her uncoolness – a vital, mysterious ingredient of her success even in her extraordinary heyday – was soon held against her. No one ever says that Doris Day is their favourite star, in the way that no one says vanilla is their favourite ice-cream flavour. Yet a heck of a lot of vanilla ice-cream gets sold.

Day was utterly without irony and she radiated a can-do straightforwardness, optimism and good nature that resonated with millions of filmgoers. She rolled up her sleeves and got on with whatever she was contractually obliged to do: a lot of good pictures, one or two brilliant ones – of which, more in a moment – and a lot of embarrassing nonsense. But she didn’t complain. Day was in her way the presidential first lady of Hollywood’s early 60s: dignified, a good sport, lovable.

John Updike, a fan of Day’s, found something fascinating and alluring in just this niceness.

[MrEdd]

From the nineteenth of October, 1950 when Chinese forces crossed the Yalu river and joined North Korean forces until the cease fire in 1953.

So roughly from a year before the movie was shot until a year after it was released.

[Fiji Hill]

We were fighting a hot war with China in Korea at the time. Doris’ lover must have found it doubly disturbing that she vowed to head not only for an exotic location but one behind the Iron Curtain.

[patriot08]

Wouldn’t that have been something!!?!!?

Reagan as president and Doris Day as first lady wow!!
Two all American icons, and treasures that we will never see the likes of again

[patriot08]

“Too bad her personal life wasn’t as wholesome.”
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She had bad luck at choosing husbands.
Her first husband kicked her in the stomach when she was pregnant.
Her tears in ‘Midnight Lace’ were real. The tears on the stair
screen brought back the time her husband pushed her down the stairs. She was so emotionally upset that she had to take three days off from production.