Edward A. Blatt’s Smart Woman is a film of “lasts.” It was the last screenplay for which Alvah Bessie received a credit. (Louis Morheim and Herbert Margolies are also credited for the screenplay, from a story by Leon Gutterman and Edwin V. Westrate.) Bessie was one of the infamous “Hollywood Ten,” a group of people who refused to cooperate with HUAC and who were blacklisted from the movie industry in 1948.
It was also the last film to feature Constance Bennett in a starring role. Bennett was a glamorous actress who appeared in dozens of films in the ’20s and ’30s, but whose star began to fade in the ’40s. (Her younger sister, Barbara Bennett, also appeared in films, and her youngest sister was film noir icon Joan Bennett.)
Smart Woman was the second and final film released by Bennett’s own production company, Constance Bennett Productions (the first was Paris Underground in 1945). It was distributed by Allied Artists. Smart Woman is by no means a bad film, but it’s not difficult to see why it didn’t reignite Bennett’s career and launch her back into starring roles.
Bennett plays defense attorney Paula Rogers, a woman who’s “smart” not just in the cerebral sense, but also in the sense that she is fashionable and sophisticated. She’s a single woman with a young son named Rusty (Richard Lyon), and her love for her son will force her to make difficult decisions as the plot of the film unfolds.
As in most “women’s pictures,” there is a suave, sophisticated, and handsome gentleman to set Paula’s heart (and the hearts of distaff audience members) aflutter with desire. He’s a special prosecutor named Robert Larrimore (Brian Aherne) who’s appointed to investigate cases the crooked district attorney, Bradley Wayne (Otto Kruger), may have improperly handled.
There’s also a slippery gangster named Frank McCoy (Barry Sullivan), whom Paula defends in a murder case. The prosecuting attorney? You guessed it … it’s Larrimore.
Smart Woman is well-made entertainment, but it’s lacking that essential spark that would move it up into the “must-see” category. Thematically, the film has elements of a film noir or gangster picture, but its cinematic style is straightforward and without any baroque flourishes. The script is well-written, but it contains a lot of parallelisms, which always seem more clever to someone hunched over a typewriter than they play out in an actual film. The film’s leads are good, but they had more active careers in the ’30s than they did in the ’40s, and Smart Woman occasionally feels a little old-fashioned because of it.
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