Lately I’ve been watching very old movies that are not well known and really enjoying them. I’m not watching them for anything other than for myself, but I thought I’d tell my blog readers about them in case you are interested as well. Many of them really hold up.

I’ve been watching these movies either on Tubi (so there are commercials) or on Amazon.

A few weeks ago, I watched one called A Woman of Distinction starring Rosalind Russell and Ray Milland. I watched it on Tubi, but I saw yesterday that it is also on YouTube for free.

I had never heard of it before, but it was very good.

I loved the cameo in the beginning by Lucille Ball. She delivered a one-liner that was in her vein of humor and cracked me up. It was her only appearance in the whole movie, but it kicked off the tone of the rest of the movie.

The movie is about Susan Manning Middlecott, the dean of a college in Connecticut. She is one of the first women in this type of position in the country during this time (the movie was released in 1950) and she was a hero during the war, so there is quite a bit of fascination about her among the public.

A magazine article is written about her in Time Magazine and in it she declares that there is no room in her ambitious, career-driven life for romance.

On the other side of the country an astronomy professor has just landed on American soil, ready to present several lectures about – well, astronomy.

Ray Milland plays Professor Alec Stevenson, who is also a war hero but from England.

The public relations firm promoting his lectures needs a way to make his lectures more appealing to potential attendees and begins to brainstorm ways to draw attention to him. Maybe his accolades from his days in the British Army?

He shoots that down. He does, however, ask them where he can find a jeweler who might have sold a locket that he has in his possession. It belonged to an American nurse and was handed to him by a dying soldier. He wants to return the locket to her.

The woman with the PR company – Teddy Evans (Janis Cater)‑­  is intrigued. This could be just the story to get some attention for the professor’s lecturers.

Teddy tags along with him to the jewelers and when she learns that the locket once belonged to Susan, she decides to leak a story to the media suggesting that Susan and Stevenson were once an item.

An article is placed in a newspaper by Teddy without either of their consent and it turns their world upside down. Teddy is deliciously evil, by the way, and played perfectly by Carter. Susan thinks the professor did it himself to get attention for his lectures so she boards a train to Boston to confront him, but instead runs into him, not knowing who he is.

Eventually both of them have to try to explain that there is no romance between them and never was. They’d never even met until this story was falsely put in the papers.

This movie features one of the most hilarious scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie involving a college student and Russell in a car. My dad is not a movie watcher, but I convinced him to watch this one with me and my mom after I had seen it and he really enjoyed that scene and the rest of the movie.

In addition to that scene, the man who played Susan’s dad was very funny.

There were several twists and turns to this one. There is romance, of course, but it wasn’t over the top and was actually very sweet.

 I am not sure if I really agreed with the ending of the movie or with some of the things her father said (like she wasn’t a complete woman without a man.), but I still liked the movie overall. As for what her dad said, um…no…but I think what he really meant is that it would be nice for her to have a family and it would make her feel whole to have a family. Not that a man makes her feel whole. Either way it was awkwardly worded.

This movie was apparently one of many that Rosalind Russell starred in where she was a career-driven woman made to feel bad about being one, instead of focusing on how she could be both a career woman and have a family. I’ve always found it odd that our society seems to think you can either only be a mother or only be a career woman and if you choose one then you must ridicule the other. Movie makers in the 40s and 40s certainly seemed to think this way.

Rosalind Russell’s husband felt Rosalind did both well. After her death he wrote, “Rosalind’s ability to play a career woman who eventually succumbed to true love was consistent with her own life. She was a successful actress and an exemplary wife and mother.”

An article on TCM provided these views of the movie:

Variety called A Woman of Distinction, “a loosely-tied grabbag of screwball and nonsensical doings about two warring-but-loving pedagogues. Sans much logic, the Rosalind Russell-Ray Milland teamwork is good.”

The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called it a “custard-pie farce,” with Russell “behaving like Mabel Normand in a Keystone comedy. She is letting herself be sprayed with water, smeared with mud, tumbled backwards out of chairs and generally booted and battered. Anything for a laugh.”

Have you ever see this hidden gem?