Why was Doris Day the biggest female Box Office draw from 1959-1965?

I think Doris Day was as popular as she was due to being multi-talented in which each talent excelled, and by having a girl-next-door-yet-sensual beauty with a wonderful smile along with a very pleasant personality and a sexy speaking voice. She was special.

>>She doesn't seem to get much discussion at CFB, but she was incredibly popular.

Neither does Betty Grable, and she was a top box draw for a number of years as well.

Doris Day went out of fashion so quickly,--practically overnight, it seemed--and was "replaced" as a top draw by Julie Andrews. I think that she was seen as a 50s holdover, which she was, as she quickly became a kind of relic of a bygone era in early middle age. With the coming of the Counterculture after 1965 she seemed even more remote, or, as we used to say, irrelevant.

As to why she's not discussed much on the CFB I think that her early films were mostly musicals, with none of them classic save maybe Calamity Jane, is a factor; and despite a couple of serious roles her morphing into an "eternal virgin" of light romantic comedies that, while they still have fans, are loved mostly for their retro charm, leaves her with rather little in the way of a cinematic legacy.

On the other hand, she was a cultural icon, and in a broader sense I think she still resonates as such, taking her musical career into account, her film work more or less as a group or series (the musicals, the comedies) rather than stand as alone classics. When she passes, it will be big news. Doris Day matters. She isn't talked about much, but when she's gone, people will remember.

Her eternal "teasing virgin" schtick always made me ... well... not a fan. That and feeling the need for a shot of insulin when watching her. BUT she WAS popular. I just never "got" why.

I seem to remember a "discussion" on the CFB last April around the time of her birthday. It devolved into a bit of a brawl concerning her talent and her state of health and current lucidity. I tried to find it but possibly it was all tucked into some other thread and thus not researchable.

Yes, and Miss Day's "no sex" reputation,--and she really was known for that (on screen, I mean )--hurt her image badly when the morals and manners of the 60s changed everything, and there's no recovering that now. The censoriousness of old Hollywood, particularly pre-1950, doesn't seem to hurt the movies of that era so much because of their avoidance of anything racy, leaving aside the pre-Codes for the time being, as well as, in screwball and romantic comedies and even some dramas, a willingness to suggest that when men and women went out together, traveled by train or boat, stayed in hotels, well, they couldn't show anything but I've seen dozens of films from that era in which it was pretty strongly implied what was going on without having their scripts come out and say it. To get back to Doris Day, it's like her scripts were almost literally screaming that nothing happened in those comedies, making them regressive (rather than retro) for their time. It was quite clear when it was Cary Grant and Jean Arthur or Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert, that "stuff" was happening between the two romantic leads.

It's funny sometimes how a label or image attaches itself to a performer and sticks, never to be shaken off.

I get a kick out Day's debut picture, because it gives absolutely no hint of either the image or the vehicles that would cultivate it: a gum-chewing hep-talker hired to pass herself off as a sophisticated socialite.

Following within her "Warner Bros decade," she did a half-dozen or so "girl next door" musicals, several of them period pieces often with Gordon MacRae (in which everybody under the age of at least 35 was a virgin), interspersed with just as many that were either straight drama or dramas with music.

Over the entire course of her 39 films, there were over a dozen "wife and/or mother" roles, a handful of "professional woman" ones, another handful of "woman in jeopardy" ones, two or three spunky tomboys and, finally (with some overlap therein), no more than six (by my count) of those teasing "professional virgin" ones. And to tell the truth, there isn't all that much "tease." In fact, in two of them, she even consents to illicit weekends with her suitor that she knows are intended to end up between the sheets (the first gets short-circuited by discovery of the ruse that got her there; the second by both getting drunk and a case of hives).

Amidst all that, she's sung and danced, been involved in international espionage, been stalked, abused, raped and even murdered. And excelled in as many genres as perhaps any other single performer: musical, drama, comedy, biography, suspense, even touches of western and noir. But the plucky, all-American girl next door quality that was simply a part of her personality feeds the enduring "virgin" image (celebrated and kidded in Oscar Levant's famous wisecrack).

It was this quality, adjusted for maturity, upon which the TV series to which her husband had committed her without her knowledge (and about which she didn't learn until after his death, but proved to be a life saver) was based: widowed mother returning to the rural family homestead. Ultimately assuming the role of executive producer, she changed the premise halfway through its five-season run, going back to the big city and a high-powered career, eventually ditching the kids and replacing them with a boyfriend (with whom she was actually seen in bed in one episode that I recall).

But by that early '70s time, the only other "girl next door" was a fresh one, equally all-American, equally spunky, relentlessly single and with only an oblique hint or two in the seven seasons of The Mary Tyler Moore Show that she ever "slipped." Yet this was perceived to have tapped into the "liberated" zeitgeist of the time: the new, independent woman.

Yep, it's funny sometimes how those labels and images come about.

And Day, never really perceived as any kind of "new woman," nevertheless suited the zeitgeist of her peak years and, with her personal fortunes restored, got out while the getting was good, her legacy assured for better or worse, and never looked back.




Poe! You are...avenged!

That's some pretty good research you did there, Doghouse. Those screen images really are often true, as in the case of Jimmy Cagney in the 30s, during which period he nearly always played tough guys of one sort or another. Or George Raft, later on, in his second string Bogart mode. Yet Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, best remembered as western stars really weren't prior to 1946. McCrea, especially, was all over the map genre-wise. Of actresses, Loretta Young did tend to play good girls, which is to say heroines; not bad girls, and certain not (or seldom) Bette Davis-type neurotic women. Rosalind Russell was nearly always, with very few exceptions, the sophisticate.

Doris Day's virgin image was probably, once her persona began to take shape, dictated by the way she came across on screen. From what I've read, Warners signed her on in the hope that she'd become their in-house Betty Hutton, who was a top star in 1948. As her career began to take off it became apparent that as a type she was nearer to June Allyson, an even "straighter" type in terms of mannerisms, affect (Allyson tended to project, to my eyes, at least an incipient sensuality, while Day didn't). The Oscar Levant remark, I believe, was actually from before Miss Day began making those sexless sex comedies with Rock Hudson, yet it's those comedies seem to define her screen legacy.

While Doris Day fell out of favor as a box-office draw she did retain that wholesome aura, was almost a code word (words, more properly) for a certain type of All-American girl/woman. She retained a measure of popularity, but it wasn't going over in the movies. If she had a "successor", Julie Andrews aside, it would probably be the not so virginal, to put it mildly, Shirley MacLaine, who was similarly All-American, sort of the Rat Pack version of the girl next door . Miss MacLaine is nearly forgotten these days, as a star, I mean, a force of nature in her own right, especially in the 60s. Doris, for her part, wisely moved into television, which literally saved her bacon given what her late husband had done to the fortune she made. He retirement thereafter was one of the wisest career moves in memory.

From what I've read, Warners signed her on in the hope that she'd become their in-house Betty Hutton, who was a top star in 1948. As her career began to take off it became apparent that as a type she was nearer to June Allyson, an even "straighter" in terms of mannerisms, affect (Allyson tended to project, to my eyes, at least an incipient sensuality, while Day didn't).Two very apt references, tel. That debut film, Romance On the High Seas, is one that could have been tailor-made for Hutton. And while contemplating the girl next door quality that emerged, Allyson came immediately to mind.

A little more research: while I wouldn't be surprised to know Levant had made his remark previously in private, it went public with the 1965 publishing of his autobiography, The Memoirs Of An Amnesiac. At that point, she had only one "professional virgin" role ahead of her (The Glass Bottom Boat, for which "reborn virgin" is perhaps more applicable: a widow who's been avoiding new romance).

Among the five others, I count two which preceded her first teaming with Hudson: one of them not a comedy (Love Me Or Leave Me), but in which she played a user who's very aware her benefactor is on the make, and who continuously stalls him off (until the aforementioned rape); the other (Teacher's Pet) a late vehicle for Gable, in which romance rears its head only late in the proceedings. The remainders are two with Hudson (in their third, they're a settled-down married couple) and one with Cary Grant.

Illustrating that someone had a sense of humor, her penultimate film (Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?) is a comedy of marital infidelity in which she plays a Broadway star eager to shake her virginal image by portraying a prostitute.

The films that seemed to me to really display her in her most natural element were those in which she's raising children, of which there were at least seven. Her work with kid actors in properties like Please Don't Eat the Daisies, The Thrill Of It All or With Six You Get Eggrole appears completely comfortable and credible in the instances of patient yet resigned weariness to eye-rolling exasperation. In those, I buy her 100%, so I guess I've always found it easier to think of her as "America's Mom" than as "America's Virgin."



Poe! You are...avenged!