She Couldn’t Say No [Beautiful but Dangerous] ** (1954, Robert Mitchum, Jean Simmons, Arthur Hunnicutt, Edgar Buchanan) – Classic Movie Review 5712

Director Lloyd Bacon’s 1954 interesting but misfiring would-be comedy is set in a town symbolically called Progress, Arkansas, where a beautiful millionairess called Corby Lane (Jean Simmons) goes home to the place she was brought up in to play Lady Bountiful to her benefactors back then.

But she disturbs the equilibrium of the townspeople by offering generous free handouts of money and lavish gifts in an unfocused, only modestly successful hit-and-miss comedy that is not quite as clever as it would like to think itself to be. Some heavy-handed social satire, combined with some embarrassingly awkward miscasting, all but sinks a promising idea, in a screenplay written by D D Beauchamp, William Bowers and Richard Flournoy.

There’s a good reason for all this, incidentally. The townspeople saved her life by giving money for her medical treatment when she was a small child travelling with her poor father. But now, after it has been publicised, of course the town becomes the venue for every fortune seeker.

Simmons and Mitchum as the laid-back, easy-going local doctor, Dr Robert Sellers, seem miscast and unusually out of their depth in these roles and with this script, though Arthur Hunnicutt (actually from Arkansas) stands out, providing some chuckles as the outrageous town drunk, Odie Chalmers.

Also in the cast are Edgar Buchanan, Wallace Ford, Raymond Walburn, Jimmy Hunt, Ralph Dumke, Hope Landin, Gus Schilling, Eleanor Todd and Pinky Tomlin.

It was shot in 1953 and released in 1954, ending both Mitchum and Simmons’s contracts with RKO Studios.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5712

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