Mobster-turned-manager Marty “The Gimp” Snyder (James Cagney) is going to be taking Ruth Etting (Doris Day) to Florida any day now. That’s a euphemism, of course, for the strings attached to the help Marty offers to Ruth’s singing career. As her star ascends, she tries to tell him off while acknowledging that she could never repay him for his support. He tells her, no, there is something she can do, and proceeds to grab her, kiss her, and throw her on the bed. The subtitles at this point read “[muffled screaming], [sobbing]”1; the film cuts to black, and in the next scene, Ruth and Marty are married.
Marty drags Ruth out to California to help her career and to open a nightclub, but he feels emasculated by her growing success and becomes more controlling. Ruth eventually demands a divorce, and later Marty sees Ruth kissing her singing coach, Johnny Alderman (Cameron Mitchell). Marty shoots Alderman twice and is arrested, leading to a climax of…Ruth headlining the opening night of the nightclub and bailing Marty out of jail so he can enjoy it? Why does the movie want me to have sympathy for this manipulative, abusive monster? Ruth says:
He gave me a big chunk of his life [...] I didn’t leave him with anything. With any pride, self-respect, nothing.
No! No! This is a bad message! This guy sucks! He shot a guy!2
Rating: 3/10, it’s A Star is Born but as a horror movie.
Cast and Crew
Born Doris Kappelhoff, Doris Day got her start as a sleepy balladeer before making the jump to light Hollywood musical comedies like Calamity Jane (1953). Love Me or Leave Me was Day’s first lead dramatic role3 and she parlayed it into being cast alongside Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). She performed “Que Sera, Sera” diegetically4 in that one and it became her signature song.
This’ll be Day’s only appearance in this column, so let’s talk about the rest of her career. One big hit of hers was the comedy Pillow Talk (1959) that starred her friend Rock Hudson. It’s about romantic entanglements stemming from a party line, so it’s, uh, dated. When the swingin’ sixties came, the squeaky-clean Doris Day started looking like a relic of the past,5 though she still had big roles in Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1960) and Billy Rose’s Jumbo (1962).6 Day was mostly retired from acting by 1973, though apparently Clint Eastwood tried to lure her out for a movie in 2015.
Cameron Mitchell plays Johnny Alderman, the guy in love with Ruth who ends up getting shot. Mitchell’s been in this column twice for terrible movies (he played the voice of God in The Robe and was Happy in Death of a Salesman) and now he’s oh-for-three. Sorry Cam, you’re in bad movies.7
Orson Welles said James Cagney was “maybe the greatest actor who ever appeared in front of the camera.” Orson Welles was wrong. Look, maybe one day we’ll go back and watch Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), the film where Cagney won an Oscar for playing composer George M. Cohan. Maybe we’ll go back and watch his legendary gangster performance in Angels with Dirty Faces8 (1938). Hell, I watched White Heat (1949) just recently to watch Cagney yell “MADE IT, MA! TOP OF THE WORLD!”9 But after Love Me or Leave Me, I’m just not feeling charitable to the guy.
The Trivia
The movie’s soundtrack contains songs made famous by the real Ruth Etting. As the movie tells you, they are “great songs by our greatest song writers.”
But Ruth Etting isn’t famous anymore, and neither are most of our “greatest song writers.” I guess we’re gonna talk about Irving Berlin, whose song “Shaking the Blues Away”10 was a hit for Etting.
The Russian-born Irving Berlin (formerly Israel Baline) was best known for one song: “God Bless America.” It became Kate Smith’s signature song11 and likely inspired Jerome Kern to say that Berlin “had no place in American music—he is American music.” Woody Guthrie, bored of hearing the song, wrote “This Land Is Your Land” as a protest and counterpoint. Royalties from “God Bless America” go to the Boy and Girl Scouts of America.
Or maybe Berlin is best known for another song: “White Christmas,” written for the movie musical Holiday Inn (1942). Like “God Bless America,” “White Christmas” is another oppressive, cloying, eternal song. A better piece of cultural flotsam from Berlin is the 1946 musical “Annie Get Your Gun,” which itself had the songs “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and “Anything You Can Do.” Those songs, along with some other Berlin bops [sic], can be found in this Spotify playlist.12
One last fact about Berlin: he couldn’t read music13 and had to have others transcribe his melodies for him. He also only wrote in F-sharp major, since that’s the key that uses all the black keys on the piano; a lever on his keyboard would then make key changes for him.
Odds and Ends
Cagney’s role was written for Spencer Tracy, and man, I’m glad I didn’t have to watch nice old man Spencer Tracy abuse Doris Day…Marty calls someone a four-flusher; this is a term meaning “bluffer” (since you actually need five of a suit for a flush in poker)...Ruth is friendly with a grip; the grips are in charge of setting up the lighting on a movie set…Marty says “the puss on you” and, even though he is gross, “puss” just refers to “mouth” (related to the Irish “pus” for “mouth” or “lip”)…Charles Vidor, the director, is best known for not being related to King Vidor, another Hollywood director.
Also, a bit of a peek behind the curtain: if you go to the Knowing Without Understanding Substack homepage, you’ll see that each post has a cute image of teddy bears recreating a scene from the film. I make them with DALL-E, but sometimes there are outtakes. Here’s one of those outtakes:
This picture is absolutely cursed, but maybe it sums up Love Me or Leave Me perfectly.
And this part was toned down by the censors. From IMDB: “As originally filmed, Cagney slammed [Day] against a wall, savagely tore off her dress, and after a tempestuous struggle, he threw her onto a bed and raped her.”
Worse, this movie is based on a true story even less feel-good than the movie: after the divorce, Marty made threats on the lives of Ruth, Alderman, and his daughter Edith. Marty eventually kidnapped and shot Alderman. This story is not a happy one.
Though yeah, she does sing.
“Diegetic” is just a fancy word that means “the characters in the movie hear the performance.” It’s the opposite of music only the audience hears (i.e., background music).
A fun Groucho Marx quip: “I’ve been around so long, I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”
Day was asked to star as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (1967), but she rejected the part, saying it was "vulgar and offensive." Don’t worry, we’ll watch that film soon and see if Day was on to something. (Spoiler: she wasn’t.)
Except maybe Gorilla at Large (1954), which Mel Brooks said was his favorite movie. I assume he meant that in the same way I mean it when I say my favorite movie is Drumline (2002). Anyway, Mel Brooks loved Gorilla at Large so much he gave Mitchell a role in a 1982 film that’ll be in this column.
Though you may know the Home Alone (1990) parody “Angels with Filthy Souls” better.
Big White Heat spoiler if you click that link.
Don’t click that link, as the song sucks and has the kind of language that got Kate Smith (see below) cancelled.
Kate Smith also had two nicknames: “First Lady of Radio” and “the Songbird of the South.” In 2019, she became a culture war flashpoint and a statue of her was removed from outside the Philadelphia Flyers’ stadium.
Some of the other Berlin tracks in that list are “Puttin’ On the Ritz,” “Blue Skies,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody,” and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”
Just like Nick Cannon’s character in Drumline!