‘Alexis Smith’
By Peter Shelley
BearManor Media, 246 Pages

Alexis Smith was often called “statuesque,” and that is how she first appears as Cecily Latham in “The Two Mrs. Carrolls” (1947). She is wearing a silvery snood and an immaculate white ensemble. As she approaches the impressive home of artist Geoffrey Carroll (Humphrey Bogart), she asks about his background and if he has money. She is as archly composed as Carroll’s wife, Sally (Barbara Stanwyck), is naive and ingenuous. 

Cecily refuses tea, and her mother comments that Cecily keeps a death watch over her diet so as to preserve her beauty. Geoffrey replies that beauty is worth any sacrifice. Cecily turns to him and remarks: “Are you one of those frightened people who always speaks the truth.” Sally says he is one of the most honest people she’s ever met. Cecily stares at her and says, “How nice.” She wants Geoffrey to paint her. He says she might not like it because he is truthful about what he sees. “I should like it,” she says. “It sounds so ruthless.”

The sexual spark between Cecily and Geoffrey becomes embarrassing when Sally says her husband only paints what people suggest to him. Cecily ignores Sally and addresses Geoffrey, “And don’t I suggest an idea to you?” He replies: “Yes, but nothing I’d care to paint.”

Alexis Smith is the best thing in this otherwise mediocre film noir, which makes me wonder why she is, as Peter Shelley admits, “a somewhat forgotten figure in movie history.” Hollywood tried to build her up, but she never ascended to the top echelon of movie stars. She had good supporting roles in films and co-starred with Errol Flynn three times, once with Cary Grant.  She had a career in television and on the stage, achieving Broadway success in “The Women,” and on a national tour of the musical “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.”

Mr. Shelley is not that interested in her individual performances, though his spare assessments are apposite: “The actress makes Cecily’s hauteur funny. The Milo Anderson wardrobe includes a coat with leopard print collar and trim, and a mink. Her best scene is perhaps where Geoffrey tells Cecily she can’t leave him. Smith transitions from humorous disbelief to fear at his mad intensity.”

Mr. Shelley accounts for the neglect of Smith by noting that she won none of the major acting awards, and was sometimes difficult to cast because she was so much taller than her leading men. Perhaps the typecasting as a “snow queen,” to use Mr. Shelley’s term, “a wealthy and arrogant woman” — which is what she appears to be in “The Two Mrs. Carrolls” — precluded the establishment of a fan base. Her roles did not excite a “rooting interest,” such that producer Darryl Zanuck deemed essential to stardom.

Unlike Bette Davis, Smith did not hold out for important roles. When she expressed a wish to play a “plain healthy American girl,” she was cast in “Stallion Road,” playing a down to earth horse breeder with a wardrobe, Mr. Shelley notes, that “ran chiefly to dungarees.” But the movie and her leading man, Ronald Reagan, turned out to be just too plain, without that brooding Bogart mystique. At one point he seemed slated for the role opposite Smith, but it was her bad luck that he did not appear in the picture.

Smith had a nearly 50-year, scandal-free marriage to actor Craig Stevens, and both of them liked it that way, not even bothering to write memoirs. As a result, a biographer is a bit stuck. Mr. Shelley compensates for that lack of proximity to his subject by providing concise and perceptive accounts of her performances.

Like a great athlete, Alexis Smith left her triumphs on the field. She was a remarkably disciplined artist who seems to have kept to herself, so that Mr. Shelley wisely provides a portrayal of her working life as an actress, how she looked and positioned herself vis a vis other actors, with occasional quotes from what she had to say and what her fellow actors said about her. 

If this biography has you wanting to see more of Smith on the screen, well that seems to be the way she wanted it, and Mr. Shelley is not willing to speculate about much more than that.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Ronald Colman: Hollywood’s Gentleman Hero.”