The Best Mother in the World

Hard, Fast and Beautiful is a powerful title. The film hasn’t even started yet, and the three adjectives already set that oppressive pace, which carries over into the second image of the opening credits: a short night-time tracking shot across an empty tennis court; the wind blows fiercely, sweeping up newspapers and old bits of paper; Roy Webb’s music is tense and the shadows are deep. It serves as a kind of warning of what is to come. Rather than a sports melodrama about the rise of a young tennis player, everything suggests that we are witnessing the downward spiral of a film noir.

Cut to a shot of Florence Farley (Sally Forrest) hitting balls against the garage door; the innocence of the gesture is cut short by her mother’s voice-over, brimming with expectations and ambitions. Gordon McKay (Robert Clarke) is the third character to enter the scene. Millie is thrilled by the surname, but when her daughter tells her that he is nothing more than a poor nephew of the famous tycoon, she immediately loses interest in the young man. In the next scene, we meet the father (Kenneth Patterson): a humble man, scorned by his wife for failing to provide her with the life she had dreamt of and condemned to be left behind in the story. The picture is complete: the Farleys are a typical American middle-class family destined to reproduce endlessly according to the same patterns. The problem is that the gears of this microcosm are about to be thrown off course by a tiny grain of sand.

Following her first victory at her local club, Florence is invited to the national junior championships in Philadelphia, where she catches the eye of a scout. Fletcher Locke (Carleton G. Young) becomes a sort of coach and agent, sending her on a gruelling tour of competitions and arranging schemes to receive money off the books.

After countless training sessions and trophies, Florence’s behaviour begins to change, culminating in the scene where her fear of facing the champion Wilson at Forest Hills Stadium on Long Island becomes suffocatingly apparent. As she bends down to tie her trainers, she sees (and so do we) Fletcher and her mother in a harrowing low-angle shot; she then walks between them as if she were a prisoner on her way to the scaffold; finally, she is overwhelmed by the crowd filling the stadium. She manages to win the match, but something has broken inside her: the enthusiasm and freedom she felt on the court—which Ida Lupino captures in a concise sequence of short shots and precise framing—are fading, and her future is narrowing. Her bond with her mother pushes her towards a futile international career, whilst her passion for Gordon (her only alternative) pulls her towards a marriage that will undoubtedly force her to give up tennis.

Florence is swept away by her mother’s smooth talk and only realises the manipulative and greedy scheme once she is in London. We see this in her tense expression and in her outbursts during the match at Wimbledon (Ida Lupino once again incorporates real footage of the stadium, which lends the film a tremendous energy). When she returns to the lavish hotel in the early hours of the morning—either drunk or precisely because of it—she settles the score with her mother. In Paris, she is already a different woman: she wants no part of that world of fleeting, commercial fame; she breaks free from the rules imposed on her and decides to return home to defend her title one last time.

The interview she gave on the eve of the match clearly reveals just how cynical her life has become: she blurts out a few affected phrases about a champion’s duty to play fair, with determination and respect, but the Times-Dispatch journalist even rolls her eyes, as she knows full well that these clichés do not bear any relation to reality.

The final scene in Forest Hills is a replica of the first victory, now on a smaller scale. The nervousness of the mother, Fletcher and Gordon in attendance is the same — and why should it change, when each of them represents social conventions that stubbornly persist? Florence’s play, however, reveals a weary and disillusioned woman: life has lost its youthful charm and tennis has become a gruelling and grimy activity. The match is a hard-fought one, but, despite her fatigue, she manages to retain her title. When she hands the trophy to her mother, she irrevocably severs the umbilical cord that bound them together and frees herself from the trappings and money that haunted her rise to fame. She embraces Gordon and sets out to reclaim a little of her life. Her mother is left alone in the empty stadium; the wind blows the papers about once more, and the sound of phantom tennis balls can be heard. We do not know what will become of Florence—although it is doubtful she will rediscover the joy of playing tennis once she is married—yet we knew from the outset that there was no way out for Millie Farley (who, not coincidentally, is played by Claire Trevor, the ‘queen of noir’). She is left there, abandoned, yet without any moral judgement: in that final shot, Millie is simultaneously the executioner and, for the second time in her life, a victim of circumstances.

Only an independent and free-spirited woman like Ida Lupino could have produced and directed a film with such thought-provoking themes. Working on B-movies with a tight budget—but also with greater creative freedom—Lupino was able to tackle subjects that the major studios shied away from. As well as being daring, her films are highly focused (economy of means is one of her specialities) and cinematographically very powerful. She used to joke that she was the ‘Don Siegel of the poor’; looking back, we might add: ‘of the poor film buffs who are now discovering her with immense joy’.