It’s funny how a movie’s reputation can morph over time—the way the years can either forgive or damn the film in the eyes of audiences. Often a film’s legacy is out of its hands, subject to the finicky whims of popular culture.
Peter Godfrey’s 1947 That Hagen Girl is a prime example of the strange journey a movie’s reputation can take. Based on a novel of the same name by Edith Kneipple Roberts, and adapted for the screen by Charles Hoffman, the film was meant to be Warner Brothers’ attempt at launching Shirley Temple’s new adult phase of her stardom. The movie was a modest success financially, but was roasted by critics, with Bosley Crowther of the New York Times calling That Hagen Girl “Thoroughly un-American.”
The irony is that Temple’s co-star, nay love interest, was future 46th President Ronald Reagan, who is some 20 years older than Temple’s 18. A fact that even old Ronnie felt uneasy about. He argued with Godfrey about the ending, saying that he and Temple shouldn’t end up together. The audience wouldn’t buy it. Godfrey argued that it was perfectly natural, after all his wife was twenty years younger than him.
More than likely That Hagen Girl would have been lost to the winds of time if not for two reasons:
- One of its stars is Ronald Freaking Reagan.
- Harry and Michael Medved, with the help of Randy Dreyfus, published a book in 1978 called The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.
Among them was, you guessed it, That Hagen Girl.
I admit it’s funny that one of the most loathsome Presidents of my lifetime is in a movie roundly thought to be one of the worst movies of all time. As an added comical bonus Reagan himself tried to have the film buried once he achieved political power, with the film being notoriously hard to get a hold of, only increasing the film’s reputation for being such a trash fire.
It’s now quite easy to view on Amazon.
Now, as much as it’s fun to dogpile on Reagan-and believe me it’s a damn hoot- calling That Hagen Girl one of the Fifty Worst Movies of All Time is frankly out of pocket. It’s not even close to being true. Don’t get me wrong That Hagen Girl isn’t good. Not in the slightest.
But while That Hagen Girl isn’t good, it’s also not THAT bad. It’s bad in the way The Book of Henry is bad. From a technical standpoint, there’s nothing egregiously awful about That Hagen Girl. It moves along well enough, with a visual proficiency that feels alien for a movie dubbed one of the worst of all time.
Still. Even though the film was shot by Karl Freund That Hagen Girl, while never all that interesting, is also never dull visually. After all Freund shot silent classics like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh. He made a name for himself during the early sound era with Tod Browning’s Dracula and even directed Boris Karloff in The Mummy. To say nothing of his technical innovations in creating the unchained camera and a new lighting system for sitcoms for a little show called I Love Lucy.
In other words, That Hagen Girl is technically proficient in a way that seems contrary to what one would consider a bad movie of such repute. Neither Godfrey nor Freund is inept to the point of creating, as J. Hoberman calls it, a sense of “perceptual havoc”. Instead, Hoffman’s script creates the majority of the sensation while Godfrey’s pedestrian direction amplifies it. Yet, That Hagen Girl never reaches the levels of camp.
Temple plays Mary Hagen, a girl who is rumored to be a bastard child of one of one of the town’s leading scions. The daughter of a man so rich and so powerful that his part in the movie is comically miniscule. The small town of Jordan gossips about Mary’s parentage incessantly. Worse is how the ton seems to go out of the way to try and sabotage Mary’s life to punish her for being an orphan. Their machinations would in different hands be the source of melodramatic amusement.
To say nothing of the fact that Reagan’s Tom Bates is rumored to be Mary’s father. Something that Godfrey and Hoffman let us know is untrue early on. However, the characters within That Hagen Girl don’t learn the truth until the third reel. Tom isn’t even aware that the town thinks he’s the father. All of this makes the eventual marriage of Tom and Mary even more astounding if for the simple reason that there’s zero progression or build-up.
There are moments throughout That Hagen Girl that are hilarious, such as Mary’s best friend telling her, “You’ve got nice teeth and you took two years of French, so why not try to see the bright side of things?” It’s not until the end when Hoffman and Godfrey realize that Tom and Mary have barely interacted and throw them together in a frantic effort to get them married as the film reaches its finale.
Hoffman and Godfrey’s problem is the tone. That Hagen Girl needs a Douglas Sirk, someone who shoots the film as a comedic tragedy. Sirk could have mined the hypocrisy of small-town values and the vindictiveness towards anything different to great emotional effect. But Godfrey doesn’t have the imagination or the gumption to do anything with Hoffman’s script except shoot it.
Of course, then there’s the actors. Reagan’s sonorous voice makes lines like “I haven’t carved my initials on anything or anyone for many years, Miss Kane,” feel like jokes without a punchline. Never mind that the citizen’s disgust and scandalized attitude towards Mary’s orphan background seem out of date even for 1947.
Hoffman’s script gaslights the viewer in a manner, that if Godfrey was a Douglas Sirk, That Hagen Girl would be a first-rate comedy. At one point in the movie Mary’s mother Minta (Dorthory Peterson), while on her deathbed reaches out to Mary and says, “There’s another thing. It’s about you…” and promptly dies.
Godfrey and Hoffman twist themselves into knots trying to create drama but with no understanding of how to resolve it. Take Mary’s teacher Julia (Lois Maxwell). The only other sane person, aside from Tom, who for much of the movie is the assumed love interest.
It’s not until the third reel that she announces she’s leaving Jordan and tells Tom to go after Mary as he’s so obviously in love with her. It’s news to Tom and to us as well. It shouldn’t be since we’ve been watching the whole thing but again That Hagen Girl excels at creating internal perceptual havoc.
Mary spends most of the film mooning over Ken (Rory Calhoun). Mary and Ken are the classic “from the other side of the tracks” couple. Ken’s devotion to Mary is so strong that he gives Mary’s rival Christine (Penny Edwards) food poisoning so Mary can star in the school’s production of Romeo & Juliet. “How was I supposed to know she was allergic to beer,” he says with an impish grin before proposing to Mary.
Poor Temple flounders in her first adult role, both as Mary and as Juliet. It’s bad enough that we have to watch one or the other, but to have to see both feels vindictive. Yet, Temple shows fleeting moments of promise when Hoffman’s overwrought script, and Godfrey’s flat direction, get out of her way. Still, what’s left on the screen is a performance that is threatened to be overshadowed by of all things Ronald Reagan.
Later in the movie, there’s a scene where Tom sits in the boat and stares, with a strange look on his face, at the age-appropriate Julia and the very not-age-appropriate Mary rowing the boat. Tom’s look is indecipherable possibly because the actor has no idea what he’s supposed to convey. Godfrey doesn’t seem to be sure either. Whatever the case the result is unsettling and darkly comical.
I haven’t even mentioned how Reagan’s Tom is a decorated war hero for his efforts in atomic warfare. Hoffman’s script mixed with Godfrey’s direction lulls you into a state of blasé before walloping you with a curve. The best example is Reagan’s delivery of this journey of a line, “I can see her yet…sitting there…beautiful…lovely as ever…but completely out of her mind.”
The score by legendary Frans Waxman, underlying this line makes it hysterical. Waxman, who has scored everything from The Bride of Frankenstein to Rear Window, is another spanner in Godfrey’s works. The music is lush and over the top but all the drama is played so low to the ground that it never quite fits. Between Waxman and Freund, Godfrey finds himself buoyed by another class of talent but who himself is unable to do anything with the material given.
Weirdly, That Hagen Girl has sparks of genuine comic timing. Little moments like when two townspeople see the schoolboard rushing to the platform to welcome back Tom. ”Never saw them in all in a lump before. Don’t look no better that way neither.” My favorite is how one of Mary’s friends tells a boy, “Why don’t you go catch a foul ball.”
That Hagen Girl is hardly a masterpiece but it’s far from an anti-masterpiece. At best is the middle of the road soap opera. It’s not until one takes a more scrupulous look at the other movies included in The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time that one begins to sense an all too familiar pattern. The list is broken down into sections like “Popular Triumphs”, “Big Budget Flops” “Grade-Z Baddies” etc. Other movies on this list range from Eegah, a Mystery Science Theater 3000 favorite, to the acclaimed Last Year at Marienbad.
The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time has all the earmarks of what is now called a listicle. A comparison that becomes more apt when you consider that including films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn feels like an old-school version of clickbait or engagement farming. Granted, The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time is hardly a cynical tome. Digging deeper into the authors of The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time, we discover that the Medveds are teenagers. The two would eventually establish The Golden Turkey Awards spawning other bad-movie awards like The Razzies.
I mention this because part of engaging with a film’s reputation is understanding how it got it. That Hagen Girl is a mildly amusing morality tale that ends with a kind of pseudo-incest resolution. But it’s hardly the worst movie of 1947, much less of all time. But two kids in 1978 don’t know that. It’s a reminder that some of our knowledge of classical Hollywood, both the silent era and the Golden Age, is misconstrued or plain inaccurate simply because marketing or well-meaning books get mistaken for historical fact. Something I see a lot of today when influencers gush over the latest superhero blockbuster parroting studio talking points.
That Hagen Girl is one of those movies where it’s fun to talk about all the wacky shenanigans that happen. Like with the 2016 film Collateral Beauty, there’s more joy in regaling what happened than it is to sit through it. Yeah, I laughed, but the competency is enough that there’s never anything all that remarkable about That Hagen Girl. Truthfully, if it hadn’t starred the future president of the United States or been the first adult role of an infamous child star it would have wasted away in Warner Brothers’ vault.
Images courtesy of Warner Bros.
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