Century or Grace Kelly in Rear Window or Marilyn Monroe in her last, unfinished film, Something’s Got to Give.
It would be too easy to call Stratten “ethereal” (as some writers have), but in They All Laughed she offsets her beauty with a sturdy, earthy quality, as when she trudges down the steps of her townhouse, armed with a pair of suitcases, or when she goes skating at a roller rink. In the latter scene—one of the film’s most charming sequences—Charles, ostensibly still on the case, has tracked Dolores to the rink, foolishly deciding to don skates in hot pursuit.
For most of the scene, the camera stays on Charles as he observes the lithesome, elegant Dolores skating gracefully, but at a key moment Bogdanovich shifts to Dolores’s perspective. The camera dollies back as she skates toward us, while Charles, visible behind her, skates to catch up. He starts mugging for her benefit, a silly-looking smile on his face, but before she can spot him, he tumbles to the floor—splat. Dolores exits frame, but Charles remains grounded, the ties to his skates in knots. The scene echoes the ending of Bringing Up Baby, in which Katharine Hepburn precipitates the collapse of Cary Grant’s dinosaur—what a mess a gorgeous woman can leave in her wake!—but with a difference: unlike Hepburn with Grant, Stratten has not actively contributed to Ritter’s fall. Her mere presence brings out the klutz in him.
Dorothy Stratten and John Ritter in They All Laughed. Courtesy Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Material Store.
Throughout the film, Dolores is made to be slightly unattainable—quick to take leave or rush off, as she does after her first kiss with Charles in a stairwell across from her townhouse. (Our heart aches as she darts back home—she is so close yet so far.) It is left to Charles’s friend Christy to cut to the chase: dancing at a club with Charles, Christy sees him making eyes at Dolores, who is paired with her friend Jose (Ferrer). Much like the bandleader in At Long Last Love, Christy has the foursome “change partners”—Christy takes Jose, while she gives Charles to Dolores. The film’s spirit is monogamous, though; among the main cast, no character would think of taking another character’s girlfriend or boyfriend once who likes who has been established. Christy may be fond of Charles, and Jose may enjoy the company of Dolores, but each is willing to sacrifice so that true love—the kind that seems to exist between Charles and Dolores—might flourish.
The film contrasts the Charles–Dolores romance with that of an older detective—Gazzara’s John, who has his sights set on Hepburn’s Angela, the discontented wife of a globetrotting millionaire. Their affair is destined to end unhappily and does, but the film itself is unfailingly bright and peppy. In one appealing moment, Arthur and Sam trade slightly risqué barbs—she teases him about the trio of “chicks” who are after him, and he jokingly asks to take refuge by sleeping on her floor—but their conversation ends amiably, even respectfully.
“It’s nice to meet you, Sam,” Arthur says.
“You, too, Curly,” Sam replies.
This exchange is incidental—fleeting, even—yet it powerfully communicates the characters’ decency and civility.
By the final reel, Dolores has agreed to marry Charles, despite their barely having carried on a conversation. In a magical scene, Christy—knowing Charles and Dolores’s feelings for each other better than they do—again orchestrates their coming together. As Christy sings “I Don’t Think I Could Take You Back Again” on stage in a club, she motions Dolores from upstairs to descend to Charles’s table downstairs. When we see Stratten emerge in white at the top of a staircase, she resembles a vision from on high. Her presence seemingly summoned by Christy, Dolores walks slowly and silently, as she might in a marriage procession, to Charles’s table, and when she sits down, he gets to the point.
“Dolores?” he asks. “Will you marry me?”
“Okay,” she says. “I will.”
She adds, of course, that their marriage will have to wait until her divorce is a done deal. Here, in the film’s single most significant scene, Stratten emanates a straightforward solidity—both in her firmness in answering “yes” and in her practicality in adding the bit about her divorce.
The suddenness of Charles and Dolores’s engagement parallels Bogdanovich and Stratten’s. “I think it was clear to Dorothy that it was me asking her to marry me … because I worked for a long time to get John to say it just the way I wanted him to say it,” he said. “And Dorothy’s answer was just the way I assume she would have answered it.”49
The daughter of Dutch parents, Dorothy Ruth Stratten was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1960. She achieved notoriety because of her appearance in the pages of Playboy, the dubious handiwork of the man who became her husband, Paul Snider. The Playboy mansion, which Bogdanovich visited for a time in his post-Shepherd funk, was the setting of his introduction to Stratten. It was 1978, and although he was left breathless by her beauty, and she was intrigued with him, they would not see each other again until the following year. As he wrote in his memoir of their relationship, The Killing of the Unicorn, he assumed she was attached (in fact, she had yet to marry Snider), while she was fed misinformation about him concerning his previous relationships and the supposedly dodgy state of his career.50
When they met again, it was not Bogdanovich but Stratten who made the first move. “In ancient courting customs,” he reflected, echoing a pattern evident in many of his films, “it was the woman who pursued the man.” One day at the mansion, Stratten spotted Bogdanovich, remembered their earlier encounter, and called his name: “I turned and saw the unfamiliar bleached hair before I saw anything else.”51 Her natural radiance, he learned, had been “improved” by Playboy, but that was not all that was troubling her.
Over the course of many subsequent days and nights together, Stratten revealed to Bogdanovich that she was profoundly unhappy in both her life and work—having deep reservations about her recent marriage and finding herself increasingly uncomfortable with posing for Playboy. Stratten sought out Bogdanovich the way someone lost at sea wires SOS; she had no family in the United States and desperately few allies.
Bogdanovich provided Stratten with answers to many of her problems. He gave her what ultimately became a major role in They All Laughed and suggested she avail herself of the many non-Playboy modeling and acting opportunities that would surely come her way. Above all, he loved her, and she him.
He came to feel, he wrote, “as though we had known each other all our lives,”52 and the equality of their relationship is striking. Yes, he was older and more experienced. Yes, he showed her the sights when she arrived in New York for the first time to make They All Laughed. And, yes, she had come to him looking for help. But she was already a writer of poetry and an enthusiast of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (having acted in a production of it) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, having fully grasped their themes. They resolved to read Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot at the same time because it was Bogdanovich’s father’s favorite book. “I’m sure I had preconceived ideas about Hef’s Playmates,” he said, “but Dorothy was very spiritual, very deep.”53 And she was already aware—far more than he was—of the resentment and wickedness of men, owing both to her family background (her father having left the scene early on and her mother enduring a subsequent failed marriage) and to her own experience with her abusive husband. “I hadn’t had much exposure to men who consistently browbeat women, much less terrorized them,” Bogdanovich wrote. “But Dorothy had seen little else from men all her life.”54 By this time, Stratten had a firm wish to get a divorce from Snider.
Both
