Alice Faye: from musicals with Dick Powell and John Payne to "Fallen Angel" with Dana Andrews

Dick Powell and Alice Faye in "On the Avenue" (1937) directed by Roy Del Ruth

Darryl Zanuck had been hatching plans since the middle of 1936 to costar Alice in the biggest musical Twentieth Century-Fox had produced to date, Irving Berlin's "On the Avenue". Alice was, as Zanuck noted in one memo, "climbing to stardom so rapidly that we are unable to keep up with the demands of the exhibitors in connection with her. Berlin begged for her and wrote the part for her." Zanuck brought in Dick Powell, the star of his 1933 smash musical at Warner Brothers, "42nd Street", casting him opposite dramatic actress Madeleine Carroll in the leading roles. Alice played Broadway baby Mona Merrick, the female star of Gary Blake's (Dick Powell) hit review.

In this incarnation of the traditional backstage musical, Alice lost the man to Madeleine Carroll's Mimi Caraway, but won all the great numbers, from the movie's opening shot of her singing "He Ain't Got Rhythm" to the show's biggest production number "Slumming on Park Avenue" (for which her legs deserved billing on their own).

She also enjoyed appearances in Powell's rendition of "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" and "The Girl in the Police Gazette," during which she remembered wearing "these stockings with jewels sewed onto them, which was pretty snazzy."

Alice Faye and John Payne taking a hayride in a publicity still for "Weekend in Havana" (1941) directed by Walter Lang

"Weekend in Havana" became one of Alice's happiest movies. It showed. She found herself surrounded with her favorite costars, including John Payne, Carmen Miranda, and Cesar Romero. Zanuck also assigned director Walter Lang, with whom she worked in "Tin Pan Alley", to the project. Alice also felt confident in the role she played. "It gave me another comedy role, that of a slightly common Macy's salesgirl," she said.

In "Hello, Frisco, Hello", a thinly disguised remake of her previous film venture "King of Burlesque", Alice found herself surrounded with a host of new faces, and, had she delayed her return much longer, she might not have even known her costars. As it was, the celebration heralding her return also served as a farewell party for John Payne, Tyrone Power, and Cesar Romero.

As quickly as the three men could complete work on their current films (Payne with Alice in Hello, Frisco, Hello) they would report to their bases: Payne as an Army private, Power as a Marine pilot, and Romero as an ordinary seaman in the Coast Guard.

Alice Faye as June Mills and Dana Andrews as Eric Stanton in "Fallen Angel" (1945) directed by Otto Preminger

Zanuck originally considered Olivia de Havilland, Jeanne Crain, or Anne Baxter for the role of June Mills. He demonstrated the flexibility with which Preminger credited him, however, when Alice expressed interest in the role. Presumably he was prepared to do anything it took just to put her back to work. Zanuck allowed Alice her choice for a leading man. She opted for Dana Andrews, who had met with stunning success in "Laura". "She had seen Laura and she liked me in the part," said Andrews. "She said, 'I'll do this one if you can get Dana Andrews.'" Fallen Angel takes place in the tawdry environs known to every denizen of small-town America: the wrong side of the tracks. The reviewer for the Los Angeles Times summed it up best by calling it "a somber murder story with repellant characters."

Dana Andrews played Eric Stanton, an out-of-work publicity agent who washes up in small-town California. At a roadside greasy spoon, he encounters and becomes obsessed with a beautiful waitress with her eye on the main chance, Stella, played by Linda Darnell. Stella agrees to marry Eric if he can come up with enough of a bankroll to give her the respectable life she desires. Eric decides, improbably, that the easiest means to his end is to woo, marry, and then bilk June Mills (Alice Faye).

Dana Andrews, who seemed to move with ease between musicals (State Fair) and dramas (The Best Years of Our Lives and Laura), hated Fallen Angel from the start. "When the script was sent to me, I said 'no,'" he remembered. Preminger called him in to discuss it. "He didn't understand why I didn't like it," Andrews said. "I said, 'In the first place, I don't think it's a picture for Alice Faye, but beside that, I don't like the part for me. I don't like the picture, It's terrible. It's in bad taste, it's unbelievable. I just can't see it at all.'"

Preminger was a taskmaster with a reputation for brutality. Alice's Fallen Angel costar Linda Darnell found him "stubborn, humorless, and terrifying on the set," according to her biographer, Ronald L. Davis. But Alice seemed to relish the challenge. She had told several columnists that she hoped to create something with Fallen Angel that her daughters could be proud of. Zanuck struck Preminger as someone with "no empathy for women in film. He liked women and was happily married, but women's problems and feelings bored him totally."

Alice later admitted, "Preminger was very tough to work for. He didn't care what he said or how he hurt you. He got a lot out of me, though; I was proud of the performance I turned in." Dana Andrews, still disgruntled over the assignment, remembered having long conversations with her in which he would ask why she was doing the movie. "Oh, you wait and see," he recalled her saying, "this is going to be great. It's terrific." Alice emerged, stunned, from the studio screening room. Her heart pounded in her ears as she grappled with an overwhelming sense of betrayal and rage. It didn't necessarily surprise her that Zanuck had chosen to recut the film in order to build up Linda Darnell.

Zanuck had obviously decided to eliminate as many of Alice's scenes as possible, to the detriment of the movie. Did Zanuck resent her that much that he would confuse and alienate the public just to humiliate her? "If that's what Zanuck is going to do to me, I'm not going to stay around and be slaughtered," she thought. Dana Andrews remembered that when she saw the picture, she made the statement, 'I'll never do another picture."' Alice never revealed what she had written to Zanuck, although many years later she indicated that it was unprintable "even today." She would not make another movie for sixteen years.

“We were born to tread the Earth as angels, to seek out heaven this side of the sky. But they who race alone shall stumble in the dark and fall from grace. Then love alone can make the fallen angel rise, for only two together can enter paradise.” -Alice Faye in "Fallen Angel"