Dark Angel
By Michael J. Roberts
"I didn't know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting!" ~ Marie Windsor
Emily Marie Bertelsen was a tall, striking young woman who’d arrived in Hollywood in 1940 after a Broadway detour seeking out famed acting coach Maria Ouspenskaya. Emily had been reading back issues of fan magazines and hadn’t kept up with the fact that Ouspenskaya had recently relocated to Hollywood, so she used her beauty contest winnings to head west and put her stunning good looks to good effect on the silver screen. She soon found her money had run out and that the town was awash with young and beautiful women, so she started to hustle work as a cigarette girl at the Mocambo nightclub before scoring uncredited bit parts in a succession of nondescript films. She relocated to New York for more coaching and radio work after her height and big eyes had paramount pass on offering her a contract.
A Metro exec in New York urged her to screen test in Hollywood and the by now Marie Windsor hopped on the MGM treadmill before they passed after a six-month option expired. She’d now been in 29 films over 7 years and was yet to have a credited role, when producer/star John Garfield and his director Abraham Polonsky cast her in their superb Film Noir, Force of Evil. From now on her ticket was stamped, femme fatale. Regular work followed the long legged beauty, now making good use of her Broadway and radio training which marked her strong voice and authentic delivery of lines to complete the package. She was useful in westerns, adventures and crime films and starred opposite George Raft, George Montgomery and had solid parts in films with John Wayne and Walter Brennan. She made a great impression as the lead role in the lively western Hellfire, but Universal failed to capitalise on her bravura turn and she continued to languish in lesser films.
Richard Fleisher and his writer partner Earl Felton gave her a role in 1950 that should have paved the way for A-list stardom – as the mobster’s widow in the wonderful, compact Film Noir, The Narrow Margin. Should have - she was superb as the edgy moll, all satin and steel, should have… until Howard Hughes took over the studio and the film was put in mothballs for 2 years. In the interim she continued the same pattern, professional and reliable in films that were slate fillers at best, until she found a great role in Edward Dymytrk’s dark San Francisco fable, The Sniper, where she again made an indelible mark as a nightclub singer. Pattern repeats until John H. Auer gave her a great role in City That Never Sleeps, another well regarded Film Noir, overlooked at the time but now championed by heavy hitters like Scorsese and Eddie Muller. A couple of musicals that put her long legs to good use, a crazy sci-fi romp called Cat Women of The Moon, and Auer called again for the actress to frock up again in the solid noir Hell’s Half Acre, with a strong female cast including Evelyn Keyes and Nancy Gates.
She enjoyed a good role in Andre De Toth’s western noir The Bounty Hunter, in 1954 and opposite Randolph Scott, before filler noir and western’s again paid the bills. An Abbott and Costello vehicle and a Roger Corman exploitation flick did little for her skillset but soon young director-on-the-rise Stanley Kubrick insisted Windsor was the perfect dame for his noir heist tale, The Killing, opposite Sterling Hayden. Kubrick remembered photographing Windsor during the time she was modelling for famous artist Alberto Vargas in the 1940s and argued for her with the studio who wanted Ida Lupino. She was peerless in the role of the scheming and duplicitous Sherry, a clever contrast to mousey husband Elisha Cook Jr. and her lines dripped velvety venom. It should have been her ticket to bigger and better roles, but as they say in the classics – that’s showbiz.
Hollywood has never been kind to glamour girls as they age and in the late 1950s (and in her late thirties) Marie Windsor was living that cliché. She continued to work until the late 1980s, but mostly in television and in the many western series that clogged sets from the 1950s onwards. If she worked in features it was as the second or third string female roles, and not with A-list directors, although she did work for John Farrow, Burt Kennedy and Andrew V. McLaglen and with stars like Fred MacMurray, Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Rod Steiger, Marlon Brando, Robert Mitchum and James Garner.
In contrast to her bad girl roles Marie Windsor was a conservative, a Mormon and led a life free from any type of Hollywood scandal. Her conservative Utah family was aghast at some of her roles and her sister Louise wrote to their mother, ‘Please tell them to have Marie stop playing all those bad girls. Somebody needs to tell them she’s not really like that.’ She never attained star status and rarely got the roles she deserved, but she proved that with a look or a gesture she could suggest a world of information that pages of dialogue could never reach. Marie Windsor became an icon in the niche world of Film Noir lovers, and it’s there that her star shines eternal. With her stunning looks, her velvet voice and her bedroom eyes she was a natural for a femme fatale, and in a handful of memorable roles in those gritty, low rent parables of the street she will forever remain a dark angel.