Out In The Be-Bop 1930s Jazz Night-Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day- A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the screwball romantic comedy, Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day.

Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, starring Frances McDormand, Amy Adams, Focus Features, 2008

I have spent no little “cyberspace” ink in the recent past swearing off femme fatales in crime noirs, mainly crime noirs from its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s. I grew tired, very tired, of two-timing dames who saw nothing wrong, nothing in the world wrong, with off-handedly putting a couple of slugs in the likes of a prince valiant like Robert Mitchum as Jane Greer did in Out Of The Past just for trying to help her out of a jam, or seven. Fortunately after successful completion of the twelve –step femme fatale withdrawal program I am now cured, cured forever and a day, of those bad femmes.

But what of “good” femme fatales, or wannabes (from Pittsburg no less), who maybe are just a little screwy (okay, okay a lot screwy) and don’t even know, how to handle a rod, or want to. Just men. Well then Miss Delysia LaFosse (played, fetchingly and every other which way played by Ms. Amy Adams) is just the type for you (and me, especially sans those pistols) featured in the film under review, Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day.

And what if all any femme fatale really needed to stay away from hard guys, hard liquor, hard grifts, and mean streets was a sort of “fairy godmother” posing as a “social secretary” (the Miss Pettigrew of the title played, every wise and wishful way by Ms. Frances McDormand of Fargo fame). Then, my friends, you would have the substance of the plot of this little romantic comedy/social commentary/ nostalgia piece (1939 just before the war, World War II in Europe when all hell will break loose, but there is just this minute reprieve for bread and circuses).

No need to get heavily entwined in the romantic triangle here, Ms. Adams and three beautiful young men who came of age after the war, the First World War that is, and who have “designs” on her free-wheeling spirit. Only one will win out in the end but not before Miss Pettigrew and Miss LaFosse light up the screen with their antics (and Ms. McDormand and Ms. Adams with their solid older woman/younger woman bonding). That is what drives this film. That and a rather nice tribute to old-time Hollywood screwball comedies a la Preston Sturgis and that crowd. With no off-hand femme fatale gun play to “resolve” the fickle lifestyle dilemmas.

And if all else fails to dignify the spirit of this film then let me end with this. View this for the torch singer (Ms. Adams) segment at the nightclub where the emotional distraught Miss LaFosse sings the old-time Inkspots classic, If I Didn’t Care. Even they would have had their handkerchiefs out on that one.