CLEARLY Hollywood, at least by the 1930s, had a vision of shaping and projecting model roles of human beauty via movies.
I stress the word ‘Human’ because in deciding to project any role that is intended to be exemplary or beautiful, the producer, the script-writer, the director, and actors of these films could not escape contextual questions like: Are the values to be projected to be specifically American? What is ‘American’ anyway?  How much will these values be determined by dominant Anglo-Saxon, or nationalistic, or political, or conventional bourgeois views expressed via the content of movies?
Indeed, the quest to be human, to assert the quality of ‘human’ values above other particular local, ethnic, parochial, secular choices of values, pushed an important (perhaps the most important) segment of Hollywood film production from the 1930s, and specifically during the 1940s and 50s, towards a hothouse of filmmaking that has grown in stature and value with the passing of time, and an apparent contemporary disregard for idealistic creative visions in film, or even art in general, today.

McGuire’s professional reputation
Some of the most exemplary, memorable, and uniquely accomplished actresses of Hollywood’s best decades  – between the 1930s and 60s, when quality films came in quantity and were not minority surprises as they are today –  never received an Academy Award. Yet their performances and their whole style and human value, make their films a preserved precious oeuvre of such quality and beauty, they can add meaning and pleasure to the lives of those who only see them now. Dorothy McGuire was such an actress.
In speaking of Dorothy McGuire, the professional press reports and critical books on screen-stars suddenly become unabashedly and exceptionally reverential, describing her as gentle, charming, mature, intelligent, tolerant, radiating kindness, warmth, and inner beauty in un-glamorized roles. For those who never noticed or even heard of McGuire, and want proof of such descriptions, her two dozen plus films provide an impeccable record that shines like a beacon of beauty and pleasure against a noticeably jaded contemporary world without soft-edged convictions.

Films as total quality
After looking at about half a dozen films by McGuire, the discerning and observant film viewer will notice that it is not just the actress and her roles that are somehow consistently outstanding, but the entire films themselves.
This is a particular social quality Hollywood at its best developed in the 1940s, when, in contrast to the star-system of today, where early production and release of films as DVD home movies have sent the advanced fees of today’s screen-stars through the ceiling, there was an emphasis on the entire film being a vehicle of social importance and meaning, rather than only a backdrop for an exaggerated chosen persona to be fabricated and mass-marketed.
Scanning McGuire’s overall film career, the first noticeable fact is that most of her films were made by classic Hollywood’s best, most intelligent and socially conscientious directors, such as Edmund Goulding, Robert Siodmak, Elia Kazan, Edward Dmytryk, Gottfried Reinhardt, Jean Negulesco, William Seiter, William Wyler, Henry king, and Delmer Daves.
The fact that she appeared twice under Kazan’s direction, and three times under Delmer Daves, two of Hollywood’s foremost socially effective, boldly open-minded and critical filmmakers immediately tells us that McGuire had a lot in common with the anti-prejudicial –across the board – viewpoints and practical positions expressed in their films.
To act certain roles simply to obey studio requests, without sharing the views and actions they project, would hardly produce results of authentic power and persuasion. This particularly applies to those consistent roles displaying a universal style of inner and outer human beauty, which McGuire established her creative immortality through.

Unavailable DVDs
It is a loss to today’s film viewers that many of McGuire’s excellent films, like those of many actresses of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, are not easily available on DVDs as they ought to be. How easily can we put our hands on ‘CLAUDIA’, directed by the suavely tasteful England-born director Edmund Goulding, who came over to Hollywood in the late 1920s and enhanced the industry’s quality immensely?
McGuire was 25 when she made the David Selnick production of ‘CLAUDIA’ for Goulding in 1943. Goulding’s talent for enhancing the feminine strong points of his actresses no doubt ignited her sense of self as a satisfying possibility, which she carried forward into her roles to follow.
1945 would be a busy year for McGuire, one where she worked under the bold and innovative producer, Dore Schary at RKO Studios, one of the successful vintage Hollywood Studios whose films were of the highest quality, until millionaire, Howard Hughes bought the company in 1954 and ran it into the ground.
McGuire made ‘THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE’ at RKO (all of whose films ought to be available on DVD today) under German-born Robert Siodmak’s fabulously avant-garde direction, which suited its socially sensitive Film Noir qualities. That same year, she made her first film under the great anti-prejudicial director, Elia Kazan.
The Film, ‘A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN’, was also Kazan’s first, and McGuire would be the actress who later unforgettably moves us in Kazan’s and one of Hollywood’s breakthrough anti-racism films, ‘GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT’ two years later in 1947.

Till the End of Time
However, it is in 1946 that McGuire delivered her first stunning trademark simmering passionate performance under Edward Dmytryk’s socially controversial effective direction in ‘TILL THE END OF TIME’, another RKO production under the progressively tolerant producer Dore Schary.
Dmytryk would later be shallowly blacklisted as a communist-influenced film director by the House of Un-American Activities trials in the early1950s. McGuire’s role as the emotionally wrecked war widow who bounces back in a passionate romance with Guy Madison, an equally forlorn returning post-war marine, possessed the wild seed of similar roles to follow in which the larger social world threatens to cripple its individual members with fatalistic conclusions.
But McGuire established a consistent and coherent strength of individual personality in her films, which resisted and overcame such social obstacles. Her anti-conformist and anti-conventional attitude was rooted in a liberal and liberated mentality and behaviour which thrilled us with subtle suggestiveness and intellectual strength like no other actress before her, whether Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, or Katherine Hepburn.
The proof of such a style came in 1947 with ‘GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT’, her second and profound film under Kazan’s direction, produced by Hollywood’s no-nonsense producer, Darryl Zanuck, whose 1940s films dumped American nationalism and official prejudices in favour of America as an ideal of human equality and justice.

Gentleman’s Agreement
McGuire’s role as the ex-married woman introduced to journalist Gregory Peck, who is assigned to expose anti-Semitism in a series if magazine articles, gave cinema a whole new feminine power in attitude, freedom of lifestyle, fashion, and subtle sexuality, caught between personal open-mindedness and familial conformity.
McGuire sank her performance into the hearts and minds of viewers by realistically exposing the difference between backing Peck’s anti-prejudicial social cause, but backing out when it threatens to expose and embarrass the prejudices within her own family. When Peck, a non-Jew like McGuire, decides to pretend he is a Jew to see just what reactions and prohibitions occur, McGuire supports him completely in his venture, but when he decides to continue the pretence when he is introduced to her family, she retreats, reminding him that he is not really a Jew, and it would only hurt their real interaction with her white Gentile family members.
However, McGuire’s profound achievements in this film, and most of her other similar roles in outstanding films like ‘MAKE HASTE TO LIVE’, and ‘THREE COINS IN A FOUNTAIN’ of 1954, ‘FRIENDLY PERSUASION’ of 1956, the amazing ‘A SUMMER PLACE’ of 1959, and ‘SUSAN SLADE’ of 1961 show how an individual feminine style comes to possess and demonstrate qualities which defeat the barriers of social stereotypes. Her key weapon in these films is her cultivation of inner human beauty above and against racial egotism, nationalistic intolerance, prissy moral dogmatism, and false modesty.

McGuire’s special features
Of course, she qualified as a film star because of her physical beauty as well. A bit short, but compact, with a small chest, but wide-hipped, her special features were her wide sensual mouth, small teeth which sparkled like her eyes when she smiled, especially in those black-and-white masterpieces of the 1940s.
It was Kazan’s sensitive camera which first lovingly doted on McGuire’s most jolting physical feature which contrasted with her subtle sensuality. That feature was her prominent buttocks, which the movie camera caught lovingly in profiles with her slow, pensive walk in close skirts to the knees, or in those flowing satin skirts which softly outlined her shapely figure in Jean Negulesco’s colour classic, ‘THREE COINS IN A FOUNTAIN’.
McGuire also mastered the short, wavy hairstyle chicly pinned or brushed back. It went perfectly with her mildly-smoked cigarettes, her warm tone and careful speech, her posture, as in ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ when Peck first meets her on a blind date in a restaurant, and she says, smiling at the end of their conversation and frank admittance of mutual attraction: “What about dinner?”
The scene then cuts away, and we never see them have that dinner, but we are left with the impression that her use of the word ‘dinner’ is not simply literal, but a euphemism for something else much more pleasurable.

McGuire’s bold, sensual style
In ‘Three Coins in a Fountain’, McGuire, as the loyal longtime secretary of an aging American writer, Clifton Webb, living in Rome, suddenly ends their coy platonic beating around the bush by admitting that she loves him, realizing his intellectual pride would never have allowed him to admit he felt the same. This is Dorothy McGuire’s style, which filmmakers knew, casting her correctly over and over again.
She made a motto of less sweet talk and more romantic action, which could be quite passionate, though she never disrobes on screen. She knows immediately the strength of her decision to love when the right time comes along, and her lack of hesitation catches us unaware. Nothing proved this more than in ‘A SUMMER PLACE’ of 1959, produced, directed, and written by Delmer Daves, the controversial director who repeatedly stood up for native Indian or Afro-American and mixed people in black-and-white Hollywood masterpiece films like ‘3:10 TO YUMA’ of 1957, and ‘KINGS GO FORTH’ of 1958.
‘A SUMMER PLACE’ remains unequalled today as one of the best of Hollywood’s most frank anti-prejudicial films towards class, race, sex, and youth. McGuire is just one of the characters who combat this social pattern, even from within her own family. She is the unfaithful wife of an upper-class alcoholic, whom she married to avoid the scandal of her early affair with a poor lifeguard, brilliantly played by the unique Richard Egan, who delivers one of Hollywood’s most precise and fiery attacks against all sorts of  prejudices evident within his American wife.
No other film since has shown father and daughter discussing sexuality so openly and permissively. At one point, Egan takes the brassiere and girdle his daughter, Sandra Dee, refuses to wear to please her mother, and casts it outside a yacht’s porthole in agreement with her.
If anyone today thinks a 1959 film is obviously old-fashioned and out of date, they should see ‘A SUMMER PLACE’. McGuire asserts her special style of passion burning beneath her modesty, as in that scene where she reunites secretly with Richard Egan at a boathouse, and finally embracing her, he asks if she missed him in all the years of her marriage, and McGuire turns around swiftly, saying: “Oh God, yes!” kissing him with fiery enthusiasm.

McGuire’s achievement
Today, her films hardly appear listed in numerous popular film anthologies, nor do some of the most socially important films by her directors, like Kazan, Negulesco, and Daves. Yet, her whole effect created an aesthetic standard shared between different character roles. Perhaps McGuire’s touching role as the pacifist wife and mother of a Quaker family in ‘FRIENDLY PERSUASION’ of 1956, sums up her mixture of non-conformist morality and simmering sensuality, hinted at in the theme-song of this wonderful classic film: “Thee pleasures me in a hundred ways, put on your bonnet your cape and your gloves, and come with me, for thee I love.” This invitation in her two dozen plus films, no doubt went out into the open-minded societies across the world that thrived on film-culture of quality, and once made Hollywood  film-stars like Dorothy McGuire a vital asset in the cultivation of human beauty worldwide.