Hard, Fast and Beautiful!

Hard, Fast and Beautiful! (1951)

The Price Of Fame In The Big-Time Sports Racket!

When most people look at Florence Farley, they see a pretty teenager. But when Milly Farley looks at her daughter she sees something else: a tennis prodigy who could be Milly’s ticket to money and fame.

Date of release
1951-05-23
TMDB
6.2 / 10 (16)
Runtime
1h 18m
Genres
Drama
Director
Ida Lupino

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: American Girl

Hard, Fast and Beautiful is a 1951 American drama film directed by Ida Lupino and starring Claire Trevor. It is loosely based on the 1930 novel American Girl by sports-fiction author John R. Tunis, which was an unflattering and thinly veiled fictionalization of the life of the tennis star Helen Wills Moody.

Production

The film had two working titles, Mother of a Champion and Loving Cup, before it was titled Hard, Fast and Beautiful.

Sally Forrest was borrowed from MGM for the film. She had starred in two previous Ida Lupino films, Not Wanted and Never Fear (both 1949). According to a Hollywood Reporter news article, technical advisor Eleanor Tennant coached Forrest for her tennis-playing scenes.

Most of the film was shot at the West Side Tennis Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, New York and in North Hollywood, California. Archival footage of tennis matches at Forest Hills and Wimbledon was included in the film.

The film was Lupino's third as a director and was co-produced by The Filmakers, the company that she had founded with her husband, producer Collier Young. The film cost less than $300,000 to produce. Lupino and actor Robert Ryan make a few cameos as tennis-match spectators.

The world premiere of Hard, Fast and Beautiful took place in San Francisco, California on May 23, 1951.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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