Best Actress Update: 5 More Down, 80 to Go
(Lost to Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8)
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Jennifer Jones in Love Letters (1945) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce)
For an actress with such an appealing veneer, plus an impressive quintet of Oscar nods, Jones sure doesn't come across very well in most of her anointed performances. Her vulgarity as a half-Mexican vixen in Duel in the Sun is at least more tactlessly fascinating than her obedient restraint as a lovelorn half-Chinese doctor in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, but this matching set of ethnic caricatures is still pretty embarrassing. Then there's Love Letters, where she plays a 100%-English amnesiac who falls in love with Joseph Cotten, not realizing that she's been in love with him before, but only via a wartime exchange of love letters that he ghost-wrote on behalf of a lousy comrade. The script, by Ayn Rand of all people, is both ridiculous and interesting for all its convolutions. Sadly, aside from Dieterle's timid direction, Jones is the worst thing in it, going unnervingly wild-eyed to communicate both her lapses in memory and her romantic passions, and skating by on some very thin, cosmetic approaches to a potentially layered character.
Sophia Loren in Marriage Italian Style (1964) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins)
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Marsha Mason in Chapter Two (1979) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Sally Field in Norma Rae)
Like Garson in Campobello, Mason is largely constrained by her vehicle, which casts her as the more interesting half of a romantic couple, only to relegate her into fawning subservience. Yes, Neil Simon writes her a big, cathartic monologue where she shakes the rafters with her proclamations of self-worth, but Mason is actually much better at humanizing the endless one-liners, allowing us to hear a plausible character instead of the steady, recycled voice of the self-regarding playwright. Even at that, she cut deeper and found more variations in Only When I Laugh, and she was funnier in the better-defined situations of The Goodbye Girl. This is a Glenda Jackson-in-A Touch of Class nomination, applauding Mason for a deft, considered presence in a rom-com part that a lesser actress might have phoned in. At least she didn't win like Jackson did; in fact, if 1979 had generated more solid contenders, I doubt she'd have qualified at all.
Luise Rainer in The Great Ziegfeld (1936) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Winner)
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The Pick of This Litter: An easy win for Sophia Loren, not just because her work is so vivacious and well-rounded (brava, signora!), but because Garson, Jones, and Mason have all been manifestly better in other nominated performances than they are in these. The big disappointment for me is Rainer, by whom I'd expected to be wowed. Normally, you don't come out of nowhere, defy your third billing, and defeat Carole Lombard and newly widowed MGM queen Norma Shearer if you don't have some serious chops. Maybe it's just a taste thing. I did, at least, like her better in The Good Earth (but she shouldn't have won for that, either).
(Images © 1960 Warner Bros. Pictures, reproduced from MoviePoster.com; © 1964 Compagnia Cinematografica Champion, reproduced from this Italian blog; and © 1936 MGM, reproduced from the Ravin' Maven.)
Labels: 1930s, 1940s, 1960s, 1970s, Best Actress, Greer Garson, Oscars
4 Comments:
don't you worry about running out of these.
I know I do.
I'm sorryrunning out of what?
running out of nominees. eventually there won't be any left and you'll have only this year's crop to view.
it seems so. um. final.
or maybe i'm just jealous that i'm so far behind and trying to get you to slow down.
Oh, no worries: as the Silkwood example proved, once I've seen all the nominees, I'll still get to return to the performances I saw too long ago to remember clearly, like Anne Bancroft in The Pumpkin Eater and Jessica Lange in Music Box and Isabelle Adjani in The Story of Adèle H. and Camille Claudel. That's a whole sideline right there.
As you know, a true actressexual never taps out! (I admit I'm a partisan to the alternate spelling.)
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