Actress Files: Barbara Stanwyck

Barbara Stanwyck, Sorry, Wrong Number
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1948 Best Actress Oscar to Jane Wyman for Johnny Belinda)

Why I Waited: I took a lengthy tour of early Stanwyck about a year ago but stalled out around Double Indemnity. Her post-Phyllis period is much less familiar to me and, I must admit, more uneven based on what I have seen. Still, who doesn't look forward to 90 minutes in bed with a freaked-out Babs? By all rights, she ought to have reaped twice as many nominations as she did, and I wanted her counted among my final group.

The Performance: All of my last three profile subjects, Ingrid Bergman, Olivia de Havilland, and Irene Dunne, were contenders again in the 1948 Best Actress race. Most people today and a sizable ratio of them at the time thought de Havilland's asylum patient in The Snake Pit was the most deserving nominee, give or take that her even more deserving sister, Joan Fontaine, was inexplicably missing from the list for Letter from an Unknown Woman. All of these ladies were bested by second-time nominee Jane Wyman, for not speaking a word as the mute rape victim of Johnny Belinda, defending her unhappily begotten baby with a double-barrel shotgun. The fifth nominee, effectively treated as such in contemporary journalism, was Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number, giving a virtual inverse of the Wyman performance. Bedridden and reliant on the telephone, Stanwyck's performance is extravagantly concentrated on her voice. Wyman was backed into a corner, killing in self-defense; Stanwyck starts out in a corner, trying to stave off her own murder, the plotting of which she horrifyingly overhears when the operator misdirects one of her calls. But what if this isn't a misdirection? What if her husband Henry (Burt Lancaster), whom she intended to ring, is one of her would-be assassins?

A lot of lurid stuff goes on in Johnny Belinda and in Sorry, Wrong Number, which might sounds like a point of connection except that Johnny has the romantic luster and the improbable optimism of a prestige project. Along with The Snake Pit, it was the lead nomination-earner in its year. (How often could you say that about any two recent vehicles made as showpieces for their headlining actresses?) Sorry, Wrong Number, though, is one of the few and one of the first shabby shockers to make its way into the Best Actress derby. Paramount treated the film with some care, given its established commodity value as a celebrated radio play starring Agnes Moorehead. They made plenty of money from it, too, and Anatole Litvak, the same director who later helmed the tonily dressed but visually inert Anastasia, fills the movie with the kinds of ornate sequence shots and camera movements that prove the technical ambitions of the filmmakers. Still, Sorry, Wrong Number feels akin to subsequent Best Actress vehicles like Sudden Fear and The Star: snapshots of major stars flirting with B-grade disreputability, demonstrating the abilities and the magnetism that have made them superstars, but also disclosing some untidy, serrated edges in those moments of extreme emotion toward which the films keep pushing them. You can't always differentiate whether these ladies are enjoying their strolls down darker, rougher avenues or whether an odor of desperation, maybe even exhaustion, is wafting into their careers.

I don't mean this as strict criticism, but if anything, Stanwyck's performance is one of the elements that make Sorry, Wrong Number seem like dubious exploitation, particularly if we compare it to all that fancy camera choreography. Let's be clear: you do have to know what you're doing to inhabit such an aggravated, ultimately hysterical pitch for 90 minutes without stalling the film or fatiguing the audience. Stanwyck's stamina helps to make Sorry, Wrong Number feel like a persuasively real-time suspenser, and though it's hard to imagine showing up to set for so many days in a row, instantly ready to leap these scales of intensity, she pulled it off. In individual moments, you see her wit and her resourcefulness in bright lights. Her varsity letter in cigarette-wielding is all she needs in the early scenes to establish that Leona Stevenson, incapacitated though she is, is no helpless victim by temperament, even if the screenplay does toss her into the deep waters of panic fairly early. Leona even finds time for a few puffs as she re-cradles the phone following that overheard confab about snuffing her out, before she moves ahead with a call to the authorities. Sometimes, Stanwyck's gifts serve primarily to help her past some flaw in Lucille Fletcher's plotting, as when she has to achieve such levels of terror that Leona actually hangs up on an operator whose help she badly needs, but without making the audience retract our sympathies in the way we usually do when the marked victims in horror movies start behaving like ignoramuses. My favorite moment in the performance is probably her disbelieving reaction shot during a flashback scene to her first date with Lancaster, a low-rung employee in her father's pharmaceutical empire who can't figure out what she stands to gain from taking up with him. Stanwyck doesn't need a word to telegraph the answer, just a wickedly lascivious stare, curled into a smile at his virility and also his obliviousness. Especially in a film that tends to hamper her distinctive but formidable carnality, it's a great moment, also providing a rare flicker of humor in this character.

All the same, too many of these compliments conjure the reverse specters of what is too limited in the part, or too coarsely unexplored in the performance, or both. Lancaster creates some trouble by keeping Henry from looking remotely interested in his courtship with Leona; he's still a new enough actor that he hasn't learned to employ that Mount Rushmore face with more subtlety, and he's too quick to give Henry a motive. Still, his dollar-chasing selfishness should never have been a surprise to Leona, even if this particularly lethal scheme isn't something you'd automatically see coming, and Stanwyck's omission of any signs of how Leona responds to or rationalizes Henry's manifest reluctance about their marriage leaves the character looking a little dim. Maybe she feels she's lucky to snare any husband, much less such a hunky one, but Leona shares so much of Stanwyck's typical, brazen self-confidence that this explanation doesn't scan, either. Maybe all Leona wants is a sex object or a pet, given her fierce individualism or her insuperable bond with her rich daddy, with whom she still lives, even after she marries Henry. But then, the character's "cardiac neurosis," the very premise for her spells of bed-rest, is a psychosomatic illness triggered by wild tantrums based in insecurity, so that rules out the thesis of Leona being a stalwart pillar on her own. And the casting of Ed Begley fairly well pulverizes any possibility of being in love with Papa.

So, why does Leona marry Henry, and why is she so taken aback by his own duplicities, even the smaller, earlier, more reasonable ones? Why does she get sick with these quasi-paralyzing spells—apart from their seeming like an immature writer's stringy compromise-device for avoiding full-on disability, which would impose tighter restrictions on character and incident than Fletcher seems willing to entertain? And, as much as I hate to ask this: who is Leona, anyway, except a vessel of enraged, effective, but rather clockwork stages of fear? Her tearful collapse upon hearing from an unexpected party in the final sequence, plus the river of apologies that start pouring from her mouth, seem out of keeping with the tougher broad Stanwyck has implied at other moments, not least in her harshly expressed impatience with anything that the secondary characters attempt to tell her. Leona only allows the most direct answers to her fairly limited questions. Again, the writing is not Stanwyck's ally in this project. She's stuck with a lot of radio-potboiler language that's meant to hook the casual listener or orient the confused auditor: e.g., "But where is my husband, Mr. Stevenson?" or "Don't you know, I'm a very sick woman!" Allow me to grossly project: it's quite possible that, as a characterization, Leona Stevenson seemed so scattershot to Stanwyck, so obviously a necessary crux for this thrill-ride premise but not a coherent individual in her own right, that she simply gave up trying to make her anything but scared, then outraged, then scared and outraged, and finally scared.

Stanwyck's professionalism and inveterate hardiness serve the material just fine. She might err too far on the side of making Leona hard to like, but she is constitutionally unable to make the easy choice of inviting pity, which would undoubtedly lure so many other interpreters. Still, for an actor who applied such an inimitable stamp of personality to virtually every performance she gave for an extraordinary fifteen years—such distinctive blends of sauciness, complexity, and intelligence, across a huge range of genres and parts—I admit to being chagrined by the sourness and rather flat severity that start stalking her work in the late 40s. In Sorry, Wrong Number, in The Two Mrs. Carrolls, in Crime of Passion, even in Robert Wise's Executive Suite, where everybody except Stanwyck seems to be firing on all the right pistons from the word "Go," she comes across as having been barely convinced to take the part, as though she materialized on the set while still working out some fierce aggression against the role or the script, maybe even the medium. She holds back from connecting all the notes that are supplied to her (such as they are), and still more from adding her own chords, which is the crowning glory of so many of her 30s and early 40s turns. Douglas Sirk still found an eager, sympathetic, gorgeously disciplined actress in Stanwyck for 1953's All I Desire, and I'm sure there are other examples of late-career glories. She fully accedes to the high-style tackiness of Walk on the Wild Side without skimping on backstory or nuance. Still, it's notable how many roles after Double Indemnity recruited this incredibly versatile performer to play harsh, off-putting, sometimes malignant women, and she tends to make them even more so—including when, as in Sorry, Wrong Number, she might have justified this approach a little better by digging more deeply for rationales, signaling more strongly that her movies were worth her effort.

It's impossible for me, I think, I hope, to dislike a Stanwyck performance, and in the case of Sorry, Wrong Number, there is no reason to. She's not at all bad in it. I just don't see her taking the kinds of initiatives that might have allowed her to be good. That creeping edge in the already-flinty voice of hers registers not just as panic but as a kind of frustrated fatigue. More than soliciting the other characters' assistance, Leona seems to want them to talk faster, say less, just get the fuck on with it. She has good reasons: the clock is ticking, and as far as she can tell, she has a date with the Reaper at 11:15. But I almost laughed during a few of the scenes when Leona barks so loudly into her interlocutor's receiver that there's no need for a cross-cut to Leona herself in order for us to hear her: "IS THERE ANYTHING WRONG? YOU'RE NOT KEEPING SOMETHING FROM ME, ARE YOU?" "ARE YOU TRYING TO MAKE FUN OF ME?" "JUST IN CASE YOU DON'T KNOW, I'M A HELPLESS INVALID!" "WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, I CAN'T TAKE ANY MESSAGES NOW!" ""DON'T YOU REALIZE I'M A TERRIBLY SICK WOMAN?" "LIARS, LIARS, LIARS, LIARS, LIARS, LIARS!"

I confess, my notes are incomplete: a few of these lines may have been spoken over direct shots of Stanwyck on the horn. In any case, she's awfully shouty. Granted, in her circumstances, you would be, too, but you might not want to be such a screeching harpy that no one wanted to help you, nor could anyone get a word in edgewise. And you might not signal, as Stanwyck often does, that she's not just yelling at Sally Lord or Waldo Evans or Dr. Alexander—respectively, her romantic rival, her shadowy informant, and the writer of her prescriptions—but that she's yelling at Paramount, at Lucille Fletcher, at an industry that's starting to take a narrower view of her, and of which she's starting to take an embittered, unimpressed view herself. None of this may have any connection to biographical reality. Maybe Stanwyck loved Sorry, Wrong Number, meditated deeply on the enigmas of Leona Stevenson, and could think of nothing better in 1948 than to continue playing a long train of perturbed, erratically sympathetic women. But for me, watching this performance, listening to that voice, I heard a different message coming over the line.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 7 to Go

The Best Actress Project: 1944

It's been a while since the last Best Actress profile, and since I recently went on a big Best Picture-related tear through the movies of 1944, I found myself in a good position to review that starry field. On the pro side: five stellar actresses whose careers combine for 31 nominations and 7 wins. The winner is a solid choice by Academy standards, and at least one other nominee gives a certifiably iconic turn. On the con side: nearly everything else, including notably subpar work by two of the contenders.

I bowed out of 1944 with only a few truly choice titles left to come, and even fewer that feature female leads: happily, I have the Hitchcock/Steinbeck collabo Lifeboat to look forward to on a big screen in May, and Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale—which wasn't Oscar-eligible until 1949—on the same screen, two weeks previously. I have a strong hunch that Tallulah will slay the competition in the poll about whose work I should check out to possibly displace one of my five current favorites, but go ahead, prove me wrong. Or prove me right. I love that, too.

Something Wicked Awesome This Way Comes

No one works as hard as Gary Tooze, the DVD Beaver, to let the world know about imminent DVD releases, and to help us sort between the wheat and the chaff, down to the finest little decibel of audio quality and the slenderest little margin of image cropping. I'm not as exacting a DVD shopper as Gary, and I wouldn't even begin to know how to be as comprehensive as he is, but so much pure gold has been dropping on the market lately, with even more looming on the horizon, that I felt I needed to say something.

For all of you Barbara Stanwyck fans, or for anyone who wanted to believe my raves about Executive Suite but had no way of verifying them for yourself, Warner Home Video is dropping The Barbara Stanwyck Collection at the end of October. That's a while away—ask any academic, or any student, and we'll scream at you that the beginning of fall is still an eon from now—but it's never too soon to gear up for Barbara. I haven't seen any of the other films in the collection, but Robert Wise's thrillingly tense and sensationally acted boardroom thriller (that's not an oxymoron, if it sounds like one) doesn't pull any punches. Barbara helps, Fredric March is efficiently insidious, June Allyson comes vividly if briefly to life, and Nina Foch actresses at every possible edge, without once making a show of herself. Exquisite.

Even though I dislike their new logo and redesigned packaging (who picked Rancid Mustard for the color on the spines?), I must admit that the Criterion Collection has been exceeding even their own high standards of late. They've honored my three favorite Japanese directors already this summer, with deluxe editions of Mizoguchi's Sanshô the Bailiff (my rhapsodic review here), Shohei Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine, and a box-set of Hiroshi Teshigara masterpieces, so I can finally stop cruising used DVD stores in pursuit of the out-of-print Milestone imprint of Woman in the Dunes, one of the greatest films of all time. (Am I supposed to insert a personal qualifier here?) As if this all weren't enough, coming soon from Criterion are Mala Noche, the highly elusive debut of Gus Van Sant, and a director-approved re-release of Days of Heaven (original review and quick tribute after seeing the restoration in 35mm).

Auteur delights, or at least they delighted me: David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE, which scared the bejesus out of me in cinemas all three times I paid to see it, arrives with even more scarifying footage on August 14th; and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (reviewed here) gets the 2-disc treatment it always deserved on October 23rd, as do several other Kubrick titles.

My two favorite films of 2007 so far, Ray Lawrence's unnerving and trenchant Jindabyne and Robinson Devor's courageously and compellingly cryptic Zoo, will both reach wider American audiences on DVD than they ever enjoyed in theaters; Zoo arrives on Sep. 16 and Jindabyne on Oct. 2.

On the other end of the historical spectrum, the archivists and the deep-pocketed among you will be ecstatic to hear that those unbeatable compilations of early-cinema rareties and esoterica, Treasures from American Film Archives and More Treasures from American Film Archives, shall be followed in October by the National Film Preservation Foundation's Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934. The thematic rubric is new for this series (the other collections are purposefully and wonderfully eclectic), but there's still plenty of variety included in this new package, despite its pointed and fascinating emphasis on politics. I'll study up on How They Rob Men in Chicago, in case history ever repeats itself, but I'll be even more excited for Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl, the entire disc devoted to female suffrage and "The New Woman," and virtually every other snippet, sideshow, epic, and episode. Here are the full contents, and here's where you can pre-order at the greatest savings (though Amazon has a prettier page). The NFPF has already announced that they'll be hosting another theme party for next year's Treasures IV set, which will be devoted to the American Avant-Garde between 1945-85. (On that same page, you can watch selected clips from the first two anthologies; select Disc 1 to see a full minute of Watson & Webber's mindblowing The Fall of the House of Usher, and try to figure out how two amateurs made this in 1928!)

Finally, apologies for burying the lead, but if you've got a multiregion player—or even if you don't, because here's a reason to buy one—Chantal Akerman's legendary feminist opus Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which has never appeared in any home format anywhere in the world, is now available as part of a French-Belgian DVD package called The Chantal Akerman Collection. "A woman in trouble" if ever there were one, Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig, of Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel and Buñuel's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) is a Belgian housewife like countless others, preparing breakfast and cleaning her kitchen, and devoting her morning to countless other errands around the apartment...except that Akerman makes us feel the scale of these semi-mindless occupations, their essential fusion of tedium and fascination, by capturing these household tasks in huge 35mm and with unrelenting attention for almost four hours. Three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman, in what would feel like three years in the life of the audience if Seyrig weren't so subtly and unpredictably entrancing, and if Akerman's political platform weren't so fully realized within clear, confident, brilliant aesthetics. And I haven't even said anything about the gentleman caller. Or the ———... because I don't want to spoil them.

See Jeanne Dielman... on a big screen if you ever get any opportunity in your whole life to do so; it makes sense, despite the intense frustration, that Akerman has withheld her legendary masterpiece for so long, because the hugeness of her images in relation to their subject is deeply essential to the project. Still, not everyone is going to have that big-screen opportunity, and those of us who have certainly want to revisit Jeanne Dielman... and figure out how Akerman, Seyrig, cinematographer Babette Mangolte, and editor Patricia Canino pulled it off. If I know you love Todd Haynes' Safe, and by his own admission, that film, like so many others, is impossible without this one. I refer you again to my personal list of the greatest films ever made, and I insist (insist!) that, Treasures III and other anthologies aside, The Chantal Akerman Collection, which also includes the deliriously great Rendez-vous d'Anna and three other titles, is the DVD release of the year.

(Image from Jeanne Dielman c/o this Finnish-language bio of Chantal Akerman)

Best Actress Update: 5 More Down, 75 to Go

Jane Alexander in Testament (1983) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment)
The major disappointment of this batch is Jane Alexander's proficient but doomed work in Testament. When I say "doomed," I don't mean the plot of this post-apocalyptic family drama so much as the flat, slipshod direction that zombifies most of the cast, bungles all the edits, and refuses any trace of style. It's clear that the script is aiming for a ground-level view of massive cataclysm; occasionally, a terse vignette like that of a mother sewing up a dead child's body in her own bedroom curtains is allowed to do its chillingly intimate work. Much more often, though, Testament botches its aspirations toward subtlety with moist speeches, heavy symbolism, and scenes that push way too hard to underline director Lynne Littman's clunky interpretations of the patchy script. Within that context, Alexander saves what scenes she can, and her sour, haunted watchfulness is an interesting, unsentimental basis for the character when the director lets her get away with it. But in other moments, even Alexander is sunk by false theatricality (a stagy search for a teddy bear, an unpersuasive collapse into despair followed by an overly rhetorical kiss), and neither the dialogue nor the filmmaking supplies her with the tools to create a sustained, interesting performance. I know a lot of people love Testament, and love Alexander in it, but I have to demur on both counts. Fellow nominee Meryl Streep in Silkwood runs circles around her for multifaceted revelation of character and for conjuring the pure terror of nuclear contamination.

Greer Garson in Blossoms in the Dust (1941) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Joan Fontaine in Suspicion)
In her first of several teamings with director Mervyn LeRoy, and at the outset of a remarkable string of five consecutive Best Actress nods, Garson plays Edna Gladney, a Midwestern debutante who becomes a champion of orphans (though she hates the word!) and "illegitimate" children (though she hates the word!) in Fort Worth, Texas. As so often, there is something so precious and safe about Garson's radiant refinement—her gleaming smiles, her flaming red hair, her accent incongruously posh by way of Wisconsin—that one feels a bit duped in praising or enjoying her work, as though one has fallen for a crashingly obvious marketing ploy. But radiant she is, and particularly once the script catches up with her age, her emotional generosity, ease of movement, and expressive face and voice go an incredibly long way toward selling the treacly script. She also interacts beautifully with Felix Bressart, a gem as a loyal and wisecracking pediatrician, and on the few occasions when Blossoms allows Edna a moment of unsavory affect (envy, annoyance, self-pity), Garson's smart enough to underline it and spry enough to win us right back.

Susan Hayward in My Foolish Heart (1949) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress)
Hayward, predictably, is at her best as the taunting alcoholic we meet in the suburban frame story, slurring out some delicious dialogue without too much focus-pulling or fussy mannerism. (Some of the choicest bits include "Who said, 'To forgive is divine'? Probably not somebody I'd care to meet, anyway" and, on the subject of jealous husbands, "They want to think you've spent your whole life vomiting every time a boy came near you.") Still, the very ordinariness that grounds Hayward's work whenever she plays an addict or a rager (which was often) works against her when she's cast as a co-ed, a romantic dreamer, or the very kind of average gal she very much looks to be. She's trapped by unimaginative casting in a thin role throughout much of My Foolish Heart's extended flashback narrative, made worse by Mark Robson's stolid direction, which shares none of Hayward's enthusiasm for the character's darker shadings. Thus, we're only interested when she's nursing a cocktail or cozying up to a witty father (a terrific Robert Keith) who shows, as they say, a little too much friendly interest in his daughter.

Carol Kane in Hester Street (1975) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Louise Fletcher in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest)
Two things can happen in years when Oscar faces a paucity of obvious choices: either the voters challenge themselves to nominate strong work in the kinds of movies and roles they would usually avoid (Keisha Castle-Hughes in Whale Rider, Samantha Morton in In America) or they pad the field with serviceable but unremarkable efforts that achieve little for Oscar besides filling the five-wide quota (Miranda Richardson in Tom & Viv, Susan Sarandon in The Client). Carol Kane's nod, garnered in a year so thin that former winners filed a protest, somehow falls on both sides of this fence. On the one hand, it's lovely to see Oscar pay such headlining attention to a modest, stylistically distinctive, culturally specific tale about Jewish immigrants and forced assimilation, even if nothing in Hester Street, only partially by design, accedes much beyond the thematic or narrative sophistication of The Jazz Singer. Kane isn't the helium-voiced, helium-minded daff we've come to know. She's lonesome, panicked, and finally angry, and she delivers almost her entire performance in Yiddish, to boot. However, she's also a bit overstated in her tremulousness, and she doesn't find much in her character beyond what is asked by the mannered direction and the quaint, predictable screenplay. Like her fellow nominee Glenda Jackson in Hedda, Kane stitches some smart, powerful moments into a somewhat routine performance, in a movie that vacillates between trying too hard and not trying enough.

Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas (1937) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Luise Rainer in The Good Earth)
What is it about Barbara Stanwyck that makes every one of her superb performances something of a surprise, no matter how many of them she gives? That low, husky voice, that downturned mouth, the narrow eyes, the nearly immobile features of her improbable face, the Brooklyn-bred, working-class butchness that pervaded her whole persona—all of these imply typecasting limitations that simply prove irrelevant to her greatest work, ranging all the way from film noir to screwball comedy to Westerns to melodramas to social realism to thrillers to B-movie macabre. Here, her flinty toughness offers an ideal through-line beneath her engaging, cackly impatience as Stella Martin, then her marital ambivalence as Stella Dallas, and finally her nimble balancing of the dear and the grotesque as one of Hollywood's most famously self-sacrificing mothers...though there's also a mean streak, a brutal cunning, and an obliviousness to Stanwyck's Stella that tend to vanish from popular memories of the character. Laserlike with her smart, forceful gestures and insinuations, keeping the movie alive even when the direction is flat, and interacting exquisitely with all of her co-stars, Stanwyck hits one of her highest peaks.

The Pick of This Litter: You can practically pull out the scenes that got Alexander, Hayward, and Kane nominated, the last two in very dubious years for the category, but none of their performances dig deeply enough, largely because the films won't allow it. Before we feel too sorry for them, though, let's realize that Stella Dallas is no slam-dunk on the page except that Barbara Stanwyck makes the sauciness, the humor, the resentment, the intelligence, and the idiocies of her character so vivid and so bizarrely credible.

(Images © 1983 Paramount Pictures, reproduced from MovieGoods.com; © 1941 MGM Pictures, reproduced from FilmPosters.com; © 1949 Samuel Goldwyn Co./RKO Radio Pictures, reproduced from Carteles de Cine; © 1975 Midwest Films/Home Vision Entertainment, reproduced from Rotten Tomatoes; © 1937 Samuel Goldwyn Co., reproduced, oddly enough, from Stuff Kids Like)

Supporting Actress Sundays: 1962... Plus a Major Twist

StinkyLulu's monthly feature Supporting Actress Smackdown fully earns its name today, as the usually simpatico participants file notably divergent opinions on almost all of the performances. True, no one waves a flag for Thelma Ritter's sixth winless nomination, for Birdman of Alcatraz, but she's very much the exception that proves the rule. Oscar's own anointee, Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker, snags an easy echoing vote from me. Neither StinkyLulu nor Tim nor Nathaniel casts any aspersion on the performance, but sadly, Mrs. Iselin's voracious brainwashing campaign has rolled onward, unfettered, and claimed all of my comrades! Or, while we're grabbing at crass and obvious metaphors, am I simply blind and deaf to Angela Lansbury's brilliance in The Manchurian Candidate? (Her inspired scene work, I appreciate; her irreproachable proficiency, I get; but I see no brilliance, hear no brilliance.) Read all about it here, though your tour isn't complete this month until you've also taken in Canadian Ken's vivid, funny, and beautifully argued impressions of all five performances.

Unfortunately, one turn you won't hear us dissect is Jane Fonda's in the redolent, subversive, and nearly extraordinary 1962 drama Walk on the Wild Side. In only her second or third movie role, Jane Fonda plays Kitty Twist (!), a hot-tempered hot patootie whom Manchurian idol Laurence Harvey meets on the side of a dusty Texas highway. They're both hitching to New Orleans—he in order to reclaim a lover who's gotten away, she in order to hit, gobble, and fucking own the whole town. If Fonda's acting serves any indication, usurping the screen as her own birthright and eminent domain, we should all be placing our bets on Kitty.

In the first of many curves in Wild Side's walk, Kitty gets dumped just as she's poised to seize the picture. She'll re-emerge later, and you can basically guess when and how, but the script throws Kitty a few more twists, and it's hard to say whether she or New Orleans ultimately emerges victorious in their brutal, feline fight. Fonda's insolent sexuality and growling entitlement explode into the same sort of fireball that Angelina Jolie detonated in her early, Gia-era performances. If you only know Fonda as that silly noodle from Barbarella, or as the national landmark from Klute and Julia, or as the latter-day harridan of Monster-in-Law, you owe it to yourself to see how it all began—how her carnality, her intelligence, and her defensive anger were inextricable from each other, bleeding out of her very public persona as Henry Fonda's volatile daughter, yet all in the service of an increasingly complicated character. She's also a whiz with a laugh-line: just look how, when a dumbfounded Harvey stumbles across her in a high-end bordello, he asks her what she's doing there, and she slings out the retort, "I run the candy concession."

From what I can glean, Walk on the Wild Side still labors under a derisive, almost bilious critical reputation, but I can't for the life of me figure out why. For one thing, it's a Supporting Actress Smackdown in itself, rounded out by Anne Baxter, using her smarts and sensitivity to neutralize her odd casting as a Mexican diner matron; and Barbara Stanwyck, alternately imperious and obsequious as a French Quarter madame, abjectly in love with her costliest girl and willing to kill to keep her. The mononomic French actress Capucine is a knockout as Stanwyck's reluctant ward—also, crucially, Harvey's long-lost paramour—but it's the agency, introspection, and dawning bitterness of her performance that anchor the picture. Even Harvey's good, if outclassed by the orbiting women. Elmer Bernstein delivers a tasty score that's an utter contrast to his To Kill a Mockingbird compositions of the same year, and Edward Dmytryk mounts his scenes with ferocity and precision, transcending the "moody" photography and deepening the nonetheless-succulent camp. (Need I remind you: Jane Fonda as a would-be hooker named "Kitty Twist," Barbara Stanwyck as a desperate dyke, and Anne Baxter as a Mexican.) Walk on the Wild Side gets much further with tragic love and futile rescue missions than Richard Brooks' Sweet Bird of Youth does, and the fully believable whorehouse is more tangible as a jail than the one in Birdman of Alcatraz. You might quibble with errant peripherals, many of them related to Stanwyck's legless husband (!), but Walk on the Wild Side stands mighty tall among 1962 releases, and Fonda is a miracle worker unto herself. A–

(Images © 1962 MGM/UA, reproduced from the IMDb PhotoGallery; and © 1962 Columbia Pictures)

Picked Flick #79: Executive Suite

Among the great, semi-forgotten American films of the 1950s is Robert Wise's Executive Suite, my favorite among his many directorial outings and still an incisive, attentive character drama about the high, hallowed halls of corporate intrigue. "Because it is high in the sky," an anonymous narrator intones over the opening shots of then-modern skyscrapers, "you may think those who work there are somehow above the tensions and temptations of those who work on the lower floors. This is to say, it isn't so." And how. The names of the film's dynamite lead cast are heralded onto the screen by the low chimes of a public clock, and with a lineup this sterling—William Holden, Fredric March, Barbara Stanwyck, Walter Pidgeon, Louis Calhern, Dean Jagger, Paul Douglas, Shelley Winters, a surprisingly tough and never-better June Allyson—the gesture hardly feels grandiose. As the movie begins, it demonstrates an affinity for formal stunts like the stark absence of any musical score and the long, tracking POV sequence shot in which the unseen Avery Bullard, president and redeemer of the Treadway Furniture Company, concludes a business meeting in Calhern's office, sends a telegram to his home office, and dies of a sudden stroke on the sidewalk while hailing a cab. From this point forward, however, the movie coils its springs and employs much more modest means in achieving its magnificence: the actors, equipped with great roles and fellows and a drastically under-explored American theme, light into their parts with heroic, muscular conviction. Ingeniously plotted, the film delays each character's awareness of Bullard's death in clever ways, digging into their reactions in some cases—Pidgeon's sorrow, Calhern's duplicity—and cleverly excising these reactions in others, so that we are all the more surprised by their battle strategies for filling the vacuum at the top of the ladder.

Wise, famously, was an editor before he was a director, and as with all of his films, the cutting expertly serves the tone and theme of the film, hastening the ends of key scenes by beats and half-beats, just enough to aggravate the tension. In concert with Ernest Lehman's typically shrewd script, Wise also makes time for unexpected accents and cul-de-sacs in the narrative. When Holden's earnest factory supervisor, now a coalition candidate to take over the company, is called away from a backyard game of catch to keep up with the latest machinations, wife Allyson dons his mitt and takes their son back out to the yard. Throwing and catching some mean fastballs in deep, unedited shots, Allyson keeps up a smart dialogue scene at the same time, which not only constitutes a small and unexpected moment but prudently keeps us guessing about what Holden and his cronies are up to. We know the basic idea; he's collaborating with Calhern, at least, to ensure that crafty, officious fussbudget March doesn't become the top banana, even if March himself capably and unshowily takes top honors in a cast of expert rivals. His prime competition, if we allow the film to teach us that everything is a competition, comes from the unexpected quarter of Nina Foch, Gene Kelly's haughty patron in An American in Paris. Cast here as the late CEO's loyal, proficient, and keenly alert secretary, Foch has one of those roles like Kelly MacDonald's in Gosford Park, watchfully slinking among more obviously dramatic characters, but all the while managing the tough double-trick of clearly delineating a specific character while also serving as the audience's general window into what's happening.

The climax of Executive Suite's script preserves all the slippery power and impressive dexterity of the earlier chapters, and continues to stoke our sense that all of the characters must be closely watched. The closing soliloquy is perhaps the one truly predictable element of the film, but its lucid optimism and core values are still quite rousing. Its grasp of corporate psychology, much less human psychology, seem much richer than in Billy Wilder's glib and opportunistic The Apartment, and the tough, simple confidence of its formal choices register much better with me than the more elaborate noir stylistics of Alexander Mackendrick's celebrated Sweet Smell of Success, which Lehman helped to write. Too, it's one of those movies that you're most likely to see if you pop onto cable TV and find that it happens to be playing, so for most of us, the film is brightly tinged with a genuine sense of discovery. 'Tis pity, though, that this is so.Why we hardly recognize a film this relevant and top-drawer, replete with such famous names ticking off some of their best work, is beyond me, but unlike capitalist profiteering and white-collar backstabbing, it's an easy enough habit to kick. Rent it. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)