Let Them Eat Birthday Cake!
Back in effect, y'all. I still have some spring-quarter papers and projects to assess and then my final grades to tabulate and submit, but this website is eager to spring back to life. I meant to get an early start one week ago, to commemorate Nathaniel's birthday—even though certain snakes in the grass have recently informed me that too many of my recent posts are all about Nathaniel. But, I just survived yet another apartment move, and though nothing (amazingly!) was broken or lost, my internet connection was scuttled until about 48 hours ago. So here, better late than never, is the latest addition to the Best Actress pages. Far be it from me to imply how old Nathaniel just turned, but let's just say that I have selected 1938 as a fitting year of tribute—and all the more fitting because we saw White Banners for the first time together in my Hartford apartment, we both love Bette Davis, and we both really love Norma Shearer, earning her sixth and final Best Actress nomination for Marie Antoinette.Bette copped the Oscar, but to learn who wins my vote, you'll have to click here. The usual poll has already been supplied to determine who you think should have won from Oscar's list, but I'm playing it a bit coy about my own favorite performances from that year, which is also slowing down the other two polls. I rented a lot of 1938 movies in preparation for this Nathaniel-a-thon, and despite wind or rain or sleet or U-Haul or AT&T, I intend to finish out my viewing list... or at least get a little closer. So, tune back in for my own 1938 Dream Team, and some remarks about Luise Rainer, Irene Dunne, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn x 2, Margaret Sullavan Redux, Sally Eilers, Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, and several other ladies who were bright lights in '38! (And it's never too late to wish Nathaniel a happy birthday!)
Labels: Best Actress, Bette Davis, Blog Buddies, Norma Shearer
posted by Nick Davis at 8:25 PM
8 comments
Are you an academic? Does your school run on the quarter system? Is work raining from the sky every day? Yesterday, I thought all I had to worry about were my two classes to teach (about 
But, I must say, till the quarter's over in early June, it's still going to be slow going at this blog, which means I haven't gotten to say anything about my annual springtime 
There's MUCH more to say, too. I still need to follow up on my exploits and juror deliberations at the 
Happy '08! I hope everyone had a great New Year's Day, my favorite day in the entire year to play it cool, keep things close to home, hang out on the futon and on the phone—and hence, no blogging yesterday. But, there will be copious entries soon enough, with end-of-year best lists to compile, and a major birthday to celebrate. (And no, I'm not talking about 
So what does every movie on my 
If that list isn't stupendous enough, consider that I've already elected against work as strong as Nina Hoss' in 
The above were at least runners-up. Katherine Heigl in 
I have been consciously postponing Joan of Arc for a while now; you can smell the elephantiasis and the box-office desperation from a mile away. Joan of Arc is the sort of movie that was made so that it could be promoted, and somehow, even though Bergman won a Tony onstage in this role, her casting in the film seems calibrated more toward PR than dramatic plausibility. Her first scenes are uniquely uncomfortable, with the 5'10", 33-year-old actress failing to seem much like a willowy, agonized teenager living under her father's thumb and runneled with sublime ecstasy and terror after hearing her "voices." Happily, Bergman's performance becomes more emotionally credible and more technically proficient the nearer we get to Joan's imprisonment and martyrdom, even though the movie gets stodgier and more pedestrian. Falconetti's shadow threatens at all points to swat her off the screen, and she has a hard time raising a sword with authority, but the solidity of her face and her persona, which sometimes leads to flat-footed performances (see The Bells of St. Mary's), somehow redeem Joan of Arc from being overly wispy and sentimental about its heroine. I found myself rooting for the performance even when it wasn't working; she's missing three stars by a hair.
A stretch for the "Great Ladies of History" theme, since Fontanne's impersonation of Queen Elizabeth I (playing the same Maxwell Anderson script, in fact, that generated Bette Davis' turn in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex) is limited to the first scene of this unusual comedy. It's a tribute to Fontanne's talent, and consonant with her legendary status in the theater, and crucial to the plot to boot, that Fontanne is so succinctly fascinating in this one scene: look at how strangely but expressively she slumps on her throne at the close. But from there, as the curtain comes down on Elizabeth the Queen, The Guardsman really takes off, as Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, married superstars of the 20th-century stage, play married superstars of the 20th-century stage who love to trade barbs about who's the better performer. She's stunned by his chauvinistic assumption of his own superiority; he's horrified to be thought of as anything less than genius, and also nervous about his wife's wandering eye. From there follows a series of farcical impersonations, uncertain realizations, and some remarkably tart pre-Code innuendo. The plot, however light, is too much fun to spoil, but to whatever extent The Guardsman draws us into a comparative evaluation of these performers, Fontanne trumps her clever but hammy hubby. Her remarkable spectrum of acerbic laughs and wry interjections, complemented by inspired gestures and smart, sexy line deliveries, keep this dated material remarkably fresh. She still acts like a doyenne of the stage, with little sense of interacting specifically with a camera, but she's not "stagy," exactly, and though she never played another film role, one surmises that she could have done great things with Kay Francis' part in the same year's majestically saucy Trouble in Paradise, or with lots of Irene Dunne or Jean Arthur-type roles in future years. A foreigner to the screen, not 100% at home, but delightful nonetheless.
In the wake of 
For quite a long time into Mary, Queen of Scots, Vanessa Redgrave is an unmitigated disaster. She overdoes her usual mannerisms of the gaping smile and the twinkling eyes, making herself cloying and foolish instead of ethereal and incandescent. Her line readings often border on the laughable, when they don't stumble right into the laughable, and she's so thoroughly bested by the sharp, sexy, epicurean, and forceful Glenda Jackson as Queen Elizabeth that Mary, Queen of Scots arrives as something of an annoying afterthought in what is putatively her own movie. What saves the performance, and the film, are the two direct confrontations between Redgrave and Jackson. Even here, Redgrave hasn't thought herself all the way through the character the way Jackson has, and she's still guilty of racing through lines and character beats that she might have handled more slowly. Still, her fury, jealousy, exhaustion, and unlikely self-beatification are tartly communicated, and her sparring with Jackson in their first, secret rendezvous in the forest describes a terrific arc from false friendship to heated rivalry to shrewd, reciprocal assessments. In a better year, Redgrave wouldn't be anywhere near this list, but she saves herself from outright embarrassment and yields some surprisingly memorable moments in this silly soap-operatizing of royal history.
Like Redgrave, Suzman transmits the impression that she is a much more interesting actor than her drab performance in this bloated film would have one believe, yet one is disinclined to make too many excuses for her Czarina Alexandra. True, in some impressive early scenes, her aloof, nearly agoraphobic take on the character strikes a welcome note of mystery in a superficial and almost comically inflated drama, the kind where Czar Nicholas (Michael Jayston) comforts his screaming child in the night with the words, "Oh, you're just dreaming about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand!" Barely half an hour into the film, however, Suzman gets stuck in the cluttered background of the film, fretting and doting over her frail heir, and enlisting unreasonably as a disciple of Rasputin (Tom Baker, one short skip away from Monty Python). Her reticence passes from interesting to unilluminating, and one ends the film knowing nothing about her, and barely caring to know.
One new feature of my revised 
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 
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cast here as a youngish Eleanor Roosevelt, Garson starts her performance on some bizarre and off-putting notes, quite literally: her version of Eleanor's fluty, fruity Old New York accent may well be expert mimicry, but like Jennifer Jason Leigh's take on Dorothy Parker, it's too mannered and outlandish to work as drama. It doesn't help that the script wheedles her for a Big Crying Scene (though Garson's unflamboyant build-up almost makes it work) or that it can't quite decide whether to canonize Eleanor or domesticate her (if you'll believe it, Eleanor sits for the climactic scene while FDR stands). The translucent likeability that anchors Garson's best work can't shine through in this fusty project, but she's still the most watchable actor on-screen, and she mines some persuasively intimate and character-revealing moments, as when she settles down silently in a chair and exchanges a silent, articulate smile with her newly afflicted husband.
The film and the performance get off to a worrisome start: as former hooker Loren wanes on her deathbed, her heart of gold at last giving out, aging playboy and longtime client Marcello Mastroianni ponders all the times he promised his love but ignored her pleas for marriage and respectability. Loren is timelessly fetching as she strides down a Neapolitan street in the film's most famous shot; still, it's all a little tawdry and clichéd, like Malèna played for casual laughs. Everything brightens considerably, though, when Loren "miraculously" revives, revealing her own duplicitous agendas, and she elevates the movie's second half into a tasty, energetic, and admirably humane comedy. She's sexy, clever, and funny, as three-dimensional in her personality as in her formidable physique. Loren won an Oscar three years previously for the sturm and drang of De Sica's Two Women, but here she shows more art and more charm—call her Irene Dunne Italian Style.
To respond to the two most common talking-points around this Oscared performance: yes, I think Anna Held is a crucial enough role with enough screen time to count as a leading performance, but no, I don't think that her famous, last-act telephone call to the Great Ziegfeld himself—congratulating him on his second marriage while bursting into tears of regret—is really all that special. Throughout, Rainer ratchets up the antic stage business and vocal affectations, landing somewhere between overripe comedy and overly emphatic imitation of the real Anna Held (who, to be fair, apparently did cut a fluttery, slightly outlandish figure). Ultimately, Rainer's approach kept me on the surface of the character instead of drawing me into her thoughts and feelings; the exception that proved the rule was her calmest scene, an encounter with Ziegfeld's lovely, young, and boozy new mistress, where Rainer underplays her moment of realization, her sorrow, her jealousy, and her frank pity for the latest fling who thinks she's a keeper.
As I keep marching forward through Oscar nominees of the past, I am occasionally regretting that I splurged so early on so much good stuff and left a steaming pile of Greatest Show on Earths and Great Santinis to contend with in my future. "Great," needless to say, is a false promise in both instances. I'm also wading through a lot of interesting mediocrities like 
Precious few actresses of the early sound era were as blithely comfortable before the camera as Claudette Colbert, especially while radiating such innate intelligence and good humor. Her consummate, seemingly unflappable professionalism makes her a smooth match for her role in Private Worlds as a gifted psychiatrist, winning the confidence of patients and colleagues as well as the audience, even as Charles Boyer's chauvinist hospital director can't quite adjust to the notion of a female doctor. The script sputters a little among its various tones and subplots, and one has the feeling that major moments in Colbert's characterization have been dropped, either in the writing or editing stages. Still, she keeps every scene believable, and like supporting players Joan Bennett and Helen Vinson, she thrives under the directorial hand of Gregory La Cava, whose later success with 1937's Stage Door proved how gifted he was at balancing a wide range of fully plausible women within the same film.
The good news first: Page's wild mannerisms and almost feral conviction perfectly suited her for her next Tennessee Williams project, the 1962 adaptation of Sweet Bird of Youth, where she duly plays a wild and feral exhibitionist who only thinks she's a recluse. Unfortunately, everything that clicked for Page as Sweet Bird's Alexandra Del Lago makes her grotesquely wrong for Summer and Smoke's epicene Alma Winemiller, who is scripted as a much more delicate creature, even in her most id-driven moments. Instead, Page fusses and snorts through a grandiloquent version of "repression" that is very much the conceit of a struggling actress and a flawed, tricky script—but not at all the stuff of life. Blythe Danner came much closer to the mark in a televised 1976 version of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Williams' apt revision of the almost self-parodic Summer and Smoke. Evidently, Danner recognized that misplaced softness and measured affectation can be plenty abrasive, as the story insists, without veering anywhere near a caricature. By contrast, Page strangles every line and moment, finally tarnishing Williams' reputation as well as her own.
A very pleasant surprise—the kind of performance that snaps you back to attention, even after you think you've got a performer and a genre pegged. No one could accuse Shearer of being the most technically skilled actress, and "serious" projects like this one often froze her up a little, even as MGM banked her reputation on them through most of the '30s. Still, she has clearly connected to the role of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the basis of her performance is not dull adulation for a great lady and her words, but rather Elizabeth's active skepticism about her controlling, almost lascivious father. More and more aware of how dangerously he hems her in, Shearer's Elizabeth wrestles with the confusing stakes of being caught amongst an illness, a parent, and a lover. She lets Fredric March bounce around as Robert Browning without slackening her own performance, and her climactic flight from the Barrett abode works terrifically, mostly because Shearer has so clearly, gradually telegraphed Elizabeth's rational and emotional divorce from her father's influence. Hardly a turn for the all-time trophy case, but both the performance and the movie are more richly shaded than I expected.
Arthur was almost always the best thing in her movies, except when they were as all-around exceptional as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Mysteriously, the Academy ignored her sterling, smart, and infectious work in all those Capra vehicles that they rewarded so lavishly in other categories. The More the Merrier earned Arthur, arguably the ablest comedienne in classic Hollywood, her solitary nod. That's a shame, but the performance isn't: the script errs on the thin side, but Arthur's rising and falling inflections and inimitable timing anchor this comedy of human character, and she's a perfect match for George Stevens' sophisticated but unpretentious direction. She also projects a palpable lust for Joel McCrea's Joe Carter, as well as the dismay of a peppy professional who knows she is selling her personal life short with a stuffed shirt like Charles J. Pendergast. Altogether deserving of a prize, either as a career tribute or on this performance's own terms.
As an actress, Midler shares a certain off-putting quality with Billy Crystal: even when she's working at her best, she seems to demand our approval, almost impolitely; at the same time, she seems to confuse some of her more grating qualities with her better ones, and as she hustles from Big Acting to Big Singing to Big Speeches, she can really exhaust you. Nonetheless, for all of its attention-grabby textures and character concepts, The Rose is a laudably severe depiction of an erratic rock star's reckless immolation. Though you can see very clearly how Midler is building the performance—straining her voice, winning us back with her wide smile, zonking out in her druggie scenes—she has energy and tremendous push, and she keeps a clichéd character breathing for two solid hours. She doesn't try to steal moments from co-stars as good as Alan Bates and Frederic Forrest, and at crucial times, as when she stumbles into a drag revue starring a doppleganger of herself, her goosey verve and relentless drive are exactly what the movie needs, maybe even what the movies need.
What use was Merle Oberon, really? Her face has a hard, flat quality onscreen that seems to repel the audience's identification, and she seems insufficiently open to the actors around her. She's a disastrously unappealing Cathy in William Wyler's overrated Wuthering Heights, and even in films where she ekes out some passable moments—as in Wyler's These Three, or in this hoary melodrama about war's disruption of romantic destinies—I always feel like many other actresses could do just as well, maybe better. I'll give her this: Oberon is touching when she's finally reunited with the blind lover she has thought dead for many years after WWI. (Yes, it's that kind of movie.) She makes us eager to see and gauge her character's reactions, but then, she has a typically excellent Fredric March performance to work from. An easy scratch-off in a six-way 1935 race that already had one nominee too many.
A few months ago, I wrote 
Utterly beguiling. I'd halfway expected to feel like Garbo was being goaded along by Lubitsch and the studio bosses, given how the "Garbo Laughs" premise was such an instant, easy sell. Happily, if anything, she keeps the movie going even when the script and the supporting cast hit a few ruts. Her poker face is somehow a different creation from the familiar, enigmatic mask of her romances and dramas, but her eruption into laughter in the famous café scene with Melvyn Douglas is perfectly timed and pitched. Great line deliveries, too. The movie doesn't allow the performance to grow or deepen as much as it might, but it's still a totally fetching piece of work.
When we first meet her on a long bus-ride with Frank Sinatra, MacLaine's character comes across as a pretty standard-issue "free spirit," and it's hard to fix exactly why she hops off with him, uninvited, in his home town. From there, this lengthy, deceptively simple drama will keep MacLaine's character waiting in the wings, and she holds out beautifully until her brilliant closing moments: once everyone else has tied their love-lives into intransigent knots, Ginnie figures it might finally be her turn. Actress and character seize their chances in perfect synch. MacLaine's lovely in her frank prostration before Martha Hyer, and she's truly sympathetic in the film's unexpected finale. All in all, she unearths the human being inside a Kooky Sprite.
I'm all for actresses having stellar breakout years, and Teresa Wright is such an instantly likeable performer—charming and lovable, while always communicating a sincere thoughtfulness—that I hate to begrudge her anything. She even goes far toward redeeming the "meet cute." Still, this is a supporting performance that, like everything else in Pride of the Yankees, is relentlessly keyed to reflect further glory unto Gary Cooper's Lou Gehrig. It goes down easy but lacks weight and insight, virtually by design.
