Actress Files: Ingrid Bergman

Ingrid Bergman, Anastasia
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(won the 1956 Best Actress Oscar)

Why I Waited: As I've said, I was saving up winners at a certain point, but I'm not sure how she ended up in the final group. I've never been eager enough to make a point of seeing it, nor skeptical enough in that Farmer's Daughter way to purposefully get it out of the way. Her thin slate of competitors did not imply that Bergman needed to be exceptional in order to win.

The Performance: Anastasia is sort of Pygmalion with pop-historical aspirations and dark overlays of lingering tragedy and psychic distress. Or at least that's Anastasia's intended center of gravity, when it isn't throwing itself off-balance with the kinds of broad-comic asides and primary-color parades through Tivoli Gardens that had Derek wandering in saying, quite affronted, "What are you doing watching an MGM musical without me?" Probably not what this 20th Century Fox mystery-drama is going for. Anyway, he missed the early, much grayer scenes when Yul Brynner's, Akim Tamiroff's, and Sacha Pitoëff's characters are grilling Ingrid Bergman's Anna Anderson. Anna is a beleaguered-looking blonde recently manumitted from a French asylum where she claimed to be Anastasia, the grown daughter of Czar Nicholas, who ought to have been assassinated with her parents and siblings ten years previously by a Bolshevik firing squad. Anna is now an amnesiac, and the truth is, she isn't positive she's Anastasia. Wisps of self-recognition have pointed in this direction, but given the implications, no wonder she is barely more comforted by this provisional bio as an orphaned survivor of a globally pertinent massacre than she is by the alternative of a totally voided identity.

No wonder, too, that she is plucked at the outset of the film from the side of the Seine, where she prepares to drown all her sorrows, whomever they belong to. Out of the firing squad and into the fire, though: Brynner, Tamiroff, and Pitoëff know there's a bounty of £10 million in Romanoff family legacies to be reaped if they can prove they have nabbed their rightful heir from the thin air of rumor, so they pummel Anna with questions about what she remembers. When that proves inconclusive, they force-feed her facts, bits of etiquette, and physical bearings that will make her an incontestable facsimile of the Princess Anastasia, had she survived. Anna flails, unsurprisingly, amidst all this mercenary imposition. "All these questions—I've lost the answers!" she protests, even before the interrogation starts, and she slightly revises her protest, howling against these "questions that can only be answered by lies!"

There is something a little pornographic in the durability of the Anastasia myth. Even now that DNA testing has established the fact of her annihilation, she still resurfaces in pop culture as the Loch Ness Monster of the imperial wreck, a mirage rippling across the black tarn that swallowed the fallen House of Romanoff. Imagine the pain of this person if she did exist, and how unready and ill-served she would be by our vociferous urge to force the truth out of her or into her, whichever way we could get it. Anastasia foregoes any of the sobriety it might have attained in black & white and courts a King and I opulence whenever it can, while it circles the character. Screenwriter Arthur Laurents, far from his home base, inserts dozens of idioms related to pretense and theatricality. Even the last line of the script is, "The play is over – go home." But the producers and the director, Anatole Litvak, seem motivated by two different aspirations: to orbit and outfit Bergman's Anastasia as a frigid, incongruously elegant emblem of tragedies survived (putting her somewhere in the Hollywood family tree that leads down to Streep's Sophie, the ivory statue of inner decimation), and to watch that emblem shiver into pieces as her self-appointed creator-destroyers lay into her. We know from Gaslight that Bergman can withstand a brainwashing with the best of them. She gives great spectacle as the world tries to break her, bridling and crying like a stallion trapped in a flaming stable.

By 1956, Bergman is a more controlled technician than she was in Gaslight. Her tremors and jags have fewer ragged edges than we see in her performance as Paula Alquist, though at least that one benefits from the impression of the actress being at sixes and sevens. There's no distance between Bergman's frenzy and Paula's, which speaks to her greenness but also her felt connection to the character. In that respect, more than a decade later, Bergman seems like a more capable, confident mistress of her own performance. To the extent we can still see an effortful actress pushing her way through a demanding part, she has the twin alibis of the role's eager solicitation of showy playing and the screenwriter's unsubtle emphasis on performance as a governing theme. If these shifts from Bergman's first Oscar-winning role to her second seem to put her in a position of power, though, not everything about Anastasia preserves her in that state. We also know that in 1956, making her first appearance in a Hollywood movie after seven years of basically forced exile over her affair with Roberto Rossellini, Bergman was subject to a dual predicament not unlike Anastasia's: the film seems to revel in showing her off as an indestructible icon, made only more tantalizing by all the luridness she has withstood, but it also bespeaks a lip-licking appetite for seeing Bergman squirm, pant, writhe, and submit. I wound up appreciating the boldly synthetic color palette, which tends to make Anastasia look rather plastically staged (compared to the exquisite, sinister gorgeousness of Gaslight), because it puts a laminating sheen of fiction over a film that can seem too much look a probing test of the actress herself: we'll welcome you back, Ingrid, but we'll also make you wrack and weep for your ticket. As Anastasia continues, it follows a truly bonkers evolution into a kind of love-vs.-duty framework. Yul Brynner, the implacable Svengali, winds up suddenly as the lover and, even more amazingly, the beloved. The film has Anastasia make a climactic decision on the Brynner character's behalf, but she does so offstage, as it were. I received this initially as an open admission that the threadbare little love-plot couldn't hold a candle to the "historical" pomp, the family drama, or the political weight of what it has so floridly presented on screen; looking at both, the puniness of the "happy ending" would be all the more absurd. But I realize, too, Anastasia probably can't focus too much on Brynner because it has no way of deciding if he is her torturer or her redeemer, and it hasn't pushed us to resolve that question about ourselves, either. Everybody wants everything both ways.

And so, disappointingly, does Bergman—speaking of "questions that can only be answered by lies." Her tirades no longer feel like things she believes, but like routines she knows well how to execute. I guess I enjoyed passages of Anastasia, but aside from its blocky, stagy awkwardness as a film, I find it hard to imagine this vehicle surviving all the parallel resonances that Bergman forces on this story through her sheer, post-scandalous presence. The film already can't decide whether to feel sorry for Anastasia or enjoy her discomfort, whether it wants her to be crazy or correct, pitiable or triumphant, a house of cards or a bride of death—and having every scene play, inevitably, like an inquiry into Bergman only gives Anastasia one more way to feel distracted and indecisive. Lines like "She also has a rather intriguing strangeness" and "She's too something: too crazy, too clever, too tricky" don't help, and there are more where those came from. But her rather arbitrary and bloodless demonstrations of skill aren't any easier to connect to than this dingy exploitation of her scarred reputation. Amid her virtuoso melismas of anger and despair, her perfected look of Haunted Introspection, Bergman doesn't look like she's made nearly enough of her own decisions about whether Anna is or isn't Anastasia, whether she is or isn't mad, whether she clings to the Dowager Empress Maria (Helen Hayes, very tasty) because she at last recognizes someone, her grandmother no less, or because at this point she's desperate for anyone who might love her and, better, protect her. I have to give Bergman credit for what looks like a dignified refusal to even countenance the silly conceit of having Anna fall for Brynner's general. She just isn't willing or interested, and if that means the narrative design of the script is hanging by a slim thread to the performed experience we behold on the screen, then so be it. Good for her. She has her limits.

But she also has her limitations. The rigid vocal and physical carriage she exhibits even in some of her most glamorous performances—the slightly stolid deliveries that conjure the image of Bergman at home, studiously learning her lines—is another of the ghosts plaguing her Anastasia, who's already got plenty to be haunted by. On the plus side, her sense of her own stateliness, which is understandable but a bit off-putting as early as For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Bells of St. Mary's, is a kind of necessary force in holding Anastasia together. When Bergman's angry she forgets everything but the anger, when she's forlorn she's nothing but sorrow, when she's bitter she sounds like she's got oil on her tongue. Still, she never stops looking as though she feels herself to be quite a personage, and whether that's acting or whether that's Ingrid—and after the slings and arrows of the past six years, why shouldn't she?—it gives the movie an anchor. She's a happy, believable drunk during an evening of too much champagne, confusing her syllables and sh-sh-sshsh'ing her S's. She memorably flouts the doggedness of her interrogators, mordantly enumerating all the rivers and madhouses she's jumped into or straggled out of. She can be imperious on cue, certifying her bloodline of Czarist arrogance in the face of a skeptical expatriate, by barking at Tamiroff, "How dare you smoke in my presence without asking my permission?"

Actually, she can be almost anything on cue, and that's a strength as well as a huge part of the problem. Bergman's ability to give herself over from one full-bodied emotion to another doesn't efface the artificial, rather literal edge she brings to most of them. She always seems like she's acting, and in a way that feels like a kink in her approach to performance, not like a concerted response to the "all the world's a stage" motif in Laurents's screenplay. Bergman was a good actor, a great movie star, and a rather chilly and danger-prone celebrity. Anastasia captures Bergman acting for a director who prefers actors to movie stars, and without the radiant patina of stardom (which Cukor and Hitchcock never stopped feeding, even as they took her performances as far as she could carry them), her acting looks forced and her recent notoriety rather pruriently hauled with her onto the stage, like Mary Tyrone's wedding dress. The casualty of all this is Anastasia, or Anna Anderson, or Anna Koreff, whoever the woman is on whom all these pasts and futures are projected. Yes, she's an amnesiac, but not the way Bergman plays it, like an actor who isn't building enough bridges from one scene to the next, sometimes from one line-reading to the next. She's extremely proficient but not all that believable; it's her lack of a synthesizing element, not Anna's, that frustrates, and in the final sequences, as a life starts to coalesce around this woman's fistful of puzzle-pieces, Bergman shows us that she's... what, exactly? For the script to keep us guessing may be deliberate and even important, but for the actress and character to feel, if anything, less substantial by the end than by the beginning implies that major opportunities have been missed beneath the style and pyrotechnics.

My heart went out to Helen Hayes's empress, who sometimes wants more than anything for this stranger to be her granddaughter, and sometimes more than anything for her not to be. In between these polar moments, she's a pool of agitation and annoyance, and underneath all of that is despondency, the aching echo of the great wound. Bergman doesn't have an "in between." Logically, that could be the point of this performance, but I never felt this as a satisfying explanation. Among her sisters in Oscar's winner's circle, her closest analogue for me is Kate Winslet's Hana in The Reader, another performance that's so overloaded with concepts (history, illiteracy, sexuality, memory, evil, beauty, guilt) that you can't fully blame even a supremely capable performer for struggling to tie it all together. But surely they could tie a tighter knot than this, or make us feel like there's a genuine bundle of personality in there to tie the knot around? Or maybe a practiced professional like Bergman or Winslet, the kind of actor who hits all her marks with separate blows of her scrupulous hammer, is finally less persuasive than a greener but more porous actress might have been, someone less hungry for an award and less cognizant of her abilities. Not someone whom you'd look at and think about rehearsals and makeup tests and taking notes on her own dailies, but someone whom you'd look at and think, There's a woman with a broken heart.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 8 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.

Best Actress Update: 5 More Down, 70 to Go

The theme this time is: Great Ladies of History

Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc (1948) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda)
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.

Lynn Fontanne in The Guardsman (1932) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Helen Hayes in The Sin of Madelon Claudet)
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.

Greer Garson in Madame Curie (1943) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette)
In the wake of Mrs. Miniver and Random Harvest, Greer Garson was so popular that she probably could have gotten nominated for anything. Omitting her would be like holding a Best Muffin contest and leaving out Blueberry. Unfortunately, this nom, her fourth in five years (with two more to come in 1944 and 1945), travesties both the award and the actress. Like Johnny Depp in Finding Neverland, Garson in Madame Curie follows a career peak with a frustrating nonentity of a performance. Though she admirably declines to coast on simple typecasting—Marie Curie, bookish and muted, permits none of the ginger amiability of her previous performances—the role, for that very reason, requires Garson to abandon everything enticing about her screen persona and leave us with a pretty drab husk of an impersonation, placeholding instead of performing. The film, directed by Random Harvest steward Meryvn LeRoy, is frankly less interested in character or audience connection than in the humility of the brilliant Curies and their long tribulations amid spartan, sometimes squalid working conditions: a safe message for a WW2 audience living on rations, but not a foundation for auspicious drama. The only memorable scenes linger because of camerawork or smart manipulations of offscreen space. Garson is an inevitability rather than an asset—the public's favorite actress playing the world's most famous female scientist—and though she doesn't crash to earth the way stiff, stodgy Walter Pidgeon does, there's almost no life to her: the last thing you expect to say about Garson onscreen.

Vanessa Redgrave in Mary, Queen of Scots (1971) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Jane Fonda in Klute)
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.

Janet Suzman in Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Jane Fonda in Klute)
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.

The Pick of This Litter: No suspense here: Lynn Fontanne is the only gal in this batch who has any business appearing on a ballot. Still, hers isn't just a relative victory, compared to a weak group of peers; she's a treat and a revelation, and I happily recommend the film, right down to its joyously teasing final shot (which is all about Fontanne).

(Images © 1948 RKO Radio/Sierra Pictures, reproduced from CineMasterpieces.com; © 1931 MGM/© 1998 MGM Home Video, reproduced from the IMDb; © 1943 MGM Studios, reproduced from Internet Movie Poster Awards; © 1971 Universal Pictures, reproduced from the IMDb; and © 1971 Columbia Pictures, reproduced from the IMDb)

Supporting Actress Sundays: 1974

StinkyLulu, that deft miner of silver linings, that veritable Mrs. Dalloway of the Supporting Actress set, manages to host an ebullient and invigorating party even when the crop of nominees is as grim as I found the 1974 vintage to be. The first of these performances I ever saw was Diane Ladd's in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and while I'm a fan of this flawed but precociously affecting movie, and while Ladd's tart, flavorful turn as Flo has grown on me over the years, I never imagined that she'd emerge as my pick of any litter. But so it is. Ingrid Bergman and Talia Shire remain as off-putting now as they were when I first saw their movies, and though I was excited for my first encounters with Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles and François Truffaut's Day for Night—two diametrically dissimilar metafilmic comedies—neither the movies nor the performances by Madeline Kahn or Smackdown winner Valentina Cortese took me quite where I wanted to go.

With Claudine's Tamu Blackwell failing to ride the coattails of Diahann Carroll's Best Actress nomination; Lenny's Valerie Perrine vaulting successfully to the lead category; The Great Gatsby's Karen Black losing an Oscar nomination after winning a Golden Globe; Young Frankenstein's Cloris Leachman losing the Funnywoman Slot to Kahn (who herself impresses more in Frankenstein than in Saddles); and critical darling Bibi Andersson barred from contention for the rhapsodically received Scenes from a Marriage, Oscar compounded the problem of the year's slim pickings by exercising some bizarrely poor judgment and tripping badly over its own arcane eligibility rules. I'd like to believe that 1974's two fêted offerings from the late, great Robert Altman, either the gambling dramedy California Split or the eccentric bankrobbing yarn Thieves Like Us, might have yielded some piquant possibilities, but I haven't seen them.

If you have your own ideas about how Oscar might have made less of a muck of things in 1974, or if you want to stick up for his chosen field of five, please leave a comment here or chez Stinky. Give some props to the formidable Ladd, who also lent some picante sauce to her brief moments in Chinatown that same year. Don't lose sleep over the fact that Bergman's asinine victory in this race very probably cost her the Best Actress statue that was so obviously due her for 1978's Autumn Sonata; the catch-22 to being overcompensated with Oscars is that you tend not to win them when you finally deserve them. And let's look forward to December's Supporting Actress Shindig, which you, YOU, YOU have the power to route somewhere interesting. For novelty's sake, since I've only seen two movies apiece in each of these years, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for 1966 or 1984, though if the electorate anoints either 1975 or 1993, I get to revisit this life-defining masterpiece or this one. L'embarrass du choix!

(Image © 1974 Warner Bros. Pictures, reproduced from DVDClassik)