Best Actress Birthday Party, Week 5

Another light week like last week, although this pace won't persist. I'll be dancing as fast as I can come mid-February. For now...



Born January 29–February 4:
Click here for the full list of entries

Jan 30: Vanessa Redgrave (75)
New Review: The Sea Gull (1968)
Vanessa's Best Work: Obviously, even Vanessa's second and third tiers of work would be a lot of actress's best efforts. If forced to single out her peaks, I always go back to her astonishing ingenuity in small roles in Julia (my review) and Howards End (my review, Favorite Films). Both times, she showed us the idea inside the woman and the woman inside the idea, in no time at all. I remember every beat of both performances. Her best lead performance, I think, was as Fania Fenelon, the increasingly dissipated, furious, and ambivalent concentration-camp prisoner in Playing for Time.
I've Also Seen: I've written academically on Redgrave's career, so I've seen a lot: getting her feet wet in Morgan! (Oscar ballot); opaque in Blowup (Favorite Films); so white-hot that miscasting was inevitable for a while, but especially in Camelot; taking risks, grand and garish, in Isadora; tremendous in a seemingly impossible role as a sex-crazed, hunchbacked Medieval nun in The Devils (my review); beautiful, uninhibited, but going down with the ship a bit in The Trojan Women; totally outwitted by Glenda Jackson in Mary, Queen of Scots; coasting on glamour, which is not a bad option, in Murder on the Orient Express; doing her best with odd scripts in Agatha and Yanks; saving Olive Chancellor from Henry James and from a stiff film in The Bostonians, without the easy route of making the character any comfier; very interesting as one of those impossible ciphers of David Hare's in Wetherby; very sly, if a bit overrated, in Prick Up Your Ears; a shrill, sexy, bold-stroke take on American South Gothic in Orpheus Descending (my review), and back on adjacent geography as the towering androgyne in The Ballad of the Sad Café; the raison d'être for Little Odessa, without even being in it very much; having fun in Mission: Impossible; extremely moving and unafraid of the icon in Mrs. Dalloway (my review); improbably stirring in Deep Impact; hitting another career peak, so devastating and candid is she in If These Walls Could Talk 2; soft but stalwart as Churchill's wife in The Gathering Storm; underseen, monologuing with theatrical stamina all through The Fever, directed by her son; trying her best to make Venus more than a wan Oscar play for O'Toole; doing her thing where she rides in to save a struggling film in Atonement; happy to co-sign the cause in The Whistleblower; and not as exciting to me as she was to many others, but still terrifically good, in Coriolanus
      She's also had blink-and-you-miss-her parts in A Man for All Seasons (my review); the rather moving Charge of the Light Brigade; the arch but hard-to-remember Oh! What a Lovely War; the turgid House of the Spirits, which she exits in high style; haunted in Smilla's Sense of Snow; a gaping jaw in Wilde, and again in Cradle Will Rock; institutional wisdom in Girl, Interrupted; haunted again in The Pledge; in The White Countess, nobody's favorite movie but surely a cherished memory for her; and fading away with everyone else in Evening, though her mates look appropriately awed by her.
Where To Go Next: I'm really intrigued by Laika's suggestion of Steaming and have it coming in the mail. Now that The Sea Gull has finally become available, though, I'm hoping some industrious outfit will distribute Red and Blue and especially The Sailor from Gibraltar, the two films Redgrave made early on with her then-husband Tony Richardson.

Jan 31: Jean Simmons (83; died 2010)
New Review: The Actress (1953)
Jean's Best Work: A controlled performance of a woman going in and out of control in Elmer Gantry, a film that intriguingly rides that line in every way, and allows this complicated woman a full-ish run of her dark, energetic, starchy, and ornery sides
I've Also Seen: A vague memory in Black Narcissus, but only because so much else is so overwhelmingly vivid; fine as Ophelia, a close-to-thankless part, and not well served by that track backward on the staircase in Olivier's Hamlet; fun once she's let loose in Guys and Dolls, though you can tell it's not her usual mode; not adding a lot in Spartacus; trying a bit hard at the start of The Happy Ending, but gradually quite affecting (performance review); hanging with the other ladies in How To Make an American Quilt, well after she'd virtually retired; lending a key voice to Howl's Moving Castle, well after having retired again
Where To Go Next: I'll eventually get to her Oscar-bait movies like The Robe and The Big Country, but first up will be her well-reviewed turn in Otto Preminger's acidic-sounding Angel Face. Still harboring hope I'll respond to this gal.

Actress Files: Jean Simmons

Jean Simmons, The Happy Ending
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1969 Best Actress Oscar to Maggie Smith for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie)

Why I Waited: I'm not the hugest fan of Simmons, finding her somewhere between unmemorable and uninteresting even in a series of "big" movies like Black Narcissus, Hamlet, Guys and Dolls, Elmer Gantry, and Spartacus. I wasn't excited about being stuck with my cropped VHS copy, either, but Turner Classic Movies broadcast it in widescreen while I happened to be staying in a hotel. (Have I mentioned I don't get cable?)

The Performance: Simmons's performance arrives with a few sandbags: she has an absolutely dire co-star in John Forsythe, and her husband, writer-director Richard Brooks, has moved on from mounting glossy, bowdlerized versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth and decided instead to maccrame a belated and unconvincing tchotchke, positioned somewhere between A Man and a Woman and Diary of a Mad Housewife. This is ye olde domestic anhedonia, unhelpfully diced up out of narrative order, and Simmons needs narrative: she doesn't have enough mystery or agility to enliven, sustain, or even perfume a series of discontinuous impressions. At least she's more beautiful than she's ever been, in homey 60s fabrics and long, gently styled tresses that make her visually enticing even as we wait for some kind of character arc to fire itself up—hopefully one that isn't totally dampened by the clichés of ill-concealed alcoholism that start splaying themselves out in her early scenes. True, it's hard not to feel affection for a gal who swills secreted liquor out of a pink, pyramid-shaped perfume bottle, but she kills the buzz with gauzy impersonations of wounded knowingness and a series of lame aphorisms: men prefer cars to women because every year they're invited to trade in a car for a newer model, etc. The screenplay keeps serving Simmons badly, concocting a pre-Shirley Valentine jaunt to warmer climes where she can comb through her depression. She enjoys a brief tryst there with a young Italian lothario (Bobby Darin!) who, you'll never believe this, turns out to be a benign impostor.

But somewhere in the middle of these dog-eared scenes, a sense of conviction and surprising specificity starts seeping out of Simmons's performance, until you wind up believing the lion's share of it, even if you learn nothing from it and remain dubious about the vehicle. She holds the camera with her alternations between the gusto she brings to her wifely recriminations and suicide flashbacks and the underplayed, almost self-mocking ironic tone she wears through her Nassau vacation. I think the trick is that these attitudes aren't as disparate as they could have been: there's a fundamental lack of self-knowledge to Simmons's Mary, except insofar as she knows she's a constant, irritating adversary to her own happiness, and whether it's causing her to act out or fold in, the basic bedrock of the woman remains persuasively consistent. Simmons doesn't sell the bromides of the script as though they're pearls of wisdom, and she keeps underscoring the character's lack of profile and resolution, even when the score and the screenplay are nudging her toward some sort of callow epiphany: returns from the tropics, hugs from her alienated daughter, etc.

The insincere flamboyance of the filmmaking, and the nagging sense that Shirley Jones (as a call-girl buddy), Nanette Fabray (as a sassy housemaid-accomplice), and Teresa Wright (as Simmons's aggrieved mother) are rather openly gunning for Supporting Actress nominations, winds up reflecting positively on Simmons' gradual tamping down on her effects, and her nicely judged earnestness. Maybe she was just as sad as the character she was playing; she was certainly rumored to be just as drink-addicted. The moderate achievement of this performance may have less to do with resourceful craft than with bitter years' experience occupying certain moods, and with making some truths about herself available to the audience... and maybe it helps here, too, that whatever seems perpetually hard, cloudy, or anonymous about Jean Simmons inherently winds up tempering what might otherwise be a ghastly exercise in self-exploitation. She lacks the manic, estranging energy that Gena Rowlands brought to superficially similar parts in the same years, or even the vocal idiosyncrasies that make Carrie Snodgress so indelible in Diary of a Mad Housewife in a way that Simmons isn't, quite, in The Happy Ending. But I suspect it's a performance that would bear up under a second look, particularly insofar as it emerges surprisingly unscathed from a movie that seems built to date and deplete it. Not too much of a happy ending for Simmons: she stayed pretty scarce from the silver screen for the next four decades, before dying earlier this year, so whatever "clicked" in this performance and its AMPAS reception didn't open her up to new professional horizons, where she may or may not have flourished. But "click" it does, unevenly but impressively, in a 1969 roster full of odd-duck personality performances. I left The Happy Ending feeling like I'd spent two hours with a woman, not an actress pretending to be that woman, and in a project as slipshod and tricked-out as this one, that's an honorable feat.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 39 to Go