Actress Files: Sarah Miles

Sarah Miles, Ryan's Daughter
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1970 Best Actress Oscar to Glenda Jackson for Women in Love)

Why I Waited: Try as I might, I don't always have 206 free minutes in a row.

The Performance: I know David Lean took the public lambasting of Ryan's Daughter very hard and only barely got over it to make one more movie, 14 years later, before he died. I don't see any need to further pillory a movie that has already been so roundly rebuked, but then the bashful gentleness of a lot of the reviews that greeted the DVD release in 2006 don't seem like the right way to go, either. Let's just say that, give or take a few scenes of mutual but benign incomprehension between Sarah Miles as a young Irish lass and Robert Mitchum as the much older schoolteacher she convinces to marry her, and aside from about 10 or 15 scattered minutes of prickly character moments or atypically enigmatic montage, the rest of Ryan's Daughter's three and a half hours are just as preternaturally weightless as you've heard. Freddie Young has photographed the movie in super widescreen for postcard prettiness, disclosing a set of priorities that are about as wrong as they could be for the material, which itself requires an exceptionally nimble execution so as to dissipate the scent of very stale air. In short: a timid young wife seeks an older, unthreateningly asexual husband but later discovers the appetites of her body, very inconveniently whetted by a soldier of the British Army who's been called in to quell the Irish discontent.

Miles is the wife, and the reason I stress the tremendous shortcomings of the film is that, at the basic stylistic level, she's all but barred from making an impact. The opening movements of the film clearly mean to present her as a sort of blooming flower, but while I appreciate that a certain degree of clichéd dollishness is avoided, she's somehow done all her wardrobe shopping in Outer Dowdsville: beige sweater down past her butt, shapeless gray tent of an ankle-length skirt, wide-brimmed hat, and a wig that looks like horse-tail. Strolling alone on clifftop and seashore with her parasol, Miles might be registering any number of nuances on her face, but we'd never know, which is partly down to that hat, but more because Lean forfends our getting very close to her—not that the actress looks especially inspired in such close-ups and two-shots as are doled out to her.

I'd call it a fair expectation that, knowing you are starring for David Lean at the most aggressive stage of his encroaching ailment, Elephantiasis of the Travelogue, you might need to devise a more physical rendering of the character, to stand any chance against the Super Panavision vistas in which you are sunk. "But render what character?" Miles may surely have asked, and who could blame her? The script supplies so little, and an externalized portrait of her vague arc defies easy imagining. In direct proportion to his wider and wider shots, Lean seemed to grow more and more taken with the idea of opaque characterizations. If his Lawrence is at last a sphinx, his Rosy Ryan Shaughnessy wastes a great name on being, from the get-go, a lovin' cipher. Lots of dewy, tentative, or stupefied glances, a bit of trembling lip. But what's behind it all? As though to give Miles even less to play with, or against, Ryan's Daughter rather pointedly eschews any dialogue at all for long periods, and as her English innamorato, Lean cast sullen pretty boy Christopher Jones, so disastrous an actor that all of his dialogue required redubbing. These gratuitous ordeals come together in a long, wordless sequence of D.H. Lawrence-style seduction between Miles and Jones in a forest of heather and jade, and if the dewy, soft-focus longueurs of this interlude manage to be less entirely cheesy than they could be, they do so without aiding Miles in any real way. Nor does she offer any memorable stamp of her own.

Personalizing stamps are a recurring problem for this actress: I have seen her now in Antonioni's Blowup; John Boorman's Hope and Glory, a generous Best Picture nominee in 1987; and Ryan's Daughter. In the former, I recall her peering silently at David Hemmings from her kitchen floor while she's in the midst of a serene rut with another man, and that's it. From the Boorman, nothing. None of these pictures have styled themselves as showcases for their casts, and if Miles doesn't seize the camera of her own electric accord the way Vanessa Redgrave does in Blowup, she cannot quite be blamed for that, or for the fact that two of her better-regarded performances, in Lady Caroline Lamb and the Palme-winning The Hireling, are more or less elusive these days. I hear that she achieves a carnal vitality in Joseph Losey's The Servant, and though Ryan's Daughter is too roseate in conception to profit from such a knack, it's true that when you do see Miles elevating her scenes, they tend to be ones where some force of sexuality is privileged. Rosy giggles, wonderfully, upon being told that virginal men fear the prospect of initiation and of their own potential failings as much as women do. (I also like her short, sincere, but meaningful laugh near the end—the end!—of the movie when her father promises to write letters to her; the plain fact that he won't, even if he momentarily intends to, amuses her.) Rosy doesn't set out to hurt anyone, and if Mitchum's humble, almost diffident schoolteacher showed any erotic confidence, or any interest in her libido, she'd never have strayed. As it is, she enjoys watching him work in the yard without his shirt, and looks surprised but unembarrassed at such enjoyment. When she asks him to keep the shirt off inside, he huffily demurs, obviously if implicitly chiding her for her nascent lustiness, and Miles shows us well that Rosy is genuinely flustered and confused.

She isn't failing, then, to make studied decisions about her character, and she appears to intend a welcome liveliness for Rosy, inward and outward, that never resolves itself. The thinness of the plotting and the pristine, listless emptiness of the lensing are barely superable hurdles... but why do four hours pass without her sticking much to the screen, and why did three such different directors all fail to get any charge from her? Lean and Antonioni treat hers as the kind of spectacular face that rewards any peer of the camera, but that confidence seems misplaced. She has the open, curving face and the aqua gaze of Samantha Morton, but she lacks Morton's moonglow quality; Miles doesn't seem to have any pores, much less an inner radiance, and she gives rather frozen poses of thought rather than, as Morton does, fine-grained transmissions of how thought fluctuates and questions itself. There's also a bit of Susannah York in Miles, but she's less striking, and minus the perverse charge. I await screening the picture that really makes the case for her. In the meantime, it's a pity to see her nominated for a picture that starts her so far behind that it's no mystery when she never fully catches up. For visible signs of effort, she might deserve a second star, but the lasting impression is just too close to zero.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 34 to Go

Actress Files: Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith, Travels with My Aunt
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1972 Best Actress Oscar to Liza Minnelli for Cabaret)

Why I Waited: Because I am no fan of Auntie Mame, and I had always heard Travels with My Aunt described as "Okay, but no Auntie Mame." And I wonder if you've ever noticed that, once you've seen one comic performance from Maggie Smith...

The Performance: Clearly a low-point in the history of the category, and not only in retrospect: reviews at the time were split at best, and the nomination raised some eyebrows where it didn't provoke outright moans. Which, obviously, isn't to say that the performance doesn't have its fans. Indeed, it's precisely the sort of overbearing Daft Hussy camp that exists so as to generate a cult following. More power to all those queens who at any time in their lives have gone to a costume party as Aunt Augusta Bertram, for you know these faithful must exist. Thing is, were Maggie herself to attend such a party, there's no end to the amount of shade that would be thrown at her hard-driving but creaky and too often joyless approach to the character.

Who knows how much input she had, if any, to the lugubriously overwrought makeup and hair designs of Carmen Sánchez and José Antonio Sánchez, stuck with the task of transforming an actress in her late 30s into a beldame well into her dotage. Surely, though, they represent the only team of cosmetologists in Hollywood history who felt compelled to make Maggie's cheeks look even more sunken and her eyes more unsettlingly profound, like something out of Franju. But pity the poor dears who, in grim cahoots with Oscar-winning costumer Anthony Powell and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, have to pass the character off in one extended flashback as a blushing schoolgirl. I understand that at one point in time, Maggie Smith must have negotiated secondary education, but even by the ghastly standards of any advanced performer trying to pass for 16, is there any face in movies less plausibly matched to the body of a uniformed adolescent?

The performance is in many respects a sort of catalog of tasks that no one should assign to Maggie Smith: be a belated teenager, be a premature dowager, sing, go Big as often and as far as possible, have an ongoing drugs-and-sex fling with an understandably adrift Lou Gossett Jr., fritter and quip with abandon until a climactic and lachrymose plea for affection, conjure a notorious legacy of sexual irresistibility. In fairness, the last point is one that Smith occasionally marshals in her favor. Her Augusta flaunts an erotic chutzpah that just dares people to second-guess her. When this odd, unexpected apparition at a family funeral counters the rumors that she was lost at sea many years ago, offering the retort that she was "rescued – many times," I see an ember of glee in the actor and the performance, and a zesty distillation of that peculiar but intense sexuality for which Smith is such an unlikely vessel in more "serious" films like Jean Brodie.

(Image c/o the Evening Standard, documenting this performance at its least makeup-enhanced)

But this is an early bit, doomed to dozens of basically unvarying reiterations. Worse, there remains the problem of chiseling away at the thick cement of affectation, much less the sepulchral layering of pancake makeup, so as to furnish any oxygen to that essential spark of mischief. I recently re-screened the first half-hour or so of Jack Clayton's The Pumpkin Eater and rediscovered Smith's small, hilariously disingenuous turn as a live-in seductress of Anne Bancroft's husband. What a marvel, what fun to see her breathing so much easier, feeling out her moods and gestures, rather than arriving to the part already locked into a rigid retinue of mannerisms. I hear that Smith is much more inventive on stage, and she's such a droll reader and stylist that I don't want to solemnize the account of watching her give even a bad performance. We need more actors who can transform a line like "You insignificant bank manager!" into such a delectable truffle.

Nonetheless, even by the familiar standards of Maggie "doing" herself in a film like Gosford Park, in Travels with My Aunt she's just laboriously encrusted. The plot, apparently derived in a free but dulling way from Graham Greene's comic novel, is so over-stuffed with outlandish incident and aggravating contrivance that it's hard to imagine any performer thinking they need to festoon the picture with more clutter. I'm equally mystified by Smith and director George Cukor's evident strategy of selling every moment of the character to the rafters, so that we can see how fully "in" on the joke of this person they are. As if it could possibly be otherwise! Augusta is indefensibly obnoxious, squeezing interludes of faux wisdom (e.g., "Some of us get out of life what everyone else is stupid enough to put into it") or ghastly introspection ("Sometimes I get the awful feeling that I'm the only one left who gets any fun out of life") between her tiresome habits of lying, smuggling, dithering, bamboozling, dragooning, and making a cock of herself. That Smith's garish overplaying, either in sync with Cukor's notes or (one hopes) in defiance of them, amounts to a constant burlesque of unnecessary ironization, maybe even a form of apology, only intensifies the displeasure of spending two endless and arbitrary hours with her. Grating with such brio yet standing apart from her own performance: it's like bringing an intolerable date to a party and imagining that you are easing the situation by telling everyone in attendance, "Sorry about my date, isn't s/he the most grueling nuisance?" A surefire tactic for getting everyone crankier at you than at the bugbear on your elbow.

I like Maggie Smith, even though I can't help grousing about a film career largely misspent on a seemingly willful program of not challenging herself, which makes it harder to view Travels with My Aunt as what it probably is: a massive but early lapse in how to conceive a character for the screen and scaling one's effects. I have only ever liked her less in Tea with Mussolini, almost three decades on. Still, though it's surely down to directors and casting agents as much as it is to her, I wish Smith had learned a lesson of keeping her roles and approaches more varied and earnestly modulated, rather than just keeping a future eye on dialing herself up to "8" or "9" rather than "10" or "11," perpetually. Scuttlebut on the movie has always run that Katharine Hepburn badly wanted and developed this role until the studio dropped her for being too old. I'm not convinced I would have liked Travels in any configuration, but asking a newly celebrated character actress three decades younger than Hepburn to tie herself up playing too old and too young within a lavishly overproduced nonsense plot was surely not the ideal solution... especially once it became obvious (surely by the first day of shooting?) that Smith was making all the crudest, least disciplined choices about how to navigate such a buzzkill assignment. Holding my ear up to the lion's share of her scenes, I hear her saying, sotto voce, "Can you believe what a sod they've made of this script?" and "Aren't you glad I'm at least going at it full-bore?" To each his own diva-kitsch, but from my perspective, No and No.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 37 to Go

Birthday Girls: Shirley MacLaine

Shirley MacLaine, Irma La Douce
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1963 Best Actress Oscar to Patricia Neal for Hud)

Why I Waited: Neither Billy Wilder nor Jack Lemmon is high on my list of favorites; it's quite possibly true that I've seen too many of the wrong movies by both of them, but I don't care for The Apartment, the previous and more famous outing for this trio. Irma La Douce is appreciably longer and less well-liked than that one is. Plus, in my experience, Hollywood producers not named Arthur Freed should have stayed out of their studio-set versions of "Paris" more often than they did. Plus, we know right off that we're dealing with a "cute" hooker, handled by a director whose apparent feelings about women I am elated I do not share. So, I admit I had the collywobbles.

The Performance: You say tomato, I say tomahto, you say self-fulfilling prophecy, I say no, Irma La Douce really is incredibly lame, despite the game contributions of cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg and the production designers. MacLaine doesn't help out nearly as much as you're hoping, partly because she can't, and partly because she won't. First, the "can't" part: while it's no surprise that Wilder and Lemmon are utterly besotted with each other, I still thought a film called Irma La Douce had a fighting shot at being about Irma. But once Lemmon's naïve, incompetent police officer shows up, and then falls for Irma, and then concocts one of those don't-ask schemes for why he just has to spend half of the film as a tony British aristocrat duping Irma into serving him exclusively, you just know who's going to win the looming mug-off. In this case, Wilder won't even allow for a fair fight. He cedes MacLaine less and less screen time as the film wears on, and more than that, he pushes her into second- and third-level planes of his setups, or frames her in key scenes so that her back is to us during most of her dialogue. She's annoyingly, joylessly neglected in her own film, which I suspect might have been sold to her as a chance to seize center stage in flouncy costumes and expensive studio style, especially after she was the best damn thing in The Apartment, and cruelly un-Oscared.

So, poor Shirley, whom I often like. But there is most certainly a "but," since nearly all of the charm she used to endear us to Fran Kubelik and distract us as well she could from the distasteful and chauvinist story-structures of The Apartment has turned into a rote, flippant kookiness in Irma La Douce. To grind down all of MacLaine's appeal would take a much worse movie than this one is; she's hard pressed to reap any laughs, but she wins a few smiles. Still, she occupies an unenviable middle-ground between limping through the tired motions of the screenplay and buying into the myth of her own pixie irresistibility. One needn't blame her for the script's many redundancies, like the long opening sequence in which she wheedles extra cash out of all her johns through a daisy-chain of cooked-up bathetic stories. However, she sells all of these stories in just the same low-energy way, appearing as though she adores Wilder and Diamond's dialogue beyond any sense of having to help it along, yet without actually believing a word of it. The character and her circumstances are just a routine to her, a middling-at-best sketch that she might use to pad out a Vegas show or a variety hour, and so it's telling when she ends one scene grinning nonsensically into the camera and making jazz-hands at the audience, and later has to batten down her own giggles after bellowing out a seemingly random line, with a deep, chesty bravado that makes no sense except as the fleeting impulse of an inveterate cut-up who's just entertaining herself.

What MacLaine needs, not for the first or last time, is a director who won't cut away from her quite so often but also won't put up with all her tics and lunges for audience affection. She also needs a film that yanks the lapdog out of her hands and the black rat's-nest wig off her head and gives her something to do instead of crap to hold. Her whole being is cluttered here with props to assemble into a color-by-numbers character—though I admittedly liked her adorable emerald bra, and feel it more than earned its screen time. The one scene where the writing breaks form to suggest what Irma La Douce might have been, if it felt like turning the tables with real zeal on Hollywood's massive dowry of pop-sexist clichés, comes when MacLaine's Irma begs Lemmon's nebbishy boyfriend not to get a job, asking what kind of woman it would make her if she couldn't support a man through her own honest work. It's clearly meant as a needle in the eye of all those "Baby, I'm the breadwinner!" scenes in mid-century movies (and in mid-century marriages), but there's nothing on either side of this scene, despite the gigantic 150-minute running time, to let MacLaine take it anywhere... and because she's taking such a slim and coasty approach to Irma anyway, she's built no reserves of emotion or personality in the character by which to sell the joke as anything but a toss-off gag. She tries that laughing-through-tears bit that shows up in so many of her performances, particularly on the seemingly annual occasion when she rendered another gamine streetwalker, but the bit doesn't have any specificity. You can't deny the movie or the lead performances their moments of zest and color, but there's a lassitude and a spendthrifty, Brat Pack-y complacency to the whole affair, and certainly, too, in MacLaine's comportment. It still speaks ill of Wilder that he so patently loses interest in Irma, but it's more than possible that Shirley beat him to it, and I can't honestly say that I missed her when she receded.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 38 to Go

Birthday Girls: Mary Pickford

Mary Pickford, Coquette
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(winner of the 1928-29 Best Actress Oscar)

I have seen Coquette (reviewed here) three times, and I think about it more than anyone probably should. Here's why: Mary Pickford, essaying her first speaking part in motion pictures, is widely cited as the worst-ever winner of the Best Actress prize, and before you go around agreeing with a charge like that, you oughta be sure. Coquette itself is, if anything, even worse than Pickford's performance. The movie is instantly dated, maudlin, erratic, gaudily dressed, and technically slapdash, but before we get to feeling too superior, the real reason I dwell on the movie so frequently is that I often, while sitting before a new theatrical release, pose what I call The Coquette Test. Sure, it's easy to kick a 1929 movie that everyone already hates, directed by that same numbskull who, in the very same year, took a notorious "Additional Dialogue by" credit on his film version of The Taming of the Shrew. But if, say, The Last Station or A Single Man or Me and Orson Welles were also 80 years old, instead of just feeling like spotty and desiccated antiques, would we be any kinder to them than we are to Coquette? Have trophy-minded movies really gotten better, especially when you start ignoring publicists, "buzz," and ad campaigns, and when you avoid the oft-floated logic that just because a hundred Tooth Fairys come out every year that deserve nothing but opprobrium, we should induce a sort of Ivy League grading curve by which something as tawdrily mediocre as Station or Welles gets bumped up to a C? When a prestige movie starts heading south, or when it just starts out that way, I often ask myself, "Would I rather be watching Coquette? Is this movie any less incongruous in its own time than Coquette was in the era of Pandora's Box and The Passion of Joan of Arc?" Reader, I must confess, the face-off usually ends in a draw.

But let's not dodge the issue: Coquette is a dog, and Pickford is barely tolerable in it. She handily gives one of the worst performances ever nominated for the Best Actress Oscar, and she won for it, almost certainly because of her stratospheric celebrity and her crucial role in founding United Artists as well as the Academy itself, only two years prior to her copping this trophy. Awfully cheeky to be 36 years old and playing an airheaded chit who can't help flirting with every man in the room, from her father's peers to the local bad boy. Pickford looks suspiciously dowdy, and not just because her infamous haircut has her looking so matronly, or because she's so perpetually clad in distressed housedresses and nightmarish effulgences of figure-killing tulle. Even amidst such intense internal competition, the most antique thing about Pickford's Norma is the actress's creaky performance style, yet this isn't an "old" style so much as a frantic, immature feint at what grand acting by established masters might look like. Dabblers in early cinema might assume that Pickford hasn't yet recalibrated her gestures or mannerisms to suit the new sonic capabilities of the medium, but you could watch silent films for days without seeing anything this garish. Pickford has no one to blame but herself for her insistence upon buttoning and almost corkscrewing her thin lips until her mouth looks like the knotted end of a balloon, and then calling greater attention to this bizarre mannerism by repeatedly pointing an index finger, inexplicably, to her face. She's a fright of uncontained energy, and not in that Clara Bow way that can be infectious in spite of itself; she looks harried and taxed, like she's somehow overthinking the part without actually thinking at all. She whinges, she scowls, she bends over backward as her boyfriend of ill repute whispers sweet pledges to her in a forest glade. She flails her arms in the air when she races across Southern streams to find him, and sinks like an eight-year-old into the lap of Louise Beavers, humming away as her loyal mammy (!). The close-ups are impossible to parse: if you didn't know that Johnny Mack Brown was playing the object of her adoring ardor, you'd wonder why she's sniffing and glowering at this fellow who has come to surprise her at a dance. Her odd vocalisms ("Ooh yoo doon't knoow my deddy!") make Singin' in the Rain's Lina Lamont seem like a creature drawn from life, and when her character gets dragooned into one of those fifth-act court-trial sequences that have felled many a better movie than Coquette, she quakes in her chair and whips her head about, letting her voice go so high and shrill that you worry she might be tearing it.

In truth, such vulgar bathos represents the high point of what Pickford manages here: her spasms of grief and her wracking sobs of divided loyalty between her priggish dad and her rough suitor at least have some energy, unlike her unlovable take on the preening ingenue or her great-auntish lack of softness or ease in her mid-story clenches. Adding final insult to injury, I always misremember Coquette, which is subtitled A Drama of the American South, as a kind of mothy Hollywood pantomime of ante-bellum backwardness. Sadly, a series of party invitations that become key props about twenty minutes into Coquette confirm that this story is set in 1928, meaning that Sam Taylor thinks that women of the world were still saying things like, "Oh, what does it matter what I do? Oh, MICHAEL!" (when Michael isn't even around, incidentally), and Mary Pickford still thinks that the best use of her talents at 36 is to play an already specious character as 18-going-on-7, for maximum irritation and minimal sense of purpose. If the Academy has rarely got things as right as it did when it voted Janet Gaynor its first Best Actress, it's rarely (if ever) been as wrong as it did with Pickford.

(Poster image c/o the Wikipedia entry for Coquette)