Best Actress Update: 5 More Down, 85 to Go

Claudette Colbert in Private Worlds (1935) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Bette Davis in Dangerous)
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.

Bessie Love in The Broadway Melody (1929) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Mary Pickford in Coquette)
Bessie Love's starring performance in 1929's Best Picture winner gets off to a pretty rough start. Her stiff discomfort as a vaudevillian performer plagues the picture, given that her showstopping "talents" and those of Anita Page as her sister comprise the driving conceit of the story. Their musical numbers never improve, even when the screenplay suggests that they are supposed to, but as the emotional threads of the piece take center stage, Bessie piquantly conveys her distress over Anita's gallavanting, as well as her gradual realization that her lover prefers the other sister. Her best moments verge on the maudlin without quite collapsing into it, and the very idea of a singing-and-dancing backstage musical was so brand spanking new in 1929 that you forgive a few growing pains in the film and the performances.

Geraldine Page in Summer and Smoke (1961) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Sophia Loren in Two Women)
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.

Rosalind Russell in My Sister Eileen (1942) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver)
Here's another actress who never gets truly comfortable in her role, thus enervating the audience she is supposed to entertain. The trouble is, Russell looks as though she thinks she's nailing it: for someone who balanced star showmanship and ensemble relations so sublimely in His Girl Friday, Russell could be astonishingly callous toward her fellow players in other movies, and My Sister Eileen catches out her arrogance several times too often. She slings out punchlines and waits for the laughs to circulate, usually while shifting her weight distractingly from one foot to another, or rolling her eyes, or tugging repeatedly at her costume. She waits to speak instead of listening, probably failing to notice that young Janet Blair is showing much more finesse in the sillier but trickier part of Eileen. Russell's physical overstatements almost kill the conga scene that would become so central to Wonderful Town, the 1953 musical derived from the same source material. Still, at least Russell can sell a gag when she's under control and staying in the moment, and her reactions to New York City's urban indignities are often charming. She's too funny to be bad, exactly, but she's too haughty in this part to be legimitately good.

Norma Shearer in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night)
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.

The Pick of This Litter: Basically, it's between Colbert and Shearer, both of whom had already won by the time they assumed these roles, and both of whom have been better elsewhere. I'll give the slight edge to Norma Shearer since Barretts hinges powerfully on her work, right at the same moment when Private Worlds starts spinning into a handful of opposed directions.

(Images © 1935 Paramount Pictures, reproduced from FilmPosters.com; © 1961 Paramount Pictures, reproduced from the Animation Station; and © 1934 MGM, reproduced from FilmPosters.com.)

Best Actress Update: Counting Down by Fives

A few months ago, I wrote this update when I watched my 288th Best Actess nominee, meaning that I had exactly 100 nominees left to investigate in that category. I thought now might be a good time to catch you up on the 15 contenders I've since crossed off my list, urging you all toward the best of the lot. Plus, since Supporting Actress Sundays has turned into such an energizing treat, I've grouped these fifteen gals in brackets of five, determined by the order in which I watched them, and I've rated them along the same five-star system that StinkyLulu uses for our Smackdowns. Enjoy!

(This from Derek, as I prepare to write yet another Oscar-themed blog entry: "Is Best Actress, like, its own sexual orientation?" I haven't thought of a way, or a reason, to disagree with this.)

#96-100
Greta Garbo in Ninotchka (1939) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind)
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.

Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver (1942) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Winner)
Previously, I only knew Garson from her sweet but minor love-interest turn in Goodbye, Mr. Chips and from her spry, sensitive, and charismatic performance in Random Harvest, made the same year as Mrs. Miniver. Her appeal on screen is never to be underestimated, and given how doggedly the Miniver script means to endear us to the character, it's impressive that Garson humanizes and particularizes her. She seizes opportunities like the spendthrift purchase of a silly hat to make Kay Miniver a little more approachable, and she works smartly and generously with all of her co-stars. Still, the notes of tactful pluckiness and unpretentious nobility don't stretch her all that much, and she isn't covering the amount of ground or plumbing quite so deeply as the best nominees and winners do.

Shirley MacLaine in Some Came Running (1958) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Susan Hayward in I Want To Live!)
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.

Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame (1958) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Susan Hayward in I Want To Live!)
A bull terrier among actresses, Roz is perpetually prone to driving a solid character approach right into the ground. In the early chapters of Mame, especially in the delightful opening soirée, she is grand and fabulous, with gleeful, impeccable comic timing on simple lines like "Knowledge is power." By the end, though—like the film, and in some ways because of the film—she pounds down on all the same keys for far too long. I ended the movie quite eager to escape her rigidly "eccentric" guardianship, especially since she keeps Mame from really learning anything or evolving while the decades swim by.

Teresa Wright in The Pride of the Yankees (1942) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver)
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.

The Pick of This Litter: Greta Garbo wins for showing us so many untapped facets and potentials in a persona we thought we knew so well. Her Ninotchka is several rungs above the stunt casting it could have been... though MacLaine's careful, delicate managing of another "type" is nearly as impressive.

Images © 1942 MGM, reproduced from this Japanese fan site; © 1939 MGM, reproduced from this Spanish-language Bela Lugosi fan site; © 1958 MGM, reproduced from this Lyonnaise movie site; and © 1942 Samuel Goldwyn Co./RKO Radio, reproduced from Modern Art Reproductions.

The Week in Movies: Home Theater Version

A quick run-through of movies I screened at home and in my classes for the first time last week, many of which involved Cary Grant, since I was preparing a review for Stop Smiling of the new Cary Grant 5-disc Box Set that bowed last month. Assigned to watch 10 hours of Cary: life's tough, huh?

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Anna and the King of Siam (1946; dir. John Cromwell) - Hollywood's first version of the tale that would later be musicalized as Rodgers & Hammerstein's The King and I. This Anna aims for a somewhat ambitious median between gentle farce and a typical Dream Factory version of liberalism abroad, but I can't say I really bought it. It helps to have Irene Dunne starring as Anna, but even aside from their impolitic casting as Southeast Asians, Rex Harrison is typically precious as the King and Linda Darnell vamps blandly as a star of the harem, whose reversal of fortune isn't much worth crying over. Gale Sondergaard, who plunged much more memorably into wild Orientalisms in William Wyler's The Letter, scored a supporting Oscar nomination as the King's "wise" and "dignified" wife, but—like photographer Arthur Miller, fourth-billed star Lee J. Cobb, and writers Sally Benson (Meet Me in St. Louis) and Talbot Jennings (Northwest Passage)—she's shown herself to much better advantage elsewhere. Yes, you make allowances for the political climates of earlier eras, but this particular drama of cross-cultural empathy just doesn't work when such crude, myopic forms of narrative and imagination are being evinced. C–

Butterflies on a Scaffold (Mariposas en el andamio) (1995; dirs. Luis Felipe Bernaza and Margaret Gilpin) - An interesting and culturally distinct companion piece to Jennie Livingston's better-known Paris Is Burning, this documentary about drag culture in modern-day Cuba is extremely likely to challenge outside perceptions of this island in particular, and of life as lived under hegemonic states more generally. We meet more than a dozen performers in a drag revue that is regularly produced as lunchtime entertainment in—get this—the cafeteria of a virtually all-female construction crew building new tenements in an especially depressed area of Havana. How does a queen assemble a fabulous outfit amidst utter poverty? Is there a way of recuperating drag as compatible with Castro's Revolutionary ethic? These questions are raised in lively ways, though the film's approach to drag itself is much less interesting (it appears to match one-to-one in everyone's mind, including the filmmakers', as synonymous with male homosexuality), and the technical modesty curtails some of the film's revelatory potential. Also unexplored is the mind-boggling uniformity of the drag personae, in marked contrast to Paris Is Burning's rampant diversity of fabricated/"real" façades. Still, a memorable trip, and a legitimate provocation. B

His Girl Friday (1940; dir. Howard Hawks) - Y'all already know I love this, but who could resist another visit? Variety reviewer Todd McCarthy's commentary on the new DVD is reasonably involving, but nowhere near as illuminating as simply diving back into the movie itself, which is so dense with humor, irony, and detail that it simply never exhausts itself. Watching Rosalind Russell march into the newspaper office in the first scene, dismiss the love-advice columnist with a hilarious and barely-heard murmur, and strut right into ex-husband Cary Grant's office is like watching the rebirth of love as an elevated form of wit. Grant himself is an absolute dream, giving his own work in Holiday and The Philadelphia Story an impossible run for his own money as the best male performance in a screwball comedy. The supporting cast outclasses even the gallery of rascals and wiseacres in Sullivan's Travels, and the mile-a-minute punchlines hit home every single time. The photography is exquisite, capturing the bustle of the profession without losing sight of the central and shifting bond between Russell and Grant—and then taking major tonal detours in scenes like the death-row interview, without ever seeming incongruous. Not a minor miracle, but a major one, and still the Big Dipper in one of American cinema's most celestial traditions. A+

Only Angels Have Wings (1939; dir. Howard Hawks) - By contrast, I found Hawks and Grant's previous collaboration to be a strangely gratuitous affair. All the earmarks of a Howard Hawks movie are there—the intimate, inbred society of male co-workers, the estimable women arriving in their midst, the blend of spectacular action with energetic dialogue—but it all registered with me as too overt, like a subpar director chasing Hawks' own tropes and technique. Based on a short story from Hawks' own pen, the movie also has an almost embarrassingly juvenile and quite repetitive awe for aviation as virile sport, not unlike Faulkner's attempts in novels like Pylon to associate himself with the august rituals of flight. Jean Arthur is typically engaging in an underwritten part, while Grant is her opposite on both counts: weirdly uningratiating, even taking into account that the character is supposed to be a tough nut to crack, and saddled with far too many motivations and backstories. A mature Bogart would have sailed through it, but Grant strains and cracks. For my money, the best way to save the film would be to hand it to Josef von Sternberg, who would loll with less embarrassment in the silly, exoticized locale, take a healthier ironic distance from the skyward exploits and male-male bathos, and show the audience a redolent good time. But, alas, this is the movie we got: passable, dotted with tiny glories (many of them care of antique star Richard Barthelmess and rising goddess Rita Hayworth), but still not worth anyone's time capsule. C+

Penny Serenade (1941; dir. George Stevens) - Lots of Grant fans who champion Only Angels Have Wings would probably shrug off Penny Serenade, which looks suspiciously like the kind of sentimental drama to which Oscar's inexplicable black sheep finally sell out in order to secure a long-postponed nomination. Penny Serenade accomplished just this for Grant, but it's no I Am Sam, and in the hands of director George Stevens (Alice Adams, The More the Merrier), it emerges as a credible melodrama. Grant co-stars with his Awful Truth flame Irene Dunne, and while the film is on shaky legs throughout their acquaintance and early marriage, climaxing in a rather risible earthquake in Japan—a rather stentorian metaphor for miscarriage, even by Hollywood standards—the adoption drama which follows is rather nicely played and paced. Dunne and Grant aren't doing career-best work, but they're still quite good, and they act with an ease and synchronicity unique to actors well-known to each other, able to save several scenes from their weepiest possible pitfalls. The arrival of costars Edgar Buchanan and Beulah Bondi also accomplishes a lot for the movie, and the screenplay doesn't take all the turns you expect. Even the obligatory climaxes, like Grant's impromptu oratory in a lawyer's office, are credibly written and staged. Maybe I'll return to Penny Serenade someday and reconsider my current admiration for it; it's certainly not lacking in hoary devices. But for now, I'm squarely on its side. B

The Talk of the Town (1942; dir. George Stevens) - Swiping a structure from His Girl Friday (civic crisis juxtaposed to romantic roundelay), a female lead from Only Angels Have Wings (Jean Arthur), and a director from Penny Serenade (George Stevens), this Best Picture-nominated comedy from 1942 plays like more of a greatest-hits pastiche from Grant's peak years than a perfectly integrated object unto itself. Grant stretches a little to play convicted arsonist and murderer Leopold Dilg, who is actually a small-town political dissident standing on the wrong side of powerful industrialists. It's a difficult character to know what to do with, and both the actor and the movie hold him somewhat in abeyance while generously ceding the movie to Jean Arthur, perkily hiding Grant from the law, and to Ronald Colman, an esteemed legal theorist who doesn't know he's befriending a fugitive. The trouble is, neither of these characters fully congeals, either, and the film's thematic arc about the nature of jurisprudence feels a little outsized to the momentary pleasures of deft actors keeping a light, fragile birdie in the air. Fun, but best taken as a pleasant sorbet after richer, more flavorful movies. B–

High Drama

In yet another winning pick from the ClassicFlix collection, I enjoyed Dudley Nichols' three-hour adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, which I've reviewed in full here. O'Neill is an incredibly strange and difficult playwright, but also an indispensable one, and the thing that impressed me most about Mourning Becomes Electra—besides the fine acting by Michael Redgrave and Raymond Massey and the priceless camping of Katina Paxinou—was that director-screenwriter Dudley Nichols flat refuses to tame the weirder impulses and transparently Athenian ambitions of O'Neill's piece. Mourning Becomes Electra at least hails from an era in Hollywood filmmaking when famous works of the stage still prompted a good number of movies—whereas now, W;t and Angels in America unfold on cable TV and the isolated cinematic transplant like Proof seems heavily embattled. Still, even the best American plays have always had trouble getting their richest, fullest layers onto the screen. Look at what Richard Brooks did to Cat on a Hit Tin Roof, and even when the bowdlerizing was fascinating, as in the gonzo screen version of Suddenly, Last Summer, it still doesn't serve the play all that well.

Mourning Becomes Electra is long, dense, formal, demanding, and uncomfortably furious in its emotions, as is the play. It is inconsistently effective, and you can spot plenty of room for Nichols to have shaped up his adaptation a little—Rosalind Russell, in particular, is a problem, and murkier lighting and a location shoot would have helped. Still, there's an integrity and a conviction to this piece which I appreciated.

Elated to see a play that survived to the screen with its essential character intact, I also gave the DVD of Closer another spin, and the film has only improved in my mind from when I saw it theatrically last December. Spiky, unpredictable, and daringly histrionic, this is a film that really puts itself out there, demanding our patience and our interest with a series of break-ups and betrayals but refusing to divulge any of the connective tisssue of romance or commitment that intercedes between all the backstabs and crying jags. Closer is not a great play but it's a very good one, and the impeccable cinematography and art direction—crucial in giving the film the elegant sheen it needs as counterpoint to all the brutality—transition perfectly onto smaller screens. Jude Law and especially Natalie Portman both get better on second look, and Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, who already stunned in the theater, reveal new sides of their performances. Away from the hype, the breathlessness of awards season, the desperation with which Sony was coveting a Best Picture nod, I am hpoing Closer is finding more converts on DVD. I am also hoping that more good, punchy, distinctive plays will make the move into cinema without sacrificing what's distinctive about them. (To whomever out there has inevitably optioned Doubt, I'm speaking to you.)