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.

Supporting Actress Smackdown 1992

Just look at how perturbed the normally wan Ruth Wilcox has become upon learning that she did not win StinkyLulu's Supporting Actress Smackdown for 1992. I totally feel her; though either a Redgrave or a Davis win would easily have ranked among my all-time favorites in the category, I'm especially awestruck by how much Redgrave achieves, implies, and obfuscates in a short run of extremely delicate scenes. She gets how much the audience should and shouldn't know about Ruth, and she's poignant, gorgeous, gratuitous, and a little creepy. All the more remarkable if you know that she was filming in stretches of just a few days apiece while flying back and forth to the Middle East to protest the first Gulf War. One suspects Joan Plowright was not doing the same on days when the Enchanted April call sheet was all Josie or all Miranda.

I had really hoped to participate in this month's Smackdown (as had Nathaniel, apparently), so here's a public apology to Stinky. Admittedly, the recent rules about heart distribution would have felled me. Judy (more here) and Vanessa (more here and here) would both have demanded five from me, and I'm kind of a two-hearter on all of the other three performances, though I haven't seen Damage or April in a while. I started rewatching Damage a while ago as preparation for this exercise, but the lugubrious pacing and direction and all-time-worst use of Juliette Binoche (by Malle, by the stylist, and by Binoche herself) quickly started doing me in.

In terms of my own preferences, according to Oscar years of eligibility, my list would probably go Davis, her castmate Juliette Lewis, Rosie Perez in White Men Can't Jump, Redgrave, and Richardson in The Crying Game, with a possible sub-in of Kaycee Moore in Daughters of the Dust. Pfeiffer's great in Batman Returns, but I remember her as a lead. Plus, there's tons of important work from '92 that I haven't seen or not in a while, so take these suggestions with a half-grain of salt. Except the endorsements of Judy and Vanessa: they're indelible.

Wasn't She Lovely?

She also seemed committed and serious when she worked, and a majority of the time, she worked on tough stuff with interesting people. She suggested good humor, but not frivolity, especially not about acting. And every story I've ever read about her personality and habits and extensions of friendship offstage and offscreen has been a beauty. My favorite is about her sending The Hours to Meryl Streep because she thought Meryl would enjoy seeing herself pop up as a cameo character; friends who send books are always good friends. Speaking of books, when her mother wrote about her in her 1990 autobiography, even as she confessed to her own lapses and wavering availability as a mother, she glowed in a believable way about Natasha's goodness, and about watching her talent as an actress emerge.

I always worry that this is meaningless if not verging on the tasteless or presumptuous, but nonetheless, my thoughts are with the Redgraves and Richardsons and with the Neesons and all of their friends.

I'm Buying What Merchant's Selling

Wow, no love for Solaris, huh? Awful quiet around that entry. Maybe this one'll fare better.

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)

Picked Flick #80: Blow-Up

A tempting but terrible habit for film critics is to pronounce with presumed authority on things we know nothing about, except via the movies we watch. Whether Blow-Up, then, offers an apt characterization of the swinging London '60s, either in literal or purposefully exaggerated terms, or whether the "swinging London '60s" are anything but a cultural mirage, cultivated at the time and cited and spoofed ever since... none of this is for me to say, though Blow-Up sure makes it all feel true. The concerts, the floating parties, the licentious verve of the fashion photo-shoots, the sexual exhibitionism and its surrounding cocoon of scopophiliac looking. Whether or not this strain of youth culture ever existed, it exists quite convincingly and entertainingly within the terms of the movie. The construction of this atmosphere is the connective tissue that binds the movie together, even as so many of its scenes feel loose, offhand, breathing easily.

Whether or not Antonioni's protagonist unwittingly takes a snapshot of a dead body in a public park is only one of the questions at the nucleus of the film. Another is what it would mean if this body, this stranger's body, this body that doesn't look sufficiently like a body and doesn't have the habit of staying put, really did turn out to be a body. What would change? What would it mean? But there is yet a further question, equally central, and it virtually neutralizes all the others: what if these narrative riddles and cryptic implications are shadows of some greater enigma, some secret life of objects that keeps emerging, deliciously but somehow troublingly, in all of Antonioni's shots and scenes? Unlike, say, L'Avventura or L'Éclisse, Blow-Up is not about spaces but about forms and hard surfaces: the photographic equipment, the images themselves, the parti-colored fashion ensembles over which Carlo Di Palma's camera pans and glides so silkily, the rustling backdrop paper in the photo studio, the mottled floor on which Sarah Miles and her husband make love, the plane propeller purchased from the antique store, the Yardbirds' hilariously absconded guitar. Even the objects that go missing from the frame—the body, the tennis ball—continue to define their surrounding spaces rather than the other way around, except perhaps in the final shot, where the photographer himself evaporates into the grass. The seductive aesthetics of the movie, Antonioni's way of photographing everything so that all of it looks fascinating as well as concealing, mark a direct prelude to movies like Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, which prompt a constant stream of questions quite apart from the putative concerns of the plot. And yet the movie also feels remarkably self-contained, an exceptional case within Antonioni's own filmography, and within the mid-'60s "swinger" cinema that I have otherwise found so enervating (Lester, Schlesinger). As in the movie's entrancing, impeccably shot and edited sequence tracing the photographic enlargements, the images in Blow-Up itself keep suggesting larger scales, darker ramifications, and its sublimity of beauty and terror is of course the greater for leaving these questions unresolved. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)