Actress Files: Grace Kelly

Grace Kelly, The Country Girl
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(won the 1954 Best Actress Oscar)

Why I Waited: Kelly's trophy-copping performance has always intrigued me more in relation to her enduring cultural cachet and to the famous nominees she trumped than on its own terms. But she surpassed my expectations in Rear Window and Mogambo, so it was worth hoping she might do it again.

The Performance: It's entirely possible that at the tail end of 60 days and 44 performances, my head is starting to swim from so much actressing. But I hope there are more case-specific reasons why I find Grace Kelly's Oscar-snagging performance in The Country Girl so tricky to write about, or even to form a stable opinion about. It's one thing to be of two minds about a performance, even for the full length of a film. In Kelly's case, though, I was of different minds for different reasons depending on which sequence I was watching, and in shifting relations to a problematic film which itself deserves credit in lots of respects and yet feels over-strained and over-confident in lots of others.

I find this much solid ground to stand on vis-à-vis The Country Girl: Bing Crosby gives an exemplary turn as worn-out and drink-ridden stage actor Frank Elgin. The first half of his performance highlights Frank's broken self-confidence, his fear of failing in a performance that's meant to resuscitate his career and his spirit, and which he can't afford to say No to. We hear rumors of pronounced alcoholism in the past, and both Broadway and Hollywood have generically prompted us to expect some vivid backsliding, but the performance doesn't feel immediately centered on those questions. The second half of the film, though, does feature many more scenes where Frank's sharp, sweaty need for a drink is front and center, taking on a focalized life of its own, in some ways superseding the questions of professional ability and confidence. One of many rare feats that Crosby achieves is that his incarnations of the pitiable, aging veteran and the soaked, volatile lush are equally powerful and specific, and they persuasively add up to the same person. Many a performer would struggle through one of these facets of Frank while thriving with the other, but Crosby offers a detailed, integrated, poignant articulation of both. Moreover, as The Country Girl makes its climactic moves to wrestle specifically with the chicken-egg question of whether Frank drinks because he fails or fails because he drinks—framing these riddles in the dueling contexts of an unsilenceable grief (the heavy past) and of Frank's potential "comeback" show, lumbering toward its Broadway opening (the portentous future)—Crosby pulls all these threads of Frank's suffering into a sad, eloquent synthesis. Through him, The Country Girl puts forward a haunting essay, a kind of didactic parable but also very lived-in, about the problems of success and failure. Why does success in one part of life seem to engender so much resistance from other people or invite bitter cosmic setbacks in other arenas? And why does failure, by contrast, seem to have such an easier time of spreading virally from one realm of experience until it infectiously grips all the others? Once you're living in that grip, how and with whose help can you ever get out?

I don't mean to build up Crosby just to say that Kelly acts less convincingly than he does, but to suggest some of the themes and stakes that become important in The Country Girl through the clarity and force of his performance, and as another way of indicating that success in their two roles involves the agile negotiating of major balancing acts. The characters are highly ambivalent, the script underscores different dimensions of the drama at different times, and it has that heightened, even awkward transparency of theme and language that are typical of Clifford Odets's writing—all while nonetheless requiring that the actors sell that language as "real" in order for the film to work. Plus, the way Kelly's Georgie is structured into the story, she is both a co-lead alongside Crosby and William Holden (in the somewhat simpler role of the writer-director who hires Frank for his play), and a reactor/enabler of Crosby's Frank, to a degree unusual even by the standards of screen wives. When he's in a play, she has to get him through it, as agent, dresser, and morale booster, though the last bit is the hardest. When he wants a drink, she has to try to get him over it. When he inevitably does drink, she has to pull him out of trouble. And all of this upkeep doubles as triage on their marriage, additionally beset as it is by an age difference that has never become easy and a catastrophe in their past to which they will never stop responding. I said before that this battle with grief aligns with the production of Holden's play as two arenas in which Frank's capacity for success—for survival, really—will finally be measured. I add now that the sustainability of the marriage is a third, parallel framework in which Frank and Georgie stand to rise and fall, which is not made any easier when Bernie Dodd, the Holden character, draws the quick, hard conclusion that it's Georgie who most undermines Frank's competence and self-belief, and that she must be exported at all costs.

That's an incredible lot to manage in one part, particularly for such an inexperienced actress. And notwithstanding a few key speeches, Georgie doesn't get the kinds of big, blustery, emotional climaxes that are the frequent payoff of having so much to handle. There's barely even anything in the script that encourages the audience to relate to Georgie. We suspect that Bernie is wrong in his estimation of her, if only because his misogyny is so astonishing and unrelenting ("Did it ever occur to you that you and your strength might be the reason he IS weak?... To be frank, I find you slightly grotesque, Mrs. Elgin"), but the point of The Country Girl is never to bring us around to Georgie's side. Maybe the most admirable commitment made manifest in Kelly's performance is that she respects this vinegary dynamic and never asks the audience to applaud her, feel sorry for her, or even get very close to her. That's not to say that I don't wish Kelly were a bit more permeable and much more flexible in the part. But she takes the role and the script seriously, very much the young actress who expects to improve by working on "good material" written by and starring more estimable talents, even if it means jumping in way over the head of her nascent sense of technique.

I'll say this for Kelly, too: the factors I most expected to interfere with her performance, the dowdying of her physical appearance and the improbability of being married to twice-as-old Bing Crosby, don't cause her any trouble. I almost wish Odets didn't include the line about young women trying to conceal themselves by looking like old ladies because, not unusually in his writing, it saps a visual and a behavioral signal into a coarsely literal assertion. The guarded way Kelly moves and wears her bulky sweaters and large spectacles all feel persuasively like the turtle-shell habits of several years, not like desperate lunges at "acting" through accessorizing. Her merry adoration of her husband in the flashback scene, where a younger, beautiful Georgie beams at a younger, golden-voiced Frank in a recording studio—even as it feels like a predictable producer's gambit to make sure we aren't hiding Grace under so much woolly cotton for the whole movie—handily communicates a real attraction to and enjoyment of each other. I suppose I was most impressed by how Kelly and Der Bingle communicate a long marriage of impatience, discontent, tiny budgets, and echoing tragedy without opting for the cliché of love that has curdled into hate, or even dislike. Kelly manages to seem ornery at almost all times with Frank's shortcomings and prevarications and she is sometimes very hard on him, but without suggesting she has foreclosed on some fundamental sympathy. I never asked myself, "Why are they still married?" and I had expected to ask that soon and often. Just the way Georgie surprises Bernie later in the film with the blunt admission that she has "twice left, twice returned" conveys a sense of beleaguered but genuine attachment. It's also the moment when we hear that Georgie, though less of a chronic or destructive self-berater than her husband, nonetheless has some aptitudes of her own in this area. When Bernie initially can't work out whether or not Georgie is encouraging Frank to take the role in Bernie's play, and he asks, "Are you for him or against him?" I admired the bullish, crabby way in which Kelly's Georgie responds, "I'm his wife," not quite clarifying whether it's to be assumed that she's "for" her spouse or whether wifedom, for her, has been accretively naturalized as a life-sentence of stalemate between being "for" and being "against."

Kelly never orchestrates anywhere near the same kind of "take" on her scenes with Holden, and unfortunately for her, these are lengthy, frequent, important, and prosy scenes. I don't envy her having to embody such an object of withering chauvinist contempt for such a long while, lobbed by an actor who radiates such a flat aggressivity that it's hard not to respond in kind (whereas Crosby's acting seems to engender in Kelly some of the sensitivity and sympathy that are characteristic of his own style). In these scenes with Holden, though not only with Holden, we catch Kelly too often playing not the character so much as some idea she associates with the part, the script, the playwright, the genre of serious drama. She looks off acridly into the distance. She jams her hands into her pockets while she quarrels or mourns. She settles again and again on a kind of hollow, superior-sounding cast to her voice, as though Georgie should be speaking from a perspective of profundity or complex thought, but without implying that Kelly has worked out just what it is that Georgie is thinking. The titular speech, when George describes herself as just "a girl from the country" who thus cannot fathom the foibles, machinations, and vicissitudes of theater people, seems totally opaque to Kelly. Again, the writing is so here rhetorical that I sympathize with its being difficult to play. But it's also a speech you know, as an actor, that the audience will be scrutinizing, and a perfect platform for making one's own decisions about why Georgie is saying this and what else it signifies for other facets of the characterization.

Kelly feels inert about making these sorts of decisions, sailing ahead in that low, etherized register of free-floating disillusion, or of introspection about nothing in particular. She makes the same choice while reciting a related but even more opaque soliloquy about the mysteries of the theater when she surprises Frank and Bernie with an after-hours visit to the rehearsal stage. Later, Georgie makes a morbid allusion to seemingly happy people who startle everyone when they wind up hanging themselves from their chandeliers. When Bernie, nonplussed, asks if she's insinuating something about Frank, Kelly looks off diagonally and says "Yes and no," but so stiffly that neither half of the answer really clarifies anything or leads anywhere. Her Georgie appears to have been doling out a speech, not working through a thought or a specific agenda; she isn't communicating anything through her "Yes and no" response except for Kelly's own seemingly vague sense of the preceding language, as though the overt ambivalence of the line has ratified her own perplexity about Georgie and mercifully absolved her of having to work it all out.

Rhythmically, formally, and narratively, The Country Girl suffers some costly lapses as it nears its conclusion, such that anything that has been frustrating about the film or its performances up to the final 20 minutes or so is only intensified as a question mark or a misgiving. Worst of all, we get a dramatic ellipsis of five weeks just where we wouldn't want one. Again, it's not just down to the actors that the characters' revised ways of relating to each other don't make as much sense, and rarely feel as though they've been plausibly signaled in any of the earlier scenes. But I wouldn't say this leap is insuperable. Particularly in Kelly's case, it seems rather too easy to reframe so much of the performance on so much new ground, under an umbrella alibi that "much has changed" since the preceding fadeout, and losing even the distinguishing marks of Georgie's glum carriage and stalwart physique. Of course, several of the old conflicts keep percolating, but the ways in which Kelly's Georgie relates to them seem superficial or sentimental—not just out of step with her earlier portraits of the character, but a direct antithesis to the woman Georgie is in her first long sequence, where "sentiment" is precisely the curse word she flings at empty praise, impractical assurances, conspicuous avoidances. Kelly and Crosby have to shoulder one pivotal scene of exchanging a long, meaningful look during the recital of a piece of music, and I'd have hoped the director George Seaton could have spatialized the scene in more complex terms than shot/reverse, or guided the performances in ways that had a chance of connecting these close-ups more fully to earlier notes. But here too, Crosby—who has never previously struck me as a born screen actor—looks as though he's trying to hold onto as much tension and emotional prehistory as possible while still managing a fairly direct expression, whereas Kelly looks as though she's favoring the most obvious affect suggested by the scene, and in an almost effusive, shining way that I have trouble squaring with the figure Georgie has elsewhere been cutting, even very recently in the film.

"Don't keep things from me" and "He's shunned any responsibility" are Georgie's two most frequent refrains in complaints to or about her husband. It's tempting, if a bit easy and twitty, to say that she keeps too many things from us that we need to know about Georgie, and she shuns too much responsibility for exploring, coming to grips with the character. Theater training is probably a crucial asset for essaying this character, even in a screen incarnation; I have my beefs with contemporaneous screen performances like Shirley Booth's in Come Back, Little Sheba or Julie Harris's in The Member of the Wedding, which seem too fully, even garishly conceived with only the stage in mind, but Kelly seems paradigmatic of an opposite awkwardness, applying a screen-specific conception of acting and a still nascent one at that to the realization of a very complicated, occasionally thankless part that can only subsist on lots of rehearsal, an ample bag of technical facilities, and lots of spontaneous interactions with co-stars, leading to well-judged and practiced takeaways from those in-the-moment experiences. It's not an all-or-nothing proposition. Kelly is effective and memorable plenty of times: glaring at Frank with empathy and annoyance as he awaits his first reviews, walking into an unwanted broadcast on the radio and dropping into an angry sorrow, catching Frank as he tries to abscond with a bottle of liquor-heavy cough syrup, without even raising her eyes from her knitting.

From moment to moment, the performance is very up and down, and on the whole, it's an unusually potent merging of the compulsively watchable with the plainly inadequate, in a way that has nothing to do with kitsch. Save the occasional jaw-clenching, eyes-widening, Mae Marsh look of furious panic, as in a scene where she has to slap Holden for one of his sexist vituperations, I never thought Kelly was remotely embarrassing herself or embarrassing the film, even though it's hard not to feel that major opportunities were missed by not casting someone with more chops, more life experience. Georgie is younger than her husband, but 25 is awfully young to have already been through all the stages she is reported to have been through, or to know how to express those ordeals and their legacies for a screen audience (even the ones that turn out not to be true). Having now seen all the performances that garnered a Best Actress Oscar, I'd have to categorize Kelly among the 20 or so that just don't make the case to me that they ought to have carried anyone near the Academy podium, even in a weak year or for heavily qualified reasons. But at the same time, of those same 20 performances, hers is the only one that specifically falls short by testing a very new actress against truly highwire dramatic material (perhaps more formidable than even she realized), and where the infelicitous match of performer to vehicle doesn't yield a flat, a dispiriting, or a mockable result but a compelling spectacle of an earnest performer who wins a couple of key rounds with the script. She goes down, ultimately, but never without a good, inspiring fight. If she were ever really electrifying in her peak scenes, as Halle Berry is in Monster's Ball—the only other winning performance that seems to marry palpable ambition, dubious technique, fitful insight, and impressive sincerity in something like the same way—I might be able to privilege the half-full glass in thinking about Kelly's work. That's what's happened over time for me with Berry, and I just saw The Country Girl yesterday. For now, her Georgie Elgin feels like a glass half-empty, but even if it therefore seems seriously undeserving of an Oscar, I do think it warrants our respect.

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

Actress Files: Susan Hayward

Susan Hayward, I Want to Live!
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(won the 1958 Best Actress Oscar)

Why I Waited: Susan Hayward going on a spree, any spree—yelling, drinking, drawling, killing—approaches, for me, the delicious promise of Jessica Lange going on a tear or Angela Bassett flying up a wall. Meaning, it doesn't always portend new heights in novelty or actorly self-control, but it's often been electrifying in the past, and I wouldn't want to miss it. Plus, that title!

The Performance: David Thomson begins his entry on this actress in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film thusly: "Susan Hayward was a trouper who never saw any reason to do anything other than sock it to us." Reader, I cannot do any better than that. He continues, "If, as I feel, she is largely devoid of appeal, it is a credit to her determination and uncompromising directness that she lasted so long." Here, I have to demur, insofar as I do see appeal. I have certainly had my complaints with some Hayward performances, and it means something that so many of them are hard to remember and difficult to distinguish from one another. Her styles of "socking it to us" come in a set number of varieties, though we should not undervalue the conviction she applies to showing her audience a real and unstinting performance, whatever that winds up meaning for her. I found her tremendously watchable as the drunk in the trashy Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman, even when she teeters precariously between elevating and sinking into the hollow, untrained sensationalism of the filmmaking. And in 1955's I'll Cry Tomorrow, at least, she is truly electrifying. In that performance, she has to sing, dance, guzzle, fume, quarrel, fall apart, and do it all in the guise of a famous person, someone still very much around when the movie came out. But yes, given Hayward's somewhat limited range and her intent focus on a species of role that seems so out of keeping with her outward appearance, it's remarkable how she endured. She carved a niche for herself that can seem campy today: the actress working hard to look careworn, always whipping up a dipsomaniacal storm, despite looking exactly like your elementary-school music teacher. There's no questioning, though, how huge a star she was throughout the 1950s, or how much she pushed the boundaries of the kinds of disastrous behavior that a female actor could embody in a mainline Hollywood picture.

Still, Hayward's craving for attention, and specifically that of Oscar, seems as intense as the more chemical cravings of even her most dissolute characters. Certainly there are actors preceding Hayward who seem groomed to be darlings of the industry and its docile voting bodies, women who pursue vehicles that aspire more to votes than to art. Greer Garson and Jennifer Jones are clear examples. But Hayward in some ways strikes me as the first actress whose career seems to exist as a long, dogged march toward Oscar, in a style that virtually dares the voters to deny her a prize. When you don't win for playing one extravagantly "fallen" girl (Smash-Up), then play another one (My Foolish Heart). When these don't work, switch courses and play someone aggressively wholesome, giving you lots of chances to charm, suffer, and even sing, all in gossamer feminine costumes (With a Song in My Heart). Granted, though, you wind up needing the famous gal you're playing to dub your vocals for you. So when that nomination doesn't pan out into a win, go back to your proven métier in shrieking substance-dependents, but keep the flashy angles of biography and diegetic showmanship, and this time, wow 'em with your real singing voice (I'll Cry Tomorrow).

When that doesn't work, ask yourself what on Christ's green Earth you need to do to win one of these damn trophies, and settle for no less than the story of real-life death-row inmate Barbara Graham. Plenty of booze, sex, and erratic behavior, and some wide-angle close-ups of the character bellowing from behind bars. Just wait till they see you striding into the gas chamber, getting masked and strapped into your Medieval chair while the cyanide tablets are readied. This'll really hook 'em! Get nominated again, alongside three-time loser Rosalind Russell and four-time loser Deborah Kerr. It's fine if everyone feels sorry for them, too, but make clear that yours is the career most obviously in need of an overdue statuette, and make sure, to this end, that the picture billboards its own Importance as often as possible. Win. Enjoy. And then, having satiated you with the one form of respect on which your whole professional life seems inordinately premised, notice how your Hollywood colleagues immediately stop offering you good parts, never nominate you again, and leave you with a bunch of desultory films and roles until your clock runs down.

So, basically, Susan Hayward is a kind of Susan Sarandon figure, a hugely popular actress for a lengthy but seemingly finite period; a highly respected figure in her community who evidently absorbs the hype that it's a crime she's never won an Oscar. Therefore, she sets herself undisguisedly to cinching one, even if it means proffering evidence of a repetitive strain in her acting. They both cleaved rather ardently to their own typecasting, and they finally struck gold on their fifth tries, relying on the tonal solemnity and the inevitable dramatic stakes of Death Row to usher them both to glory. Almost from the moment they at long last won their Oscars, their careers began to decline. But the huge letdown of I Want to Live!, which you could never in a million years ascribe to Dead Man Walking, is that it seems somewhat sleazily undecided about whether to treat capital punishment as an occasion for moral reflection or for 2,000 volts of slick, gaudy potboilerism. And without question, though one could fairly have expected more from director Robert Wise, I Want to Live! bends over backwards to let its actress make a bold but tireless, unrestrained, and frequently tacky show of herself. Hayward could not be seeking awards gold any more candidly if she showed up to set in a dress made of magnet tape, and yet, in a total about-face from the harrowing, earnest extremities of her Lillian Roth in I'll Cry Tomorrow, Hayward coats her Barbara Graham in a thick wax of flippant mannerism and self-regard. She looks ripely pleased with herself through the lion's share of I Want to Live!, leading to scenes for which the proper response is not an Academy Award but an abrupt "cut" and a second, recalibrated take. Once more, with humility.

In a sense, whether she sought the part or was recruited for it, Hayward is a victim here of radical miscasting that only looks like no-brainer casting. Women in extremis, especially in biopics, practically meant "Susan Hayward" by 1958, but she was already 40 years old by the time she filmed this part. Almost everything in the script implies a much younger woman, and indeed, the real Barbara Graham was only a couple years past 30 when she was executed. Hayward's performance is full of facetious pantomimes and exaggeratedly animated gestures that may well be intended to make the character seem younger, but to no avail. Not even her incongruous, somewhat embarrassing dance to a bongo beat at a drink-soaked party can help her in this arena. Her eyes pop, her head cocks to the side, her smile goes crooked, and she makes other, erratic gestures in the name of improvisational pizzazz, some of them aimed right at the camera. Perhaps she is trying to syncopate the register of her acting with the loud, busy jazz score of Johnny Mandel. The film and the actress, though, feel inordinately hell-bent on presenting Barbara as a livewire, a good-time girl, a ball of boisterous, amoral energy ...but not a killer. And so a good deal of dramatic tension flies out the window while Hayward indulges in double-takes and shimmies with untoward glee.

Wise. Hayward. The screenwriters, Nelson Gidding and Don Mankiewicz. The dubiously repentant crime reporter Ed Montgomery (played here by Simon Oakland), whose articles are credited as an adapted source for I Want to Live!'s script and who emerges here as a major advocate for Barbara's harsh sentence, only to undergo a Damascene change of heart and start lobbying to save her hide. All of these collaborators clearly prefer to portray Barbara as a merry but irresponsible party girl, rather than a woman who may well have perpetrated the murder for which she is charged. Hayward looks sozzled and slap-happy plenty of the time as I Want to Live! gets going, and she gets some more bite into her rowdy burlesque of drunkenness once she and her bartender-husband Henry are berating each other with their baby squalling in between them, gray circles hanging beneath their bloodshot eyes and the specter of potential violence quickly coming to a head. For all that, though, Hayward never feels dangerous, in a way that punchy Piper Laurie almost certainly would have, as might an Anne Bancroft type, capable of anger, temper, and other, disciplined forms of unnerving potency.

Instead, symptomatically of other errant drifts in the performance, Hayward makes leering, bizarrely comic lunges at the camera as she enters the warehouse where the police apprehend her and her male accomplices. She does so again when the cops arrive to flush her out amid hot white spotlights. In the shower and the delousing inspection she undergoes on her way into jail, a naked Barbara is asked "What's that?" by a nurse looking her over for scars or infected sores. "My push-button control," is Barbara's taunting response, and I can't believe she says that in a 1958 script, clearly with something else in mind. Still, even in moments where the character is obviously taking smug pride in her own insolence, Hayward's delectation in her tough-broad dialogue and in her own "saucy" delivery feels too constant, supercilious, and flat. She overwhelms our sense of the character beneath this spectacle of an actress congratulating herself on playing someone in so mordantly caustic a fashion, as though this in itself is the closest she needs to come to exploring Barbara's susceptibility to lawlessness. Or as though Hayward's growing fatigue with playing similar variations on reckless, bullheaded characters is a good enough reason to start communicating them so haphazardly, with an eye toward entertaining herself more than illuminating the woman in the story.

Again, the script and direction do not help, even though I don't mean to describe her as a total wash in I Want to Live! She gets a great, silhouetted entrance in a panting boudoir scene, which might have been devised by Sam Fuller as one of his classic, tawdry character intros. But where Fuller and associated muses like Constance Towers, whatever their failures of finesse, would have thrived in the unabashedly criminal milieu and dared us to deny them their charisma, Wise and his editors virtually occlude any sense we have of what Hayward's Barbara has or hasn't perpetrated alongside her underworld pals. Her incessant kiss-offs to social propriety feel too detached from any genuine thrill in wrong-doing, or any contagious sense of desperation, the kinds that could lead a woman like Barbara into much deeper trouble. A director with fuller, richer conviction in B-grade pictures, the ones that usually run under titles like I Want to Live!, would never have let Hayward get away with such skin-deep impudence, had such a director even cast her at all. When she eventually plays other emotions beyond her laughing-Medusa routine, whether in the guises of a furious inmate or a despondent mother or an outraged defendant or a desperate witness or a hard-bitten stoic in the face of state-sanctioned extermination, these often tend to feel overdone as well, and occasionally downright clownish. By contrast, when Hayward does elect to give herself a richer workout, you can always feel it, as during a long, tense scene played in shot/reverse close-ups when Barbara is trying to hire a cellmate's handsome boyfriend as an alibi-for-sale, committing perjury in order to claim that he was with her on the night she is accused of helping to murder an old widow. This scheme doesn't work nearly as well as Barbara had hoped, but as a cameo impression of the woman's studious preparations for an immoral way out—limned with fear, annoyance, and sustained tension, and leavened with one incongruous but very funny throwaway line about mustard plasters—the sequence profits more than most do from Hayward's characteristic intensity.

She certainly has her moments in the final chapters, too, as Barbara nears the hour of her appointed death. She is both filing multiple pleas for a stay of execution and haranguing her lawyers and advocates for lodging these requests. Such high-stakes ambivalence puts some credible human drama into Hayward's playing, and she edges up to an engaging rapport with Alice Backes, playing her final guard and confidante in San Quentin. Nonetheless, the much-vaunted power of the movie's closing sequences depends less on Hayward than on the frank but arguably sensualized details of how an execution is prepped. Submitting herself to the scarily sterile atmosphere and the moment-to-moment protocols of a California execution cannot have been easy on Hayward, and I'm sure she didn't take the role lightly. But in some ways she has taken the part, if not lightly, then at least over-easily. Her transition from overplayed, self-indulgent jocularity to a stern, frayed-edge stoicism by the finale serves the material just fine, I guess, but it's not a particularly subtle, fresh, or difficult way to explore the complicated workings and enigmas of Barbara Graham.

I would also point out that with the exception of Jo Van Fleet in I'll Cry Tomorrow (not coincidentally, Hayward's strongest performance), I find it hard to recall almost any of the other actors in Hayward's other starring vehicles. Possible senility aside, I think this struggle on my part suggests Hayward's frequently ostentatious approach to her job, stealing her scenes even when she's already dead-center, and even though the supporting parts have been cast too thinly to keep them from bringing a whole lot to the table. On the one hand, Hayward's showboating gets in the way of our dwelling on anybody or anything else, which also hampers the ability of I Want to Live! to prompt the kind of larger ethical rumination on capital punishment that it seems to have in mind. It's hard to see past Hayward and wrangle with anything else in the film. On the other hand, the showboating is so flagrant even when it's most effective that when the fatal boom gets lowered on Barbara in the last ten minutes, I was much more aware of watching the curtain come down on a fruity bit of overacting, not of watching a soul get snuffed out by an implacable, bureaucratic system. There are more than enough high points in Hayward's construction of Barbara Graham to make a credible case for three stars, but I have to concede, most of the good stuff you've seen before. Worse, a million opportunities for depth and credibility have been squandered in the name of wry, imprecise gesticulating. An intriguing film and a much more insinuating dissection of an unsettling woman still make themselves felt in brief but palpable flashes. I just wish they hadn't been trapped in a project that ought to have been titled I Want to Win!, and one that professes such blowzy, cynical ideas of what the voters might misrecognize as great acting or great art. Then again, the voters did recognize it as exactly this, so who am I to carp?

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 4 to Go

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

Actress Files: Olivia de Havilland

Olivia de Havilland, To Each His Own
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(won the 1946 Best Actress Oscar)

Why I Waited: Two and a half years ago, after screening Kitty Foyle, I realized I had 65 more nominated performances to go (not counting, of course, the 15 new nominees that have been anointed since then). Only four of those were winners, and I've enjoyed saving them up. Surely, though, after I wrote up Joan yesterday, you didn't think her sister-rival could be far behind?

The Performance: "The most mysterious mysteries are people, and usually people who don't seem mysterious at all," states the onscreen epigraph for the 1946 Paramount weepie To Each His Own. "Take Miss Norris, for instance. Here she is, a middle-aged American woman, walking down a London street on a blacked-out New Year's Eve." Olivia de Havilland "takes" Judy Norris to the tune of her first Best Actress Oscar, approaching her with the studied élan of an efficiency expert, devising clear physical and vocal correlatives for every adjective or information-point the screenplay offers about her. Right off, she adopts the harsh, snooty accent of a moneyed, standoffish American expatriate as she haggles over a cab on her way to her fire-watching duties on the roof of a London church. (Fire-watch, v., to keep a nighttime eye on the city, calling in any bomb-related blazes before they can spread too far). After some bickering and some light-comic mishaps with her fellow cyclops, a George Sanders type called Lord Desham (Roland Culver), the two repair to a café where he describes coming home from World War I to find his wife and child dead of the so-called Spanish flu. Full stop on Lord Desham: the movie only includes this dolorous tale as a generic prompt to goad Judy into her own reminiscences of hardship. Or rather, to allow de Havilland the kinds of close-up reactions that leave no doubt she's holding back her inward laments. As the actress takes pains to show us—her vowels aggressively arch, her clothes and hat completely concealing, her fine jaw warily pulled back toward her neck in instantaneous response to Desham's compliment, her dark eyes guarded and transparently preoccupied—Judy isn't giving up her ghosts to a total stranger. She prefers to unspool them in voiceover, and then in fully re-enacted flashback, so that de Havilland can start off with a new assemblage of character traits: the smart but modest makeup, the open manner, the "nice" but ardent romantic daydreams of an early-century upstate New Yorker, the ice-cream scooper and checkout girl in her father's smalltown pharmacy and convenience store.

De Havilland is by no means a bad actress, and in fact, she has the serious commitment to detail, the curiosity about character, the self-confidence, and the susceptibility to various passions that often a distinguish a really strong one. She's impressively go-for-broke in The Snake Pit, intriguingly devious in My Cousin Rachel, and, for all the divided opinions about her gleaming saintliness in Gone with the Wind, able to sustain subtle fluctuations and nuances of an essentially good person. But the first thing To Each His Own tells us is that Judy is "mysterious," and this de Havilland isn't. If anything, she translates in many of her performances as rather proud of herself, though without the panache or the illuminated complexities of headstrong goddesses like Davis, Hepburn, Crawford, or Bankhead. Particularly after the famous early-40s case in which she won freer rein to choose her own projects (and thereby rendered a magnificent service to a legion of fellow actors), de Havilland gravitates to pictures and directors that radiate a Hollywood studio's idea of "prestige," and there's something of the docent's look in her eye: Note the fineness of this film. Allow me the honor of starring in it for you. By all means, let me take you on a tour of this interesting woman.

Considered a bit differently, in movies like To Each His Own or her other Oscar-winning performance in The Heiress, de Havilland seems like a self-consciously strong student who is eager to get herself into the honors courses and impress teachers and fellows alike with her diligent, well-expressed variations on the lock-and-load research project, the correct geometric proof, the five-paragraph essay. There's ability but not a surfeit of fire, and even less of mystery: her eagerness to show you some good acting involves disclosing how scrupulously she takes her work, how thoughtfully she has searched for just the right techniques and gestures to demystify anything uncertain in the script. She submits her notes as well as her finished compositions for the audience's approval, and she waits for the day the Dean's List is posted. Admittedly, I respond in some of the same ways to the screenplays of Charles Brackett, which are almost always as sturdily constructed and arc-defined as everyone says, with dollops of comic incident and "character moments" thrown in for extra delight, but often with the same effect of broadcasting his processes of plotting and outlining. In mid-quality scripts like the one for To Each His Own, which are still much stronger than a lot of other writers' mid-grade scripts, I don't observe the jokes, the flashbacks, the interruptions, or the climaxes without hearing Brackett's conscience saying, "Let's lighten things up here to keep the film from getting soggy," or "Here's the instant they should reach for the Kleenex," or "Here I tarted up the structure a bit, to keep the audience from getting bored, and to show off the contrasts in Olivia's performance."

You can easily see why these caliber and species of talents would gravitate to each other, and why de Havilland, in the immediate wake of her judicial campaign for better roles, would leap at a story that gives her so many guises to inhabit: the fluttering innocent, the girl crushed by a necessary secret, the self-made Mildred Pierce, the blackmailer whom the audience can't begrudge, the Stella Dallas who'd rather ache in silence than crash her kid's good time. She isn't always tepid or fully safe in her approach. The whole premise requires that young Judy draw certain lines beyond which she's no longer willing to be the paradigmatically good girl, and though de Havilland misses a dozen opportunities for added depth during her whirlwind courtship with cynical aviator Bart Cosgrove (John Lund, not appealing), she melts pretty well when the time comes. Sure, she makes up for it by acting disappointingly prim even when she's by herself—ladling herself a symbolically significant glass of milk with finishing-school decorum, when there's so much else she could articulate in this moment—but she's convincingly antsy while dancing the steps of a tense social fandango that's meant to preserve her happiness and her good name, and convincingly devastated when the Fates capriciously intervene. Even in the best of times, then, the successes of the performances maintain a steady embrace with its limitations. De Havilland has focused too much, perhaps, on staving off the harpies of propriety who would slag off Judy Norris as a "bad girl," but she has sunk to the unimaginative level of these hypothetical tsk-tskers by preemptively countering with a cautious, fatally unmysterious blandness. She's much too flat and procedural with lines that could have carried delicious weight: "This is what I hoped flying would be like," "They talk about him as if he were dead, just dead," "I'm a traitor to everything you stand for," et al. Her Judy, to my mind, is more relentlessly "decent" than her roseate Melanie, because the gradations of the later performance are actually much blunter, and she has conceded in advance to the logic that stronger signals of pleasure, ambivalence, eroticism, pragmatism, or cruelty would be the marks of a bad person.

To Each His Own unfolds not unlike one of those early-30s, Sin of Madelon Claudet-style numbers where the unwed mother, having lost or renounced or sacrificed her child, undergoes a kind of picaresque of good and bad fortunes while trying to recover her life—with the obvious corollary agenda of accumulating untouchable credentials as a parent who warrants the restoration of her child. Sure, she becomes a cold-creme magnate instead of a trod-upon prostitute like Helen Hayes did, but you know the template. De Havilland gets a couple of scenes to flaunt her nouveau wealth and strategically wheedle her boy away from the couple who has raised him, by holding their financial fortunes in her immaculately gloved hand. The film hedges its bets by contriving to have the husband in this adoptive couple be a lifelong admirer of Judy, in fact a previously rejected and still-simmering suitor, but the actress sends no signals of thinking one way or another about him while she makes her big, remorseless play with only little Gregsy in mind. (Yes, "Gregsy.") She gets a luxe, dark, end-of-Blonde Venus ensemble in which to conduct this plaintive but mercenary errand; why Mary Anderson's Corinne is suddenly dressed as Dolly Madison is less clear. Anyway, de Havilland doesn't foreclose all sense that Judy isn't entirely on the up-and-up here, or that she might even enjoy pinning the possessive Other Mother to the wall. But here again, she softens and beams a bit too much just as the standoff is coming to a head, one of too many moments in To Each His Own when de Havilland elects to play "love" or "motherhood" or "what's best for the child" as spotless, burnished, uninterrogated ideals. She pitches right into the expectations of a dully conceived audience, rather than reflecting any of the character's own truths and striated experiences, starting with the fact that for Judy to remember herself as having been sublimely in "love" with Capt. Cosgrove is at best a self-protective delusion.

The final sequences of To Each His Own complete the actress's cosmetic tour of age brackets, and I certainly grant her the technical execution of her late-middle-age posture and voice, though the shoe polish under her eyes was a bit much, and she gives the strange effect of having aged remarkably between leaving for a train station and arriving there, and again during the car-trip from the station to her house. At last, she offers some of her most complicated, conflicted acting during these last-act scenes, as she wrestles with the decision of revealing her true identity to her now-grown boy or whether to stay mum, and questions whether her silence has more to do with insulating his contentment or with placating her own sense of shame. In a few of her close-ups, you can even see some doubt passing over her eyes about whether Gregory's genial but peremptory behavior has only to do with his incomplete information about what's going on or if he's just, you know, insensitive and a little rude.

De Havilland still might have done more with these scenes, but by the same token, I don't mean to imply that she's so completely on-the-nose in the preceding 100 minutes that there's no excitement in watching her, no possibility of the character's feelings having a claim on the audience. There's just too little sense of those feelings having deepened, shifted, or grown more complex in passing from the script to the screen, through the creative medium of the actress. An even more docile actress like Jane Wyman proves in films like All That Heaven Allows, albeit in tandem with a more ambitious and skeptical director, that you don't have to play a "bad girl" to communicate the labors and ironies of trying to do what's right and yet always finding yourself holding the short straw, or of being prone to sexual arousal despite an onscreen persona that's hardly designed to set the reels on fire. Frankly, the script for To Each His Own and the brusque performances of the other actors give de Havilland many more opportunities than Wyman, or other actresses in similar parts have had, to explore her character's discontents, and to violate her personal standards for propriety without losing the empathy of the audience. The film was nonetheless a hit and a key step, maybe the key step, in de Havilland's sudden ascendancy to the top spot among Hollywood's dramatic actresses. Oscar was obviously impressed, though de Havilland's legal victory against Warners surely gave her a huge boost in the voting, as, I expect, did her showy dual role during the same year as a murder suspect and her twin sister in Robert Siodmak's The Dark Mirror. I haven't seen that one, but I suspect it offers de Havilland another chance to impress us by differentiating separate guises of herself in the same movie. I still wish she showed a defter hand at finer nuances, and that she'd have worked more often and more mysteriously to find the fissures and ambiguities within a single guise of herself, without a decades-spanning plot or a double role or a flash-forward epilogue like the one in The Heiress to help her along. But as they say—even though I'm not sure what else it's intended to mean in this particular movie—to each his own.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 10 to Go