Hit Me With Your Best Shot: The Night of the Hunter

Not only am I apparently over-challenged to join Nathaniel's Hit Me With Your Best Shot series by the posted deadlines, but most of us who participate continually moan about how hard it is to winnow down to just one shot, even though this is the whole point of the exercise. At least with Showgirls I knew right where to go, but I kept sneaking in runners-up for Angels in America and Requiem for a Dream. At least I committed to a favorite in each case.

This time I'm cheating a little more, because the more deadline-savvy participants have already revealed their choices, and I couldn't help looking at their entries before I skimmed back through the movie. I love the peekaboo lighting trick that director Charles Laughton and legendary d.p. Stanley Cortez pull off with the candle and the window screen, while feisty Lillian Gish is keeping vigil with her shotgun, guarding her new wards from burly, devilish, implacable Robert Mitchum:



Jose likes this shot, too, so even if I would have picked it as my favorite (and I might have), I'll leave it aside for now.

I'm pretty sure my choice would actually have been "Not Quite Still Life, With Frog," one of several storybook tableaux featuring uncanny animal bystanders, during the kids' spooky flight down the river:



I just adore the cryptic, animist flavor of this sequence, which is shimmery and beautiful, but with the lenses pushing the frogs and the bunnies and the spiderwebs so insistently into the foreground that the overall effect is not entirely reassuring. Laughton and Cortez avoid telegraphing in any obvious way that the kids are absconding to a safer haven, or that having (barely) evaded the mad preacher's grasp has necessarily made life easy. To confess fully, however, I partly love the image because without it, and without the whole river-flight sequence, I don't know if Michel Gondry and Björk would have dreamt up her "Human Behaviour" video, and that would have been a great loss to humanity.



I also don't see how Martin Scorsese would have arrived at many of the images he burned into my brain in Cape Fear without Harry Powell to serve as Max Cady's stauncher, more barrel-chested grandpappy, always surreally lurking around the perimeter of the house he is haunting:



And I'm grateful for so many images that other Hit Me With Your Best Shot commentators singled out:




I'm especially fond of the top left image because I find it so breathtaking that Laughton and Cortez can orchestrate such an unbelievably strong, remarkably sustained, concertedly unrealistic look for their movie, and still accommodate so complete a departure from their template as these quick inserts of the (perpetually) drowned Shelley Winters. The light gray palette and minimal chromatic contrast, the diagonal angles, the unsettling motion of the formidably static camera, the flowing undulations of the seaweeds: Shelley hasn't just died, she's sunk to the bottom of a completely different filmic universe. From whose perspective—psychic or imaginative, rather than literal—could this shot possibly derive? I can't imagine the kids having this particular vision of their late Mom, though I'm not sure the rest of the movie exemplifies the kids' vision, either. Of all the times Shelley obligingly drowned on screen, this one's my favorite.

I also love the top-right image because even though the house towers over Mitchum's Harry, a fact that is only accentuated by the low angle of the camera, and even though the domicile all but crowds the human menace out of the frame, the compressed depth of field and the minimal shadowing everywhere except the front door area makes that house look awfully flimsy. Whereas, introducing a man-shaped black hole into the shot, resting with arrogant, Hud-like indolence against that crooked little tree, Harry seems as though he could raze the whole edifice in the time it takes to say "Leaning on the everlasting arms."

A few more favorites, since this is the end of the series' first season, and it's such a visually rich film:


Adore this opening aerial shot. Nothing's even happened yet, and already the kids of the world are sprinting for cover as though this is Cloverfield.


Like a re-write of the final shot of Shane, except this isn't about watching a boy's hero riding off toward the horizon, but watching a boy watch his father be apprehended by police, as though he's witnessing this awful trauma but also experiencing it as a sort of out-of-body experience. Again, the lensing and the bare minimum of shadow make it look as though Billy is standing before a screen painting of his father's arrest rather than implicating him spatially in the scene, though the advance of all those cops is undisguisably harrowing, and the implied sightline is devastatingly direct. Poor kid. His dad already feels so close and yet so far away.


Bless Laughton and Mitchum for allowing Harry some wit, and the film its own occasional, obsidian sense of humor. The actor popping his head down from the top bunk when we aren't necessarily expecting him to be a presence in the scene is even more chuckle-worthy as a graphic impression than it is unsettling as a certain pretext for nefarious behavior. This shot, too, gets a pointed reprise in Scorsese's Cape Fear. (Remember that Mitchum played the original Max Cady, too.)


One of the few close-ups I've ever seen of Mitchum where he almost looks conventionally handsome, and frankly pretty sexy. Screening Out of the Past and Crossfire yesterday, I was thinking of how carnally charismatic Mitchum succeeds in being without quite qualifying as handsome. He's shaped like a keg of ale, with an inverted pyramid or a funnel for a head, his brow much wider in circumference than his jaw, and his facial features stretched in a strange, triangular way like a drawing on a balloon, cinched with a knot at the bottom. It's a great face for movies, but an odd one, and only great because Mitchum makes it work as brilliantly as he does. But in this shot, he's much more straightforwardly attractive, and it makes Shelley Winters's Willa Harper make a little more sense in the way she breathlessly flings herself at him. Which, speaking of...


...is there a more devastating shot of spousal alienation in movies, especially on a wedding night, especially when we're expecting, as Willa obviously is, that Harry will be a force to be reckoned with in bed? Poor gal, even before she winds up in the drink, having handed her kids over to the monster.


And is there a more pitiable irony in movies than the fact that Billy can't help but react to the pitiful spectacle of terrible, terrorizing Harry being taken down like some petty vagrant, as though it's a replay of his Dad's demise—that he instinctively reaches out to his most fiendishly devoted antagonist, even permitting himself the emotional release that he did not allow at the moment of the initial wound?


How dear and how insightful, then, of Lillian Gish's Rachel to help Billy get over his father by allowing him to feel just a little bit like the man of her house, afforded the privilege of sleeping at her feet while the rest of the kids are locked up behind them. Is there a bit of the overzealous warden, though, in the way Rachel "protects" her charges? Is it odd that she sometimes looks more like ranch-hand of the kids than their den-mother caretaker, with her chickens penned inside her little coop, and with her trusty dog, subservient and silent, sleeping at her feet? She's a more than obvious Force of Good, but even Good can look a little strange, especially when you're dreaming. Sort of. Maybe.

(Note that all of these shots will luster even more once the Criterion DVD bows in the U.S. on November 16, in the 1.66:1 aspect that Laughton intended, and which the MGM disc compresses into Academy ratio.)

Birthday Girls: Judy Garland

Judy Garland, A Star Is Born
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1954 Best Actress Oscar to Grace Kelly for The Country Girl)

Why I Waited: Some form of gay honor code, I suppose, though that could just as easily have been a reason to have screened this years ago. Some residual hope that the footage excised by studio birdbrains might one day be recovered, though it seems fairly clear this will never happen. A dream of being in the right place and time for an in-cinema projection, though none has ever come my way. But really, the real reason is that even by the time I had 100 performances left to screen, this was the one that attracted the most reverential praise from fans, and the most durable controversy about just how scandalous it was that Judy didn't win. Plus, she sings, she dances, she emotes, she acts with James Mason (always a plus), she keeps it going for several hours, and she revisits and expands upon the foundations laid by Janet Gaynor, who was the first Mrs. Norman Maine but also the first Best Actress. So doesn't this seem, at least in theory, like an ideal capper to my loving archaeology of this category?

The Performance: Vicki Lester (née Esther Blodgett), as exploded into life by Judy Garland (née Frances Gumm), turns out to be an even more fitting alpha and omega for this project than I had realized. Having seen the previous Star Is Born with Gaynor and Fredric March, I of course should have anticipated that the Academy Awards themselves would figure prominently in the plot of the 1954 version, offering a more than fortuitous leitmotif given the context in which I watched the movie. The scenes at the Oscar ceremony furnish a kind of full, blooming resolution to the central, crescendoing chord of my nutty enterprise, which has been building in slow steps for so many years. As many of you know, Vicki wins the Oscar in A Star Is Born and gives the beginning of a very touching speech before a sudden, scary, and very sad interruption. I would still find this episode heartbreaking, I'm sure, even if I weren't completely over-invested in precisely the sort of glorious moment Vicki is enjoying until, abruptly, she isn't. And of course it's no easier watching Vicki essentially get Kanye'd by her own husband if we're preoccupied, as I couldn't help being, with the knowledge that this is the closest Vicki/Judy is ever going to get to a competitive Oscar. By the end of 175 minutes, and frankly much earlier, a truth for the ages has emerged, and it runs thus: if you're going to charter a peer academy of filmmaking professionals in order to honor annual feats of excellence in popular cinema, and you're not going to bestow one of these laurels upon Judy Garland's exhilarating, athletic, funny, nuanced, and sublimely grief-stricken performance in A Star Is Born, then you can pour, blast, and gild as many of those statues as you want, but you may as well just smash them against a wall or hurl them down the stairs.

Garland is beyond being the best of her group, which is hardly a shabby one. She's one Blanche DuBois away from being the strongest nominee of her decade. (No, I'm not forgetting that miraculous 1950 constellation.) She achieves so exemplary a fulfillment of every formidable ambition ingrained within George Cukor's brilliant film—a supernova of electric pizazz, an acute melodrama that pulls no psychological punches, a fond time-capsule of multiple forms and techniques of entertainment, and a metafilm about the production, the aesthetics, and the semiotics of Hollywood studio movies—that she actually makes you see what's missing, by comparison, in comparable characterizations as stupendous as Barbra Streisand's Fanny Brice and Liza Minnelli's Sally Bowles and Francine Evans. Not that I spent a single one of those 175 minutes thinking about anyone or anything else besides Vicki, her husband Norman Maine (made indelible by an equally heart-stopping James Mason), the movie they're in, the movies they make, the people who employ and applaud and punish Vicki and Norman (three categories with multiple overlaps), the private relationship they continually fight to preserve, and the final, catastrophic implosion of at least one of them.

And yet, no Oscar: he's the real Man That Got Away. And while I'd rather sing Garland's praises than use them as a glittering cudgel by which to beat up on the champ in her race, the injustice of this result, even by AMPAS's dubious standards, is pretty overpowering. I know well the look in my partner's eyes that says, "So do you see, then, what a cruel and absurd competition this always turns out to be? Are we ready to move on now to something else?" Sometimes he makes it easier and just says it with his mouth. In the case of A Star Is Born, it isn't just the external voting outcome that engenders disillusion but a message within the story and the filmmaking, holding that the ways in which we revere our actors tend to have built-in expiration dates. And even when this isn't the case, our ardor can look an awful lot like merciless aggression.

As Nathaniel pointed out in the comments on yesterday's Country Girl post, one needn't work too hard to align that film with A Star Is Born in relation to a thematic dialectics of success and failure. In lots of ways, A Star Is Born could not be more literal in this respect, given its famous chiastic structure by which matinée idol Norman Maine (né Ernest Sidney Gubbins) sees the bottom drop out of his acting career just as his discovery and eventual wife Esther/Vicki gleams like an arcing comet in the Hollywood firmament. Compared, however, to The Country Girl and to Georgie's crabbed efforts to keep her husband's stage career afloat, A Star Is Born is even more skeptical that anyone's creativity can be nourished or abetted by anyone else. Norman gives Vicki her crucial breaks, yes, and as he singles her out for praise, reapplies her makeup, applauds her routines, and enjoys her success, Garland and Mason alike contribute some of the most sensitive, tender acting in the film. But for all that you can cunningly escort someone into a studio head's office, there is not a single scene in A Star Is Born that suggests that Norman is capable of making Esther/Vicki a greater talent than she is, or that her love can defibrillate his sagging artistic energies.

Still less can you reverse the equation and extend your own creative prowess as a permanent balm to someone else's breaking spirit. But you can sure as hell try, and Garland's Vicki gives this form of exuberant nursing the fullest, funniest, most fiery test-run that anyone ever has. She comes home to a depressed and under-stimulated husband and launches into an impromptu, improvisatory living-room version of the lavish production number she's apparently been practicing all day, as though her virtuosity can lift him up. Temporarily, it seems to work, and it certainly works on us. Norman is absolutely delighted by Vicki's ingenuity, counter to my fears that A Star Is Born would generically require him to sour on Vicki's singing, dancing, and acting abilities once her star began to shoot higher than his. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen an on-screen spouse of a hoofer and belter take such mood-lifting, joyous pleasure in his partner's talent, just as I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone conjure the feeling, range, and exactitude of a major production number with the kind of vividness Garland attains, nailing her steps and her notes but, more importantly, implying a luscious series of visual tableaus where only a living room exists. (Granted, it's quite a living room.) Still, her victory is pyrrhic and quick. His mirth evaporates. Her incandescence dims before our eyes, even as she sits there in a rosy flush.

So, she creates tremendous entertainment out of thin air, and then it disappears just as swiftly back from whence it came. It's not just that Garland stops wailing and twirling but that she has to project the strange aura of the superpowered medium who is suddenly, once again, a mortal. Her performance, like the film, thus circles back to some subtly handled questions. What is this strange thing, creative magic? Where does it come from? What can it accomplish? Where does it go as the creator himself or herself starts to dissipate, or when the creator is forced to draw on more practical, more domestic, more emergency energies on behalf of someone else? Even while the story of A Star Is Born preoccupies itself with the practical ups and downs of commodifying, sustaining, and regulating artistic labor, the filmmaking and the acting seem charged at all times with—forgive me—a metaphysical reckoning with the vivid, slashing, booming, scary fact of human expressivity. Norman sees it in Esther, immediately, just as quickly and certainly as she sees that it once persisted, even quite recently, in him. So Mason has got to seem credible as a storied actor in the twilight of an august career, even though his character never gets to do a bit of acting—and this Mason accomplishes, and much else, unimprovably, through manipulations of manner and voice. Garland, meanwhile, has got to seem possessed not just of talent but of phenomenal, turbo-powered self-transportations. If all you do is sing a song well in the company of your buddies, then you'll still seem like a foolish opportunist, and/or like a clichéd character from any number of Ruby Keeler movies, when you quit your band of friends on the eve of a big tour, in order to pursue the eager but soggy promises of a tottering lush with industry connections. But, if you power your way through "The Man That Got Away" the way Garland does here, swelling your voice to huge, muscular volume before your body even looks like it's woken up; and then you start arcing your back and extending your arm in ecstatic, passionate service of the song; and then you power down into a giddy but embarrassed satisfaction immediately after the final note, as though even you cannot believe you can be the conduit for such sonorous, extravagant forces; then the audience will believe that Esther has to take Norman's advice, that their story is about something so prodigious that nothing smaller than the elephantine Hollywood apparatus could ever properly feed it, or be fed on it.

For huge stretches of A Star Is Born, most famously the 20-minute portmanteau of nested numbers called "Born in a Trunk," narrative recedes entirely, and there are no book scenes. Consequently, Garland's notes, her rhythms, her dancing, and her gestures carry the whole burden of showing that Esther's abilities are further burgeoning before our eyes, even though we don't have a lot of preceding impressions to compare these to. These same exertions, though, must also prepare us to grasp the complex ambivalences that start clawing at Esther's life with Norman the moment she leaves the theater. And we have to believe Esther knows most of this, even while she's selling the hell out of her songs and dance routines.... even when the lyric through which Garland has to filter all of this is the astoundingly mundane refrain "Pocatello, Idaho." Try singing that with ecstatic and multi-layered feeling. A Star Is Born, then, and Garland's turn in particular, doubly obligate themselves to set new, enthralling standards in note-perfect, emotionally shaded musical performance while also portraying a woman who increasingly perceives that her mastery in these areas is failing to shield her husband from disaster, or herself from abject unhappiness, even though her talents are in no way causing the disaster or the unhappiness. Her virtuosity gratifies her husband, buoys him up, but it also ensconces her within a profession that is busy sloughing him off. And it puts her in touch with an almost uncanny, purgative, expressive power which is the same one he has lost—or is so widely perceived to have lost that it amounts to the same thing—so in some ways it widens the gulf between them, even though neither of them wants that to happen.

Garland's numbers and her deliveries of them are often required to dramatize this kind of crisis, most obviously on the occasions when Norman asks Esther to sing for him and she gently obliges while nonetheless looking scared to go all the way—an unexpected reluctance, maybe, from a woman who belted "The Man That Got Away" to kingdom come after no more than a glance at the sheet music, before an audience of zero. Garland's phrasings of the lyrics and her modulations of sound tell us all we need to know about when she's thinking of the number, or thinking of Norman, or thinking of herself, in more or less that order. Sometimes, she has to run through the same routine twice in this movie, giving her all in the way that is Vicki's job and Garland's job, but signaling different forms of effort or preoccupation each time. The exemplary case here, of course, is the "Lose That Long Face" number which Garland has to put over like gangbusters after arriving on the set looking glum and distracted. Then she has to duck out between camera setups so she can completely decompose herself in tears, panic, and choking helplessness on the semi-warm shoulder of studio-head Charles Bickford (and in very close to one long take, incidentally). Then, after drying her eyes and wiping her nose, she has to reprise the same number for an encore in close-up, cognizant that her audience knows what kind of effort it's requiring for Vicki to bear out the injunction of her own song, especially in the face of an even more intrusive camera. But Vicki has to do that, without seeming lost in her own despondent thoughts, because the whole point of A Star Is Born is that she's a trouper, in work as in love, before she is anything else.

What Garland ultimately presents is an astonishing synthesis of Gene Kelly's indefatigable physical energy and Bette Davis's dramatic intensity, including in moments where her acting stands wholly apart from musical performance. You have to have real mettle to survive the unexpectedly vicious tirade that a studio publicist unleashes on her when Vicki won't attend an Academy benefit in the final minutes of the film, for patently obvious reasons. Garland survives it, and then bellows back with her own redoubtable gust of jealous self-defense, even as the character's nerves are obviously, completely frayed. But not all of Garland's acting is scaled so high or so loud. She's much more simply compelling making an earnest plea to a disgusted judge, and showing up for her bewildering first few days of work at a movie studio. She exercises just the right amount of idolatry, attraction, lucidity, and bashfulness that we believe her love of Norman eclipses her gnawing concerns about his alcoholism and unreliability. It's obvious she's heading into this relationship with both eyes open—in some ways returning the favor of how he "saw something in me no one else ever did," and she refuses to act surprised or victimized when the going gets very, very tough, no matter how devastated she gets. More than once, Garland's odd penchant for reacting to ephemeral little stimuli that no one else even seems to register cuts the daringly high-pitched histrionics of A Star Is Born down to a smaller, more humorous, more offhandedly accessible size: i.e., the way she darts her eyes around now rooms when she enters them, often perplexed, or how she emits a girlish chuckle at the size of a very large sandwich that Norman hands to her.

Garland can uncork a ferocious vibrato, and often does, but she also has the tender comic timing to gently chuckle at her husband when he asks her to perform in private, as though she knows it's an odd way to express love, as well as a stirring one and, for her, an easy one. She can look very moved and serious and only a little rattled during a dingy jailhouse wedding, despite having been pushed to the extremes of despair (and, it must be said, of regrettable overacting) after a similar scene in Vincente Minnelli's The Clock in 1945. She can get laughs singing a jingle about peanuts, accompanying herself on maracas, even while she sings it better than anyone else could. A cartoon drunk saunters by asking incongruously for "My Melancholy Baby" instead, and as it turns out she can also put over "My Melancholy Baby" with creamy, lavender ease. She can react to a horrifying smack as though she knows it's not deliberate and must immediately be covered over, for the benefit of an entire room, and to keep her intimate life sustainable; she can react to someone else's opinion of her husband as though this is the horrifying smack, while nevertheless implying that she cannot in every sense discount what this person is saying. She can charm as much as Irene Dunne ever did by just rattling off a list of hamburger options on a menu. She can look emptied out inside by a splotchy, sluttish makeover she didn't want. She can give three versions of the same dance in a subtly altered costume, in a line of nearly interchangeable and identically dressed women, playing up the ridiculousness of the routine while handily implying just how much time is probably passing between repetitions, and how much she's giving her best while wishing she were somewhere else. Outside a sidewalk box office, she can make the almost silently mouthed words "Thank you" ring just as powerfully as almost anything else in a film brimming with violent colors, bustling Cinemascope frames, tapping shoes, waves of song, lens flares, crane shots, and starkly lit chiaroscuro farewells.

What else could anyone want, AMPAS voter or otherwise? When Garland comes out to offer her final, notorious line reading, it would be specious to give her sole credit for all of the ironies that reverberate from this one sentence. The set, the lighting, the sensitive camera movements, judiciously spaced-out edits, and sublime direction from master George Cukor have all put Garland in a place from which her Vicki Lester, her Esther Blodgett—in many ways, this is a dual performance rolled into one ceaselessly renegotiated package—can saunter out as both the triumphant survivor and the foreclosed bride of death. She says, "I'm Mrs. Norman Maine," and we receive it as both a final tribute to her most voluminous love, spoken by a woman taking her first solo steps toward her own glorious horizon, and as a possible signal that every spark of vitality Vicki/Esther has emitted for 175 minutes is destined to be muffled. What if, from this moment on, she constrains her whole life into an extravagantly humbled memory of his? Is this what she has in mind? You can't, as an actor, read the words "I'm Mrs. Norman Maine" and pour all of that into it without a vivid, ambitious, multifaceted film behind you, one that's ceaselessly doing all kinds of work beneath, around, and in sync with your own performance. But you can give the kind of performance that inspires and grounds such a line, and such a film. If this is the last time Vicki Lester introduces herself as Mrs. Norman Maine, Garland has shown us a Vicki whose fluorescence and resilience we can capably project for years into the future, even as A Star Is Born fades to a close. If, however, this marks the first day of thirty or forty consecutive years of wearing her widowhood like a self-effacing shroud, notwithstanding the jewels and the spotlights in which she currently stands, Garland has shown us just how much the world will lose by losing Vicki, while also forcing us to appreciate her own devotion, edging us closer to accepting her sacrifice of herself. Either way, working in beautiful tandem with her co-stars and her off-screen colleagues, she has completed a detailed characterization in the combined mediums of movement, sound, and dramatic impersonation, and she has carried musical drama to the cathartic, precarious, philosophically provocative plane of opera. If that's not deserving of an award called "Best Actress," I'll never know what is.

The Best Actress Project: Completed!

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: Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn, Sabrina
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1954 Best Actress Oscar to Grace Kelly for The Country Girl)

Why I Waited: As regular readers will already know, I wasn't much of a convert to Hepburn's cause until recently, and I'm still suspicious of Wilder. Those biases account for some heel-dragging on Sabrina. But really, once I realized that Garland vs. Kelly would be a perfect way to finish this project, the idea of saving a third nominee from the same high-caliber field was impossible to resist.

The Performance: When I began this final tour through the Ghosts of Best Actresses Past with Betty Compson in April, Audrey Hepburn was the only performer with more than one entry outstanding on the list of 41 nominations I then had left to screen. I am so glad I saw The Nun's Story first, since I was so taken with and surprised by her work as Sister Luke that Sabrina became a real event for me to look forward to, and not just a coattail pre-show for the Garland vs. Kelly rematch that I'm about to investigate. Watching in reverse would not have worked in the same way—I was not nearly so bowled over by Sabrina that it would have magnificently whetted my appetite for The Nun's Story. The performances exist at entirely different planes of ambition and accomplishment. Still, in some ways, it's equally impressive to find that, in a single year, Hepburn passed from being an elegant but rather mute icon of demure femininity in Roman Holiday to being the more plausible woman and the cleverer, more gently risk-taking actress that we find in Sabrina. It's not a performance for the annals but it's a noteworthy step in the right direction, and though I haven't seen any of the four movies Hepburn filmed between this one and The Nun's Story (to include War and Peace, Love in the Afternoon, the suspicious Green Mansions, or the promising Funny Face), the prospect of watching her artistic education transpire across that span of work suddenly acquires a genuine appeal. Even if it turns out to be a comparatively fallow run, I will officially be rooting for her.

Now, rest assured that when I say "more plausible woman," I am speaking in matters of degree only. Sabrina Fairchild has a few more dimensions than Princess Ann of Europia (capital: Poise City, pop. 1), but she is nevertheless a denizen of eager Hollywood fantasy, a chauffeur's daughter who lives with her father above the garage of the fabulously wealthy Larrabee family, pining for the less reputable of its two scions, the golden-haired ladies' man David (William Holden). As a reluctant alternative to suicide, once she has realized that David will never in a million years acknowledge her, Sabrina relocates to Paris where she becomes a singularly bad student of cooking. Then she meets a puckish, Edmund Gwenn-y Baron in her class. This gentleman kindly instructs her that if she wants her soufflé to rise, she'll need to turn on her oven... but he also recognizes her peculiar distractedness as a symptom of unrequited love. What a difference a sentimental, potentially patronizing remark from one slumming member of the landed gentry can make! Before we know it, Sabrina has returned to Long Island, so chicly dressed and coiffed that her own father has nearly as much difficulty recognizing her as does David , who nonetheless rises much, much more quickly in response to Sabrina than her soufflés ever did. If you get my drift. And I'm sure you do.

If the movie had been made in France instead of just taking a sojourn there—c'est à dire, in a culinary academy with a direct view of the Eiffel Tower, and in a student's appartement that gives onto Montmartre and Sacre Coeur—we'd have had a fighting chance that Sabrina's return to the Larrabees' lavish estate would occasion a tart but tasty revenge scenario, in which the most comely woman in the world finally snares the eye of a man who never batted a lash at her in 20 years, only to expose his comically rote seduction routine and leave him with no skirt left to chase. During a long outdoor party sequence just after Sabrina's return, she nods with eager approval at every turn in David's Manual of Flirting, even providing him with a few of his own customary prompts, gleaned from years of watching him lure other girls into the private tennis court for the identical menu of champagne and kisses. It's odd that Sabrina so clearly tips her hand, at least to those of us in the audience, that she knows David's enthusiasm for her is wholly generic. Indeed, she is only too willing to be marched through the pre-set choreography. She harbors no ambitions of exploding his overtures from within, and if anything, she seems all too happy to incur the same responses as all those gigglier, blonder, and wealthier girls have done forever. If anyone is scheming, it's David's older, more responsible brother Linus (Humphrey Bogart), already inheriting the lion's share of the family business from their father, and swiftly cognizant that the Larrabees will never allow a marriage between their scintillating son, even if he is an empty-headed ne'er-do-well, and the daughter of the paid help. After David sidelines himself with an injury that could only arise in a Billy Wilder film (I'll leave you to discover it, and the parade of double entendres that surround it), Linus intercedes to escort Sabrina around the town, around the harbor, to the theater, and atop the corporate headquarters. He means to stultify her with the sexless, prosaic facts of his rich industrialist's life and, by extension, to wean her of her affection for David, who besides being so callow is also already engaged.

If I'm allowing more plot summary than I'd normally want to, it's because Sabrina itself stays so oddly fixated on its plot, even though it's so comically, archetypally predetermined that you've predicted the whole thing within 15 minutes. Wilder's direction affords some charm to the platoon of chauffeurs, butlers, maids, and other staff who track Sabrina's early heartbreak and her sublime self-reinvention, with the eccentric spiritedness of a Preston Sturges chorus. And yet, his direction of Sabrina seems no less cowed than his co-authored script when it comes to really engaging the withering, entrenched snobbism of the Larrabees, a pivotal plot element and core thematic axiom from which Wilder nonetheless keeps diverting our attention. He's also weirdly unsuccessful in coaxing Bogart into the tonalities of light romantic banter, or folding him into the prevailing aesthetic of glossy elegance. Rarely, in fact, have I seen a superstar leading man in an erstwhile romantic comedy look so haggard, and so very tentative about the genre. You can put him in a white tuxedo coat but you can't efface the signs of illness or idiomatic mismatch. I was frankly just as spooked by how shrunken and drawn Wilder allows Bogie to look here as I was by any of Montgomery Clift's post-accident apparitions in films like Raintree County, even if Bogie's dwindling follows more of a natural human cycle. Give or take the ocean of whiskey.

Add all that together, and you can see how Hepburn could get trapped playing another alabaster mannequin, alongside a co-star who's clearly the worse for wear and in a film that keeps pussy-footing around its own thematic thrusts. Sabrina is so god-damned gorgeous, you'd think Hal Pereira and Edith Head invented black & white themselves, amidst some lustrous moment of Olympian inspiration, but this, too, could have backfired against the actress, particularly for any audiences hoping to see her transcend the confines of glassy, desexualied, art-directed splendor. Hepburn's immaculate posture actually does allow the sublime visual scheme to work, since an actress of less refinement might have made the glamor of the film seem overbearing, or nakedly compensatory of other flaws. But the real gifts of the performance, proscribed though they are by an undemandingly written role, center around the frankly unnerving presence she brings to her early scenes as David's stalking admirer and the sophisticated lightness with which she floats the main line of the film, shaped around Sabrina's swannishly revised alter ego. Early signals are actually a bit grim in these regards, since Hepburn narrates the opening voice-over with much more insufferable "polish" than it requires. Her affectedly snooty vowels are a bit much even for a character we know is scheduled for a midfilm reinvention, talking about the groundskeepers who "scraype the buttums" of the Larrabees' boats and about their coddled goldfish named "Joje"—not just a different inflection but a phonetic world away from anything one might pronounce as "George." She's got all these Billy Wilder quips and barbs to read, about how David amounts to little more than a $600 deduction on Linus's taxes, and how Linus himself was voted by his fellow Yalies as "Most Likely to Leave His Alma Mater Fifty Million Dollars," but she sounds worryingly incapable of having any fun with them.

It makes for a fun twist, then, that the way Hepburn brings some spirit into the film after this cheeky but oddly flat introduction is not by letting her hair down or unleashing her charms but by being a bit spooky. She hides in dark copses and lurks outside of windows while spying on David, and that's all down to the scenario and the photography, but Hepburn gives Sabrina a kind of Ninotchka solemnity that works as a very dry joke while also fairly capturing the character's adolescent envy and discontent. You know Wilder, the hard-hearted bastard, just loves his suicide jokes, but when Sabrina writes some parting words to her father ("P.S. Don't have David at the funeral. He probably won't even cry"), Hepburn gets a chuckle out of the flawless lines of Sabrina's body. She moves like a prima ballerina even as she's sporting as dour a mask as her face can manage, and looking very miserable indeed, in the manner of a six-year-old who sits all day on the front stoop with a lunch box, threatening to run away forever. This almost alien level of composure might seem like an impregnable fact of being Audrey Hepburn, but she has strategically robotized her pace and her gait and has settled on the perfect, funny-to-everyone-but-Sabrina expression of teenaged fatalism. We can see, through the subtlest of intimations, that she has settled on this hyperbolic equipoise as her best, ironic tactic for triumphing over a looming scene that only Wilder would throw up as a ghoulish obstacle for one of his own comedies, as Sabrina attempts to gas herself with the exhaust of eight running cars. When comedy works, even very dry and wordless comedy, it works. And this works, right down to Hepburn's Héloise et Abelard way of sliding down the wall curving into some kind of daft communion with the inner wall of the garage.

Try this for two hours, though, and an audience would fairly get tired, so I was as relieved as anyone when Marcel Dalio's Baron finally got Sabrina to crack a smile. This smile serves Hepburn wonderfully for most of the rest of the film. A particularly extravagant version of it greets David's unrecognizing response to her at the Long Island depot, suggesting more clearly than the script does that Sabrina is both delighted to enjoy his long dreamed-of attentions and also having an immediate, inward laugh at his obsequious buffoonishness. Sabrina seems to want to be a comedy, sort of, but the focus or intensity of its comic aims are rendered unclear by the fact that not much that's funny actually happens in it. The script gets its share of scrumptious screwball utterances ("All columnists should be beaten to a pulp and converted back into paper!") and some good situational humor, as when Linus, the decent but totally closed-off capitalist, entertains himself at cocktail parties by demonstrating how his latest line of clear plastic squares don't even scorch when you set them on fire. If you're scratching your head, I admit that even this wouldn't be funny if Wilder didn't fold it casually into the background of an elegant shot; this is just what Linus does, while other people gossip or preen or grab for the hors d'oeuvres. In these and other scenes, though, William Holden is a fine but fairly blank pretty-boy flunky as David, and as I've said, Bogart seems a out-of-sorts with his part, maybe even with the whole script. So among the leads, Hepburn is the only one who seems to find the register of winsome, winking pleasantness that Sabrina can reach more easily than it can grasp more recognizable "comedy." She finds ways of chuckling on a sailing date with Linus and of engaging him in fond conversation, especially after-hours in his office, that give Sabrina as well as Sabrina some spontaneity, lightness, and attractive charge. Without denying the utter artificiality of the scenario, the music, and the visual style, she's the person on screen who seems to breathe like a human, and to believe in what her character believes.

I was pleased that, in so believing, she doesn't move to save Sabrina from what the audience, along with the character's father (wonderfully etched by John Williams), might well see as the moral error of being only too happy to be loved by David so long as she's imposed a veneer of swanky cosmopolitanism over her wage-earning origins. A safer actress would steal some looks, nibble her lip, or insert some awkward pauses to let us know that Sabrina is always troubled by the way she's letting herself become the latest in David's line of sexy flings. But Hepburn shows us a woman who's blithely willing to be just that—in full awareness, too, of that fiancée of David's waiting in the wings, and sometimes right in center stage. By the same token, having come deceptively close to Scarlet Woman status, this impossibly lean gamine is not in the ideal position to be shocked or appalled when she eventually finds out that the Larrabees, even the one who seems to love her most, are ready to ship her off, quite literally, so as to avoid the stain of the non-aristocracy. Hepburn has the grace not to seize a flagrant moral authority that isn't really Sabrina's to seize, even though she very smoothly, tacitly, and affectingly shows us how the air gets sucked out of Sabrina's lungs when confronted with a truth that hasn't, frankly, been all that hard to guess.

It's odd to me that I'm expending as many words on Hepburn's classy, sensible, but still slightly green approach to the modest requirements of Sabrina as I did on her grave, shaken, breathtakingly mature work in The Nun's Story. However much they are qualified by the short-cuts in the script, her own simplicities as an actress, and her second-billing in some respects to the fabulousness of what she wears, her successes as Sabrina are not the kind that deepen or improve the movie so much as they allow it to work. Would, though, that all actors had the strong, clear, spring-water gifts that allow a star vehicle to work, gifts that do require some effort and some intelligent parsing, not just beauty and charisma. A film like Sabrina can easily go adrift, implying perpetually that it's meant to orbit some nexus of charm that no one in the audience can actually detect (see: The Moon Is Blue). So, when this sort of movie holds up, even while flirting with nuances and darker sides that it disappointingly refuses to plumb, it's worth poking around to see whose hands have kept it steady and seaworthy. The designers are aces, but the world they create could be swiftly sunk without any intriguing people to inhabit it. Wilder and his co-writers supply most of what's best in Sabrina but are also responsible for that which is most evasive, distasteful, or inadequate. Hepburn betrays little sense of genius or creative autonomy by 1954, especially compared to an undeniable talent like Wilder, but she's a savvy student and vessel for her irascible director, and may even have better intuitions than he does about what the audience wants and what the material needs in a case like this. She isn't yet a fully realized thespian, but she's convincingly cast as someone special, and without chickening away from Wilder's morbid impulses, she warms this cool film considerably. She, more than anyone, turns an uneven, ambivalent lark into a modest but real pleasure.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 2 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