Actress Files: Anna Magnani

Anna Magnani, Wild Is the Wind
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1957 Best Actress Oscar to Joanne Woodward for The Three Faces of Eve)

Why I Waited: A DVD would be nice, but then, this one never even appeared on VHS. Anyone know what the hold-up is? I recently saw Magnani's legendary work in Rome, Open City, and after that, I could no longer hold off.

The Performance: George Cukor's film Wild Is the Wind includes a running gag wherein Anna Magnani's Gioia, upon arriving to America to marry her sister's widower, keeps fumbling vowels and idiomatic expressions. Gino (Anthony Quinn), the husband, eventually makes her sit down with a huge record player that he has stocked with some mid-century prototype for Hooked on Phonics, which Gioia enjoys about as much as Jane Wyman relished her TV in All that Heaven Allows. She avoids the contraption as long as possible, focused instead on trying to goad Gino into taking her with him when he heads out to lasso some horses. In this particular scene, as so often, Magnani's vocal deliveries are as exaggerated as her physical gestures are oblique and unpredictable. She sort of lazily prods Anthony Quinn with her foot to get his attention while she implores him in her Italian-accented English, thus managing to express Gioia's desperation and her boredom at the same time, without breaking a sweat. Thwarted nonetheless, and left alone in the living room, she relents to the hulking LP player, which emits the voice of a chirpily flat, utterly deracinated American woman, the mechanized antonym of Anna Magnani. "What Time Can It Be? It's Probably Almost One," spouts the record, oddly wide of the idiomatic mark itself, and Gioia begrudgingly mumbles these sentences with her hand over her mouth. "He's Probably Eating Now," continues the clipped voice, hitting every word like a teletype transmission, and Magnani now looks comically befuddled: who is she talking about? what is this nonsense? "Have You Seen The Apples On The Tree?" asks the record-player, and Magnani just shrugs off the whole exercise, with a low sigh about how this task "make-a me ca-razy." She circles, teases, and tosses off this prop like Brando noodling with Eva Marie Saint's glove. She rewrites the joke and owns the scene, and she hasn't even risen out of second or third gear.

Earlier in the 50s, Magnani had famously recused herself from playing Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo on Broadway, even though the infatuated playwright had written the piece for her. Her English, she said, was nowhere near good enough. Even in her Oscared performance of the same role on film, four years later, you can see that Magnani is flummoxed, maybe a bit perturbed by this tongue that marks such a sensuous step down from her native Italian, even in the purple hands of Williams. Throughout that turn, and even by the standards of her outsized performances for Rossellini, et al., Magnani goes big with Serafina's emotions and gestures, as though overcompensating for whatever might not be coming through in her words. You can't quite tell if Magnani wanted to speak English any more fluently than she did, or if she was acceding half-wearily to the ardent dreams of others, especially such storied American actressexuals as Williams and Cukor. In accord with their impatience, not hers, this speech-practice scene completely avoids humiliating the actress, and if anything plays as a gently barbed joke against her recruiters, disciples, and Anglophone fans.

Who needs Magnani speaking English anyway? Who watches Rome, Open City and demands to know precisely what she is saying, and precisely how? It isn't just that Magnani's full-bodied presence and commanding, long-nosed, strong-jawed face are so indomitably charismatic. She uses her body, rather than just inhabiting it. Whether by literally poking her costars, or moving up and down a corporeal scale of malaise and exuberance, or throwing in tosses of the head and jabs of the hand at unexpected moments (against the thrust of a line as often as with), she uses her physical presence as a kind of control-and-release valve on the tensions and rhythms of her scenes, and thereby dislodges other actors from settling into their own cadences, or overly practiced recitations. She forces responses and baffles them, too, for her scene partners and her audiences.

No surprise to me, then, that Magnani jives so much more in Wild Is the Wind to her second costar, Method-trained Anthony Franciosa, playing the role of her younger lover, than she does to Quinn. Or, better, she establishes ease and finds different homeopathic grooves with Franciosa's detailed and revealing scene work and with Quinn's florid and temperamental grandiosity, and as a viewer, I simply prefer the former to the latter. In effect, her co-stars emphasize the two tracks that always exist in Magnani's acting, the shrewd psychological delving and the pantomime postures of uncut, medium-rare emotion. Wind's plot is technically an adaptation of the Italian novel Furia but it's a transposition, too, of Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted, with an Italian bride instead of a homegrown one and horses instead of grapes. Despite all these sources, the story is so spare and predictable that I can't see much value in playing it even more broadly. Still, Magnani likes her semaphores, and sifting out her impromptu belly-laughs and breakdowns and bits of physical business is about as easy as U-turning a Mack truck on its way down a hill. One's own appetite for big, bold Mediterranean affectations will determine one's response to Magnani at dozens and dozens of moments in any performance.

All the same, she's not an unsubtle performer. Cast here as a woman whom the screenplay leaves a bit underwritten (as it does everyone else, and Quinn's character most of all), Magnani nonetheless holds tight to the loneliness of the émigré, the seeker of adventure, the curious student of life, the lover of laughter, the Catholic subscriber to matrimony and rectitude, the casual intimate of animals, the mourner of a sister who is nonetheless alarmed by every vestige of family resemblance, because they underscore her own status a paid proxy rather than a recipient of love. Again, these facets of Gioia are fairly stock archetypes, and Magnani doesn't make any of them more complicated so much as she mixes them together at a breathless, vociferous pace, prompting unexpected collisions, and often playing one card in her hand when you're expecting her to lay down another. Her Gioia is dispassionate and curious when you sometimes expect tears; her states of arousal are limned with self-criticism and violent anger; she is capable of coldness. Magnani gets some good effects, too, out of looking puzzled by her own failures of perception or changes of heart. During a long sequence of witnessing Quinn and Franciosa take down a team of wild horses—a direct pretext for the more famous mustang-roping sequence in The Misfits, for which Wild Is the Wind serves as a kind of paler, less ambitious dry run—Gioia shifts from being thrilled by the animals, the spectacle, and the prowess of her companions to being despondent and outraged at the plight of the beasts, and baffled by how she could have cheered on this enterprise without recognizing its fundamental character.

I don't know if people realize that Magnani thinks on screen, rather than just emoting, exclaiming, bulldozing, and lamenting. I'm as susceptible as the next queen to the robustness of this actor's bellicose wails and apostrophes, even in those lazily written scenes where Gino's preoccupation with his first wife is literalized by a bad habit of calling Gioia by her dead sister's name. But we don't really learn anything about the character or the story in moments like this. Who knows if Magnani was setting the agenda or just obeying orders by marking her performance with these showy eruptions, but they yield more smoke than fire. Much more interesting to me is the single nervous instant when Gioia's liaison with the handsome ranch-hand is sussed out by the middle-aged housemaid, replaced almost instantly with an adult, unintimidated admission that yes, she has done that—she has extended her love, out of libido as well as principle, to people who respond in kind. We've seen this scene 100 times, but rarely with so little intimidation or prevarication on either side. I chuckled at her wordless perplexity that Gino's daughter is getting a university degree in Home Economics, but she doesn't play this reaction for laughs. Allowing that she may be mistaking Angela's meaning, she nonetheless looks stupefied that anyone would study, much less rationalize, the way you make a home, not because the skill comes particularly naturally to Gioia, but because she's an obvious believer in observing, sensing, feeling one's way into relationships and environments. For her these are occasions for intimate rather than abstracted thought. Her surrender to adulterous longings, after deferring them so long, does not follow the hackneyed recipe of being further heightened through their postponement and prohibition. Gioia looks genuinely troubled by her decisions as well as romantically satiated. For her, the affair is not just about bodily or soulful gratification but a way of getting to know a person who intrigues her, which is part of why you believe her candid delivery of lines like "I don't want you to do anything you don't want to do," once her partner starts acting nervous.

Gioia isn't a landmark characterization; Hollywood never got one of those out of Magnani. She is a proudly excessive performer, but that doesn't mean she isn't as wise, thoughtful, and limber as she is muscular and loud. With less workshoppy ostentation than we see in the performance that beat her to that year's Oscar, Magnani shows us at least three faces of Gioia. Neither the performance nor the movie might qualify as deathless art, but when a portrait this rangy and rounded seems like halfway-easy work, you know you're observing an artist.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 30 to Go

Actress Files: Maggie Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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