Geraldine Page in You're a Big Boy Now (1966) - Supporting Actress Sundays

Screening Francis Ford Coppola's You're a Big Boy Now -- the filmmaker's MFA thesis film -- feels, perhaps appropriately enough, like an academic exercise. (Indeed, I might recommend screening it -- were I to recommend screening it at all -- with Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution at your side, his astute references to the film flagged for easy perusal...something I now wish I had done.) Occasionally fascinating but rarely genuinely entertaining, Coppola's debut feature seems -- like so much of the filmmaker's work -- to be both a throwback and a flash forward, its burgeoning formal whimsy enervated by its reverence for the formalities of history/convention. (The film's adoration of Times Square at night, as well as its fascination with the action in the bowels of the New York Public Library, emerge as the most exciting parts of this curiously turgid romantic caper.) This film is also a harbinger of Coppola's excellent knack for assembling collaborators, especially actors and designers, perhaps most notable here in the film's "introduction" of the now legendary Karen Black and its featured, nominated performance by...

...Geraldine Page in You're a Big Boy Now (1966)
approximately 13 minutes and 2 seconds
10 scenes
roughly 14% of film's total running time

Geraldine Page plays Margery Chanticleer, the intensely devoted mother of Bernard, a young man struggling to "become a man" (in every turn of that phrase) in New York City during the middle 1960s.
Page's Margery Chanticleer is the sort of suburban housewife who exists for (and through) her children -- or child, in this case. As presented by Page and writer/director Francis Ford Coppola, Margery transforms her every maternal virtue into a vice through simple excess. Indeed, on almost every count, Page's Margery is just too much.
Her doting is domineering, her attentiveness obsessive, and her propriety prudish.
Primary among Margery's domineering, prudish obsessions is her quixotic quest to keep Bernard away from girls, because -- at 19 -- "he's just too young." So, when her husband (Rip Torn, in a glib yet incisive performance) insists that Bernard take his own apartment in the city, Page's Margery strikes a deal with the improbably-named landlady, Miss Thing (Julie Harris incongruously cast in a role better suited for Elsa Lanchester, Doris Roberts, or Divine) to telephone immediately should Bernard become involved with a girl.
The film understands Page's Margery to be a prim neurotic, prone to hysteric fits and shrieking remonstrations (an approach that permits the actress to deploy her vast arsenal of tics in service of the role).
The actress, however, also understands Margery to be a desperately vain and frightened woman, a woman who's so terrified of middle age that she does everything in her power to keep her son a child. It's an interesting move, on Page's part, to develop such dimension and depth for this basically non-dimensional role.
That said, I'm not entirely sure that Page's psychologically sophisticated approach to the character actually serves what should be a broad comedic performance. (To put it bluntly, Geraldine Page ain't no Nancy Walker...and this role needs a Nancy Walker.)
Glimmers of humor -- often via Theoni V. Aldredge's gloriously funny (yet apt) costumes and wigs -- do manifest in the role. (Just track all the business that Page develops around her giant Dairy Queen wig in the the final confrontation/chase sequence.) But Page's Margery is, for the most part, a basically unfunny performance of an stock comedic role. (Torn deploys just as much "business" in his role, yet somehow maintains a lightness of touch that helps sustain the comedic possibilities of a scene.)
And perhaps most interesting, Page's decision to wrap Margery in a jittery caul of defensive self-obsession has the disastrous, though possibly inadvertent, side effect of disrupting any possible chemistry or comedic rhythm she might find with her impressive roster of costars. Page barks, she wails, she steamrolls -- but she never connects.
Neither a "coaster" nor a "breakthrough" nor a nearly hidden "gem," Page's is a negligible little performance in a wackadoodle little comedy, occasionally interesting but...that's about it.

Geraldine Page in Hondo (1953) - Supporting Actress Sundays

There is a small handful of actresses of whom I remain inordinately fond, even as I find most of their performances vaguely disappointing or mildly distasteful. For an actressexual like me, that can create some awkward situations: I hate to be the crabby pooper always spoiling everyone else's lovefest. Nonetheless, one must remain true to one's self, especially in matters of faith, politics and actressexuality. Which is why it's always such a pleasure to discover that rare performance by such an actress, one that I don't hate at all, one that I actually sorta love. Which is precisely what happened this week with...

...Geraldine Page in Hondo(1953).

approximately 36 minutes and 27 seconds
23 scenes
roughly 44% of film's total running time

Geraldine Page plays Angie Lowe, a rancher's wife on a homestead in the remote New Mexico territory.
A self-described "plain" woman accustomed to fending for herself, Page's Lowe is uncertain what to make of the rangy stranger ambling her way. Turns out, the stranger is Hondo (John Wayne in the kind of performance for which celebrity impressionists exist), a man the isolated woman will come to know well over the next 80 or so minutes.
Page's Angie agrees to let Hondo use a horse that's not yet trained and, as Hondo "breaks" the animal, she assesses the man with a wary but avid delight.
In these early scenes, Page's Angie is constantly announcing the fact of her husband, who -- she repeatedly says -- will be back any minute, or any day, or any week now. Page's handling of Angie's conspicuous fibs is uncomplicated, allowing just the whiff of untruth to linger in the air as the character continues to do or say whatever else she needs to.
Yet, as Page's Angie becomes better acquainted with Hondo, she becomes ever more smitten with the confident, competent cowboy. Here, too, Page registers Angie's shift in emotional attention in the simplest terms. Angie's mounting interest in Hondo's is marked by Page's increasingly shy smiles, and these lingering, intent looks are some of the only evidence of this grown woman's amplifying crush on Wayne's Hondo.
Page's work in the role of Angie is rife with gestures of comparably uncomplicated clarity. Page's Angie likes Hondo, enjoys having him around, trusts him with her land and her son -- but she's also careful not to get her hopes up that the pleasure will last. After all, she is married and her husband will be back any whatever now...
At about midpoint in the film, as Hondo leaves Angie alone on the homestead, several questions emerge: will Angie and her son be safe amidst the Apache uprisings? will Hondo find out the truth about Angie's husband? and, perhaps most essentially (as this film is an utterly conventional romance, albeit with black-limbed "Injuns" as the main obstacle), will Hondo and Angie ever be able to get together?
The resolutions of these boilerplate dilemmas are, in and of themselves, less than interesting, which perhaps why I so admire Page's unpretentious yet complex rendering of Angie.
Page invests Angie with a subtle depth and dimension that is both haunting and humane. In her hands, Angie becomes an articulated human instead of merely a type. Note, for example, how Page's Angie registers the news of the circumstance of her husband's death. With a measured, contemplative turn, she says, "Ed wasn't the type to die well." Page holds this moment simply, allowing Angie a kind of sadness while also crafting a kind of mystery with her reaction, a mystery that permits the possibility of something unspoken mattering as much or more than that which is said. (Indeed, Page maneuvers the dimensions of subtext with such artful, uncomplicated ease in this role that it's hard to reconcile her work in Hondo with the self-consciously neurotic frippery that would mark most of her more celebrated performances.)
In this cardboard cutout of a character, Page delivers what is easily my favorite among her many accomplished performances. Solid, subtle and empathetic, Page's Angie elevates this generic puddle of a film with a humane integrity that is by turns surprising and surprisingly effective. And while this performance/nomination might legitimately be accused of "category fraud," it might just as well be a case of an actress sneaking from the edges to steal center stage.