Supporting Actress: Jan's Out, Feb's In

We've reached the end of our first month of the yearlong Supporting Actress retrospective, honoring the 365 movies that have yielded nominations in that category's first 80 years. (This year's AMPAS voters, whatever their other foibles, at least complied with my schema and furnished nominees from five separate films, which keeps my math on track.) I hope you've had fun reading along, if you have been.  You can click the image to the left and visit the Calendar for more on each nominated movie, plus a few individual performance reviews.

So, who are your five favorite nominees from this early batch? And, separate question, what are your five favorites among the films? My own all-star team of performances from this batch probably entails Judith Anderson for Rebecca, Fay Bainter for Jezebel, Jane Darwell for The Grapes of Wrath, Agnes Moorehead for The Magnificent Ambersons, and Barbara O'Neil for All This, and Heaven Too, with apologies to close runner-up Patricia Collinge for The Little Foxes. If we're talking actual movies, my cream of the crop encompasses Dead End, Dodsworth, Gone with the Wind, The Magnificent Ambersons, and The Philadelphia Story, though it stings to leave out Grapes, Rebecca, and Stage Door, especially.

What are your thoughts, dear reader? And—one more question—are there supporting performances by women from 1936-1942 that you especially wish had appeared on Oscar's ballot?

Lastly, do consider following along with the Supporting Actress films for February, already posted. The beauty of this feature is that you can already see what film will be up for review on the site and on Twitter for any given day. I'd love to hear other voices on the same movies. I know you're out there, you opinionated queens. Four of February's performances are first-time viewings for me: Paulette Goddard in So Proudly We Hail (1943), Lucile Watson in Watch on the Rhine (1943), and two winners, Ethel Barrymore in None But the Lonely Heart (1944) and Anne Baxter in The Razor's Edge (1946). Beyond my curiosity about these four, I'm especially keen to revisit The Song of Bernadette (1943), which I saw once, ages ago. I wish I remembered Crossfire (1947) more clearly. Two famous films that I didn't love the first and only times I saw them, Mildred Pierce (1945) and Key Largo (1948), are also ripe for reassessment.  And somehow, we'll all get through the mid-40s fad for nominating ethnically inappropriate performances: Aline MacMahon's "Chinese" peasant in Dragon Seed (1944), though she at least applies a soft touch; Gale Sondergaard's member of the palace in Anna and the King of Siam (1946); and, easily worst of all, Flora Robson's blackface part in Saratoga Trunk (1945, but nominated in 1946). Jesus, keep me close to the cross.

Cannes 1995: Day 12: May 28

The Quick and the Dead, USA, dir. Sam Raimi

Many people need no help appreciating Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man. If you're me and can't help feeling agnostic, recuperating more admiration for Jarmusch's affected earnestness and genuine idiosyncrasy is a lot easier after seeing a revisionist Western as flat and plodding as Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead Or Sharon Stone's The Quick and the Dead (she also produced), or whoever's The Quick and the Dead. Even the mid-90s' reigning Goldilocks can't save the movie from being too much or too little at all times. The narrative disarray is total—as evidenced by a major flashback tucked into the last ten minutes, which, incidentally, unfolds a scene the audience has already worked out—but even disarray is more interesting than the utter stasis of so many shots where Stone or Russell Crowe or Gene Hackman just stares at people, or the brute momentum of the shootout scenes where the same same same thing happens as the field of contestants winnows down to an utterly foreordained foursome. Raimi's attempts to wake himself aren't any more interesting than the impressions of Raimi asleep at the wheel. But rather than keep laying on Cannes's closing night film, I'm inclined to put pressure on the oft-invoked phrase "revisionist Western," because the John Ford retrospective that unfolded throughout the festival—25 features in ten days——shows that even peak-period Westerns by figures as major as Ford were "revisionist" as often as not. Few have been as austere in their outlook, albeit frequently purple in their prose, as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  This 1962 James Stewart/John Wayne vehicle, which could not possibly be more cannily cast, challenges and complicates so many myths of the frontier, the ballot box, the law, the state, and the gun that you're hard-pressed to find any Western trope that survives intact. I wish I'd had time for more of the Ford films, but boy was I glad to have saved them up so that I didn't finish on Raimi's folly, and I could take in a rounder, wider, bitterer scale of revision than the simple notion of a girl with a gun.

Read more »

Actress Files: Irene Dunne

Irene Dunne, Love Affair
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1939 Best Actress Oscar to Vivien Leigh for Gone with the Wind)

Why I Waited: As with Lee Remick, checking off this performance meant signing off on a top-drawer roster, and I was sorry to see it go. Affection for Dunne, and hearsay that this was her favorite among her own movies, only amplified the anticipation.

The Performance: The first thing Irene Dunne does in Love Affair is say "I beg your pardon" through a porthole-shaped window connecting an enclosed hallway on a cruise-liner to an outdoor promenade. Why is that special? Because she says it in the quick, peremptory way that you'd actually say "I beg your pardon" in real life, and not as you would say it to a soulmate disguised as a stranger, whom you were meeting at the outset of a classic romance. Her character is called Terry, and the reason she has been hailed into conversation by Charles Boyer's Michel is that a gust of wind has just blown a telegram from his fiancée out of his hand and through this window; he's asking that she pass it back. Sizing up this charismatic, brutely handsome Continental and enjoying his embarrassment, especially after taking a glance at the ripely romantic telegram, Terry teases him to prove that the telegram is really his, forcing him to recite certain details. She's having a passing lark, like a woman who is used to entertaining herself on the spur of the moment with cheeky little dares and parries. She's also baldly flirting with someone she's never met, whom she can only see from the neck up, and about whom the only things she knows are 1) that he's engaged and 2) that he's rich enough to be with her on this boat. Within an instant, she seems like a pretty rare bird, and she has sized him up as one, too, ascertaining as well that they belong to the same flock. Thus, they have immediate bonafides as movie characters, and the makings of a high-flying, promising couple. Yet she's also the kind of woman who can say "I beg your pardon" like she's any woman, anywhere, talking to anyone.

Irene Dunne's appeal rests on such unusual fusions of the ordinary, the glamorous, and the subtly but defiantly odd. There are shots fairly early in Love Affair, while she's encased in a huge, armoire-shaped fur coat and coiffed in a matronly updo, when she looks a bit grandmotherly for a romantic lead. You can see why, as early as Cimarron, when she was eight years younger than she is in Love Affair she was so easily adaptable into old-age makeup. (She was in fact 41 when Love Affair opened, which should inspire a lot of Hollywood women, as well as their fans.) Dunne's air of strangeness has to do with how quickly she presumes familiarity and sets about seducing and needling men who are more "obviously" attractive than she is: Cary Grant, Charles Boyer, John Boles, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. She takes liberties, verbally tickling them, looking fully confident that her rectangular smile, her mischievous gaze, her nutty hats, and her habit of throwing arch or exhausted "ah"s and "mm"s into her dialogue are as fetching as anything these matinée idols bring to the table. In her screwball and pseudo-screwball performances, but even in roles like the one in Love Affair, she comes across as a sort of tenuously acculturated version of Katharine Hepburn's Susan from Bringing Up Baby, pleased as punch to start a little trouble at any given moment, and it's both perplexing and funny that she can nonetheless transform in a second into a completely credible society type. One minute, in Love Affair, she's throwing a photographer's pictures into the ocean and having a dry, self-satisfied little chuckle about it. Three beats later, she's embodying the kind of woman who might need to worry if the gossip columns catch her scent, who would feel bad about breaking a rule if it hurt someone, or drew agitating attention to herself. Even if you don't know that Dunne was raised from solid, devout, Republican stock, you can feel her bone-deep handle on "proper" behavior in her performances, even the ones—which is most of them, especially in the 30s, whether she's laughing, yearning, or crying—where she's one way or another tossing dart after dart at the bulls-eye of respectability.

Stanley Cavell famously wrote in Pursuits of Happiness that, of all the great screwball heroines, Dunne is the one whose movies suffer most if you can't jive to her idiosyncratic appeal, even as she's also the actress who's wry and eccentric in just the sorts of ways that might annoy a lot of viewers. Compared to Theodora Goes Wild or Joy of Living or My Favorite Wife or even The Awful Truth, Love Affair strikes me as the film from Dunne's peak period where it's hardest to imagine not falling for her character, but it's wonderful to discover that this isn't because it's a boring or safe performance. Maybe Dunne knows that after playing so many daffy miscreants, it's something of a risk for her to play so many of Terry's feelings semi-straight, whether falling rather suddenly for Michel, or realizing their attraction to each other has an 8©-day lifespan until the ship reaches port. She takes undisguised and unironic pleasure in meeting Michel's stately but smiling grandmother (Maria Ouspenskaya, who also plays the ship) and bids her a full-bodied, close-to-tears farewell as they're prancing out of her house. The script even requires that Terry duck into the matron's private chapel and take a few moments out for God. Rudolph Maté lights this scene like a meaningful interlude of piety, catching Dunne and her all-white outfit in a nimbus of angelic light, and her look of simple, religious earnestness is as welcome a surprise as the solemn, perceptible agnosticism on Boyer's brow. Love Affair, a famous movie whose plot is even more of a cultural mainstay care of the 1957 remake An Affair to Remember, eventually depends on a big, bathetic plot contrivance and needs the ballast of plausible, un-tricked-out acting to avoid total shamelessness, and to pack the enormous charge that it has for decades of viewers. A lot of actors, even good ones, would seek to establish plausibility and overcome the big narrative stunt by expressing ardor, anticipation, devastation, and climactic, chin-up martyrdom with such surging commitment that the penny-romance conceits get buoyed along by sheer emotional force. We'll call that the Whitney Houston way to play the part, and make no mistake that I(IIIII-ee-IIIIII-ee-IIIIII....) can be a sucker for that stuff.

But Dunne takes the road of Dolly Parton, letting us know that she will always love Michel by allowing Terry an absolute candor around him, in mirth and passion and sorrow. She banks on the power of sharp, clear, modest phrasing to signal concealed depths, rather than plunging right into them and dragging us along. Some actors congenitally suggest that one mustn't play two emotions at once or can only do so by pointing huge arrows at your own double-meanings. Dunne, though, manages a tinge of sexiness while being briskly funny, adopting a slurry Mae West timbre while dissuading Boyer from confiding his secret romantic angst. "I'm really not very good at that sort of thing," she drawls. "I talk a lot." There's no double-meaning here, just a tangy friskiness that packs more into the line than it's asking. When Ouspenskaya's benevolent dowager worries that Michel has missed out on romantic partnership because "he's been too busy...," Dunne is the perfect actress to complete the sentence ("...living?") in a way that preserves the tactful euphemism, appropriate to speaking with one's elders, while grinning that she knows just what "living" involves in this context, and that she's the last person to frown upon it. "I guess you and I have been more or less used to a life of pink champagne," she confides to Boyer's playboy, without an ounce of the censorious, compulsory Hollywood pretense that the rich, or at least the best among them, don't care about their money. Dunne's Terry is thrilled to have money, and aware that it won't be comfortable to proceed without it, even as she's sportingly up to the fresh challenge of earning her own.

An actor can't give us such complete frameworks for grasping a character's complex feelings, especially those that are germane to the whole plot of the film, without being able and willing at crucial times to tell a different story with her face than with her voice, or able to turn nimbly from one affect to another, as when Terry follows her dreamy citation of her father saying "Wishes are the dreams we dream when we're awake" with the dry-gin chaser of "He drank a lot." In a brilliant bit of direction, perfectly enacted by Dunne, Terry outlines the famous meet-atop-the-Empire-State-Building stratagem for rendezvousing with Michel six months in the future as though she really has lost her heart to him and she enjoys a good romantic cliffhanger... and at the same time, she's clutching her arms and bobbing up and down like it's very cold out there on the deck, so she ends the scene with a clipped, over-the-shoulder "Take care of yourself" as she dashes inside for warmth. Love Affair has enough of its barrels aimed at the summit of screen romance that Dunne, Boyer, and McCarey know that not every shot they take needs to hit that same target. We might even believe the scenario more fully, or care about the characters more richly, if their layers and peccadilloes drive the narrative, rather than allowing the abstract goal of just smashing our hearts dictate everything they say and do, and every way they do and say it.

Why not five stars, then? Well, the final third of Love Affair, where The Whitney Approach would really start going for broke—and I presume, sight unseen, that this is just what Deborah Kerr attempts—is a little less hospitable to Dunne. Her genius lies primarily in timing and in creative, multi-faceted interactions with her co-stars. Therefore, long sequences of her singing unmemorable songs in close-up, while Terry builds up her nest-egg as a nightclub chanteuse, prove an unexpected advert for Dunne's opera-trained soprano but otherwise don't give her anything to do creatively. I love her typical counter-intuition in diluting the performance just when so many actors would start pumping up the volume, and she is a godsend in the moment when Terry and Michel unexpectedly meet in a theater, each in another person's company, and in the short taxi-cab scene just afterward, when she insists as conversationally as possible that she really doesn't want Michel knowing about her waist-down paralysis. But in other, neighboring scenes, playing the ukulele and singing with a cadre of orphans, or negotiating for a job with the orphanage director, she looks a little bored without a more inspiring scene partner. One sign is the deflated way in which she reads some of her lines, even if this deflation is meant to register the ebb in Terry's spirit following her accident. It's just as revealing, though, that in these scenes Dunne reprises some of her oldest standby mannerisms from other performances, like her mischievous grin, with one fingernail resting on her teeth. Not in every moment of an Irene Dunne performance does she look unreservedly involved in what's going on. There are flashes of this habit even in the long final scene with Boyer, where she emotes very movingly in some of her close-ups, but you still sense that she'd be thrilled to do a little more of the talking.

Still, Dunne succeeds memorably in being amusing and aroused and resilient and regretful and somewhere close to ideal in Love Affair, without almost ever taking the most predictable paths toward any of these goals. At 88 minutes, Love Affair itself is as succinct as she is, covering a lot of ground without needing a lot of time, and proving, in perfect sync with its leading lady, that sly and disciplined pithiness can be just as powerfully moving as extravagant excess. At the midpoint of the movie and again in the closing moments, Dunne has to recite a line concerning "the nearest thing to heaven"—I'm sure you can guess what that is—and the sentiments feel too inescapably on-the-nose for a performer who so clearly prefers to arrive sideways into a screenplay's designs, or to tell the audience what we expect to hear through a counter-harmonic approach that only Dunne would conceive. We don't need to hear about the nearest thing to heaven when, left to her own devices, and furnished the proper companions, she has such a sparkling track record for getting us there herself.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 9 to Go

Actress Files: Elisabeth Bergner

Elisabeth Bergner, Escape Me Never
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1935 Best Actress Oscar to Bette Davis for Dangerous)

Why I Waited: With a title like that? Hard to resist, but too delicious to waste. Plus, it's not the easiest film to come by. (An image of the poster has proved even more elusive; even the ones listed for sale on eBay, explicitly linked to the 1935 film, turn out to be for the 1947 remake with Errol Flynn, Ida Lupino, and Eleanor Powell.)

The Performance: Escape Me Never is a sadly ironic title for Bergner's Oscar-nod vehicle, since both Bergner and this film are the virtual opposite of "inescapable" these days. Setting aside her headlining role in the AIP-produced Cry of the Banshee in 1970 (though if I ever come across that film, there's no way I'll set it aside), Bergner has no English-language film credits to her name after the six-film run from 1934 to 1941 when Hollywood briefly tried to parlay her stage and screen successes in Europe into mainstream American stardom. Her Anglophone debut in The Rise of Catherine the Great, released the same year as Dietrich's take on the same part in Sternberg's Scarlet Empress, has just become more accessible through the Criterion Collection's box set, under their "Eclipse" insignia, of Alexander Korda's royalty dramas. The 1936 As You Like It she filmed opposite Laurence Olivier is also kicking around its fair share of libraries, but otherwise Bergner's career is a distant relic, dating to an era when the studios were still sorting out which genres of performer—silent-screen celebs? Broadway eminences? foreign imports? Met Opera singers? Midwestern check-out girls, leant new names and dossiers?—could be best enlisted as deities of the talking cinema.

Bergner was married to Paul Czinner, the Austro-Hungarian-born helmer of five of her six American movies, including Escape Me Never, and of most of the German-language projects on which she got started. The trope of the Teutonic glamor-gal guided perpetually by the hand of the same doting auteur is one of several suggestive links between the Czinner-Bergner alliance and the Sternberg-Dietrich enterprise, although Bergner had more theatrical bonafides by the time she crossed into pictures than Dietrich did. She doesn't come-across as the pure-born creation of movie magic that Dietrich does, and Czinner presents her as a stage-trained thespian rather than a shimmering phenom of bone and lace, skin and light. In Escape Me Never, he opts for lots of proscenium long shots that invoke the stage rather explicitly, such that we're well into the second half of the film before Bergner seems to be making a concerted transition into acting for the camera. Still, it's clear that the moviemakers love her: she gets an antic but charming intro as a teenager taking a school-group tour of some Venetian aristocrat's castle, slingshotting herself up the marble stairs and into the verboten private living quarters, where the more sedate young beauty Fenella McClean (Penelope Dudley-Ward) is confiding to her snobby parents her plans of marriage to the struggling composer-conductor Caryl Sanger (Griffith Jones). Bergner's impetuous Gemma, crashing the gates of this solemn family summit, serves the purpose, too, of livening up a film that has begun as a garden-variety, chin-up soaper. With her pale, pageboyed beauty and her insouciant refusal of manners, Gemma annoys the McCleans but comes close to starting to soften them, until, quite unaware, she drops the info that she is a poor housekeeper only disguising herself as a student to gain entry to the palazzo, and that she lives with an artist called Sanger. Here, of course, she is escorted out, with Bergner, in her late 30s at the time of filming, forcing her childlike impishness a bit hard, and the film looking even more like one of those Norma Shearer vehicles where intolerant wealth and precocious irreverence are equally calcified by the staid machinations of a convoluted but airlessly predictable plot.

Bergner and her male lead, Hugh Sinclair, start saving the screen through pure, attractive charisma in the next scene. Turns out he is Caryl's more rakish brother Sebastian, a composer-choreographer, and that it's he, not Caryl, with whom Gemma resides. She has a child by another man, someone who treated her gruffly in the past, and ostensibly she and Sebastian cohabitate by convenience, though she clearly has her eye on him and enjoys his jealous reaction to a probably made-up story about someone else who wants to marry her. It's around this time that the story's loosened but still post-Code relation to domestic and erotic arrangements starts to give Escape Me Never some flavor, aided by Czinner's provisions of some unmotivated but elegant zooms and camera movements. It seems less clear what might count as a couple in Escape Me Never. "Were they lovers?" Gemma asks as Sebastian points out the constellations of Castor and Pollux in the sky. "I don't quite remember - anyway they were inseparable," he responds, with some of the dry, sexy hauteur of a studio-era Rupert Everett. Bergner's allure falls somewhere between the indolent knowingness of Dietrich and the off-center daffiness of Carole Lombard, which one can imagine as a strenuous combo to pull off, but she doesn't seem to be working at crafting a screen persona, or predetermining her effects on her audience.

Admittedly, that farcical, hyper-gamine bit near the outset is a bet testing, and there are swerves into bathos at the finale from which few actresses would emerge unscathed. I doubt, though, that the relative successes and limits of Bergner's work have only to do with what is already felicitous or otherwise in the screenplay. Part of why the first and last movements in Bergner's performance seem thinner than the others resonates with these being the moments where Gemma has the least complicated feelings (her climactic grief is overwhelming, but not necessary complicated). By contrast, for the lengthy middle of Escape Me Never, Gemma pines for Sebastian even as she finds his coldness and arrogance off-putting; she sees Sebastian and Fenella growing adulterously closer but expects her observations to be denied by him and ignored by her; she feels compelled to warn the cuckolded Caryl but has a hard time finding him particularly sympathetic (as did I); she heeds an overarching call to accept moral compromise and a certain amount of unhappiness as long as it keeps herself and her child fed and sheltered, yet she cannot help getting caught up in the four-way intrigue, sometimes finding her feelings hurt and sometimes taking a kind of wicked, ironic pleasure in the shortcomings and naïvetés of the others, including the one she's married to. It's actually the dimwitted Caryl who discloses to Gemma that Sebastian is lying to her about the trips he takes, and offers patronizing advice about what to tolerate in her lovers if she wants to be happy—and yet it's Gemma who intuits immediately, as Caryl has not, that the woman with whom Sebastian is apparently cheating must be Caryl. In this scene, Bergner achieves lucid, subtle, but compelling blends of fresh dismay and absorbed knowledge, of embarrassment at having missed earlier signals and of smugness that she laps Caryl so quickly in the race from ignorance to awareness.

Those wavering emotional states lead to Bergner's best sequence, which is also the movie's, as she calls privately on Fenella to see what the woman knows and, after a long period of waiting during which Fenella predictably condescends to her, Gemma discloses the marriage to Sebastian that they have up to that point concealed, and with a serpentine ease sticks the knife into Fenella, letting her know she'll be a dislikable wife to Caryl, just as she has been a deceived and futile mistress to Sebastian. Of course, Gemma is much less assured than she's pretending that everyone will behave in the ways she will describe, and that Fenella's allure really will be as short-lived for Sebastian as Gemma hopes. She is counting on his fickleness and his superseding love affair with himself and his art: a less inspiring rationale than one probably wants in articulating why a husband is likely to stick around. Gemma seduces Fenella, then, into revealing just how dim she finds her to be before applying the cold splash of a prior claim and of superior knowledge, even as her multifaceted performance of strength in this scene, all the way down to a sleeker, sexier outfit than we've ever seen her wear, doubles as a kind of desperate reinforcement to herself that she really is in charge. We have to see that layer of effort in a way that Fenella absolutely mustn't, and Bergner organizes and choreographs all of those vectors of self-management like a skilled pro.

Indeed, we may have underestimated the actress in advance of this scene, just as Gemma has played as an amiable gal but not quite a substantial personage. Escape Me Never continues to feel like too qualified and contrived a vehicle for Bergner to achieve a full exercise of her gifts, and there are moments here and there where she is demonstrably too stage-bound, or is working out Gemma's potential depths a bit less rigorously than she might. She'd have been a great contender for a lot of Margaret Sullavan's roles, especially in cases where Sullavan seems just a bit too plaintive or numinous than she needs to—say, in The Shop Around the Corner, where Bergner's accented English would even have been an idiomatic asset. Even in the finale, which, as I've said, leads Bergner too far down a path of stiffly-played bereavement, she finds room to shift the terms of the script. Coming home to Sebastian amid the absolute nadir of her sorrow, Bergner makes the intriguing choice of playing their last scene with an eerie, quotidian neutrality, almost a lightness. Only when Sebastian acknowledges the truth of what she's just been through—what he, in some sense, has put her through—does she reveal how hard she's working to preserve her balance. This signal instance of playing both with and against the grain of a fairly stock scene leaves us with a potent parting impression of Bergner's creative intelligence, and of the top-level career she might have achieved in the U.S., even though things didn't work out that way. Good thing that, on the basis of her thick-skinned Gemma Jones, she seems to have a strong handle on how to make do in the face of disappointment.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 19 to Go

Actress Files: Miriam Hopkins

Miriam Hopkins, Becky Sharp
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1935 Best Actress Oscar to Bette Davis for Dangerous)

Why I Waited: Futile hopes of getting around to reading Vanity Fair first. I started once, but you meet "Black Sambo" within the first few pages, and I just wasn't ready.

The Performance: Hopkins in Becky Sharp constitutes that rare thing, a Best Actress nominee in a film of milestone historical importance. Though color films existed before Becky Sharp, to include Michael Curtiz's ghoulish Mystery of the Wax Museum, which I enjoyed last month at the Film Forum, Rouben Mamoulian's bumptious compression of Thackeray's Vanity Fair was the first full-length feature rendered in the full "three-strip" technicolor process, so that it has a richer, bolder palette of primary hues compared to the pale pinkish cast of the Curtiz film. The grass is always greener, of course: first-time audiences complained that by contrast to the arresting visuals, the dialogue was scratchy and indiscernible, which indeed remains something of a problem in surviving prints, even after RKO ordered up a new "high fidelity" soundtrack from RCA. And sure, the livid tones of Becky Sharp's mise-en-scène seem a little primitive even three or four years down the line, compared to Errol Flynn's emerald forest and Scarlett O'Hara's city on fire. But Becky Sharp impresses mightily as a first-time achievement, and Mamoulian has directed the material with an overripe, almost slapstick acceleration and exaggeration, such that, whether or not out of conscious intent, the narrative and the acting feel wholly of a piece with the heightened visual tones of the film.

Indeed, one sometimes has the sense that Becky Sharp isn't enacting Vanity Fair so much as blasting some madcap distillation of it in the general direction of the audience, with the pace and force of one of those mechanical pitching machines at a batting cage. Hopkins's Becky even has a literal habit of hurling books, once in the prologue when she receives a begrudging gift of a dictionary from a schoolmistress who's only too glad to see her go, only to have Becky toss Dr. Johnson's volume back at her on the way out the door. The second instance arises in the final scene as Becky shows some pious relatives just what they can do with their compendium of Christian homilies. But books are the least of what Hopkins tosses at the audience, with no evident loss in her own energy, though she exhausted me by the end of ten minutes. Calling liberally upon that carnivorous, self-loving grin familiar from other Hopkins performances, her Becky is the very picture of amoral schoolgirl hedonism, twisting about in a yellow-polka dot frock against a purple divan and treating the whole world as a gloriously color-dyed playground for her own flamboyant cunning. Hopkins suggests that Becky is simultaneously a creature of shallow intellect and a savvy manipulator of people and situations, selling proto-Wildean insights like "I'm not very good at giving answers, I so seldom listen to the questions" as a testimony of empty-headedness and also a wily means of throwing skeptics off her trail, so that she can really pull the rug out from under them when she eventually springs for what she wants. Becky is just tickled to death by her own cynical play-acting, concocting hokey romantic plots about meeting in hackney coaches after midnight, and inwardly guffawing that so many men are boobs enough to follow along. They apparently detect a heart or at least a human spirit where there's nothing, really, except a calculator in a frock.

To her peril, though, Hopkins's hammy relish at playing such a merry deceiver and insistent center of attention sometimes translates as a rude refusal to discipline the performance in even the slightest way. Being the indefatigable if inexplicable object of at least a half-dozen men's affections proves repeatedly insufficient at quelling Becky's need to push the envelope of selfishness even further, to induce even more mayhem into everybody's lives. Equally, though, Hopkins never seems satisfied with being the frenetic focal point of virtually every scene, exhibiting the most outrageous behaviors and pulling close-up after close-up. In one scene, penniless Becky ingratiates herself with yet another rich family with a whopper about her own background, challenging even her own confidence about how much deception she can get away with. Hopkins is drolly go-for-broke, selling this audience on the tear-stained saga of her late mother being some kind of counterrevolutionary dancer, doomed to death. We get plenty of sense of how Becky amps herself up for set-pieces like these, even amid their very performance, by constantly taking the temperature of her audiences and emitting a smug shine of the eye when they prove as credulous as she has banked on them being. Hopkins is never subtle, then, but the success and even more the point of the performance rest in how she connives her way into her goals, not by being a silken prevaricator but by conjuring such relentless gales of hubris and energy that she seizes other people's belief and complicity, the way a hurricane sucks moisture from the ocean; it's never a question of the ocean's will. But if we already see all that in the vigor of Hopkins's hard-driving slapstick, why on earth do we need scenes like the one that follows, where Hopkins not only listens through a drawing-room door to the pathetically gullible people she's just deceived, but does so with the huge, horsey grin of an animated character, then literally winks at the audience, then chomps on a peppermint stick like Scrooge making love to his money, then poses for the incipient fade-to-black with a frozen grin of pure hedonism, the character's and the actress's?

Hopkins pulls so many faces at the ends of her scenes, it's like she, not Mamoulian, is saying "cut." Again, given that Becky Sharp isn't Vanity Fair so much as a stripped-down and sped-up 100-yard dash through Vanity Fair, the film probably gains from Hopkins being such a colossal, overbearing twit, shoving Becky Sharp into the realm of high-end burlesque rather than suggesting the film "meant" in some way to be subtler or fuller. Then again, maybe her own swagger and momentum, as one of Hollywood's most notorious and least-liked scene-stealers, backed Mamoulian into a corner of having to shape Becky Sharp around the bull he invited into his own china shop. A longstanding cinephile's gripe against Becky Sharp is that it has so little of the camera movement that was a frequent Mamoulian trademark, intensifying the overall impression of elegant fluidity that, for many people, is part of his authorial signature. There's no question that technical factors in this rudimentary stage of "three-strip" filming discourage a lot of movement, since there's already a problem of blurring and bleeding when anyone in the frame moves too quickly. It's worth asking again, though, whether Hopkins's pantomiming style made for a smart casting choice or whether her approach to the character, reliant on close-ups to the point where it would barely be legible in any other way, goads the film's makers into the uncharacteristic and disappointing stolidity of Becky Sharp's style.

The clearest casualty of Hopkins's performance is any sense of pathos related to the character. Even granting that she is a rapacious and infantile beast, I cannot imagine that Thackeray denied us some portals into her own point of view, or that the film benefits from seeing her as such an impenetrable engine of her own remorseless will. In scenes like the one where Rawdon Crawley, man of her dreams, is summoned off to the Battle of Waterloo, any sense that Becky sincerely frets about the likely prospect of his death either is badly played by an actress losing her grip on sincerity or is hopelessly overwhelmed by all of the surrounding scenes where she obliterates any shot at giving Becky a sustained human dimension. I wouldn't honestly know how to tell the difference, even by the standards of the other performances in the movie; nearly all of them operate at a shrill farcical pitch, though Becky Sharp is such a rapid, proudly cartoonish picaresque that the line between directorial slant and directorial error just evaporates. And the Technicolor breakthrough, marking a huge leap forward and yet received even by critics of the time as an instantly dated lurch toward greater achievements on the horizon, imposes its own layer of confusion on how we should take the film and the performance. Are they admirably seamless fusions of the antique and the modern, or do they furnish slapdash proof of the filmmakers' refusing to choose either path?

"How terrible!" Frances Dee's pale, sainted Amelia intones when she and Becky hear about Napoleon's escape from Elba and the certainty of resumed warfare. "How amusing," Hopkins's Becky gushes just a half-second later, in response to the same news. Becky Sharp and Hopkins's lead performance are terrible and amusing—though not, to the disappointment of camp connoisseurs, amusingly terrible, or terribly amusing. They are coherent achievements that I still wish had been approached very differently. One has to allow some room for the limits of still-nascent technology in the film's case, but it's tougher to extend full benefit of the doubt to Hopkins, given the limits of agility, compassion, and nuance that she betrayed in so many of her performances, especially from this time forward. But, by the same token, for all that irritates me about Hopkins's forming of the character, Becky Sharp would be a completely inert novelty without this cyclone in the middle of it, for which the actress sets the breathless pace. Becky might need to be played as caustic and tiring but hard to ignore—even the teensiest bit charming, in tremendous spite of how deplorable she is. This, Hopkins accomplishes. Is that achievement something for which we should extend her credit? Or is it a major, face-saving accident that she opts to be so insufferable and self-infatuated in a rare part that doesn't die on the vine if it's planted in that kind of soil? I couldn't decide while watching Becky Sharp and feel even further from deciding now. A return visit might nudge me into hating the performance, or liking it more than I do; loving it, anyway, seems well out of the question. But a return visit to Becky Sharp, when I could be checking back in on Hopkins's marvelous turn in Trouble in Paradise, or taking my first gander at one of her feudy pairings with Bette Davis, in The Old Maid or Old Acquaintance? Not bloody likely. If the performance is ultimately so wearing that, whether or not it's the "right" approach for Hopkins to have taken, I'd never want to withstand it again—and I say this as someone who's seen Coquette three times—then surely that's got to mean something.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 20 to Go

Gone with the Ghibli: Best Pictures 1939 and 1996

An odd Moroccan wind rains blood on the state of Georgia...
NICK: If you've had seven spare hours lately - and who hasn't? - you'll have joined us in revisiting two of Oscar's grandest, prosiest, most impassioned historical epics. There had never been a movie quite like Gone with the Wind (1939), and in many respects, there's hasn't been one since: a cultural lodestone from the eve of the book's publication through the deliriously publicized build-up to the picture to its relentless, Sherman-style takeover of the box-office, where it still reigns handily as the all-time champ if you adjust for inflation. Gone with the Wind had more authors than you could shake your last carrot at, and it shows: directorial styles, camera distances, rhythms of dialogue, lighting regimens, and story emphases shift frequently over the course of its 238 minutes. For some viewers, this mars the movie and for some it deepens and enriches its interest; some critics are tempted to overlook the film's oscillations and inconsistencies, where others marvel at its overall coherence despite all the cooks in the kitchen. Some viewers don't even notice. So frankly, dears, do we give a damn?

And how about all the competing tones and authorial signatures in The English Patient, Miramax's first Oscar win after several years as the chic, funky, and dangerous bridesmaid? Anthony Minghella's glossy and story-driven direction sometimes matches Michael Ondaatje's spindly, image-driven mosaic. Harvey Weinstein's obsession with mainstreaming the arthouse and producer Saul Zaentz's fondness for European and literary pedigrees certainly worked out with AMPAS, to the tune of nine wins: one more than GWTW, unless you count the latter's technical and honorary citations. But is the movie they made all of a piece, or is it a pile of glittery, unreconciled fragments? Do the plot strands blend together or do some get lost within this romantic braid?

NATHANIEL: I think unreconciled fragments are the point, frankly (my dears), since The English Patient is such a memory tone poem. Not that I love all the fragments. The English Patient loses me whenever Willem Dafoe holds up his thumbless hands and the political intrigues bore me. But I lost the thread of your question as soon as you said "romantic braid"—anything referencing hair entangles me immediately in visual flashes of Kristin Scott Thomas's miracle bangs, Ralph Fiennes at his sandy prettiest, Naveen Andrews wringing out his massive locks, and especially the scene where Hana (Juliette Binoche) chops hers off in a moment of rushed practicality. She looks fabulous afterwards—I'm sure she's a good nurse but I think she missed her calling.


Hana as Coiffeuse > Scarlett as Couturier
This brings me to a major point in the movie's favor, which is its tactile quality. I often feel like if I touch the screen I'll feel the heat of skin, the smoothness of the sand, the texture of hair, and even the cold outer shell of bombs and worn book covers. Good movies always work sight and sound but how many evoke any of the other senses?

NICK: A great point, and a great one to get in early. I'm nosing in before Mike even gets to talk, but I remember being surprised (sort of) when Peter Greenaway took such strong public exception to The English Patient, since among narrative films it's the only contemporary of The Pillow Book I could think of that had a similar knack for that tactile, synesthesiac vibrancy that you're talking about. All those plums and paper maps and dust storms and shampoos.

MIKE: I can't help but think of The English Patient in terms of halves: the half driven by divine coincidence versus the half driven by contrivance; the half made of unapologetically melodramatic moments and huge emotional swells versus the half where everything is so polite, even despite the various explosions and romances; the half that's so three-dimensional, sensual, and sensory that I want to put it in my mouth and/or rub it all over my body (and it sounds like you guys agree with me) versus the flat whodunit (or whoisit, or isithim).

I'm talking about the good half and the not so good half, the pre-war and the post-war, the Ralph-as-gawky-god and the Ralph-as-whispery-pudding, the "Kristin Scott Thomas is a love goddess who seems uncomfortable in her own body, which makes her even more attractive" half, and the "Juliette Binoche is vague and cold beyond the requirements of her character" half. I don't know how this relates back to Nick's original question, since I haven't read the novel and can't say whether what works is Minghella channeling a 1930s epic weepie or Minghella trying to shove some Ondaatje into the film. Oh, yeah: what I'm saying is, "What Nathaniel managed to say in one sentence."

The film's best moments feel like they're from another era, say, the era of Gone with the Wind (woo, segue). A weeping Ralph carrying Kristin's body out of the cave, the incredibly hot prelude to their first assignation ("You still have sand in your hair"): huge, unabashedly romantic moments that compelled me to watch them again before I could finish this paragraph. These moments reminded me of similarly huge moments in GWTW that I had seen and heard so many times that, when I finally got around to watching it for the first time, I thought would be sapped of their power, but they weren't. They're so much a part of the epic fabric of the film that anything muted or attenuated would have seemed out of place. I was so swept away that I really didn't notice all the oscillations and inconsistencies you mentioned in your opening, Nick. Maybe on second viewing I'll be able to see some of them.

NATHANIEL: I don't notice the tonal or visual schizophrenia of Gone with the Wind that much, either. I blame that almost entirely on Vivien Leigh. I like to think of GWTW's entire cast, numerous setpieces, and multiple acts in exactly the way that Scarlett herself seems to think of them: as either annoyances, obsessions, crushes, flatteries, inconveniences, backdrop, excuses for bad behavior, frenemies, threats, or... other. It's ALWAYS about her. Even when it's not.


Scarlett/Vivien throwing Georgia shade at the mention of Melanie/Olivia
Vivien Leigh is the top. When you hear about someone carrying a film, this is what they mean. That she carried it for four hours with an 18-inch waist as a virtual unknown in the midst of that veritable hurricane of apocrypha which surrounds this production—I'm sorry! This is supposed to be about what's on the screen. Not what happened behind the scenes or the legend accumulated. I get distracted. But maybe Oscar does, too. If you'll allow me an obscene exaggeration: I sometimes forget (mostly when I'm not watching it, which is often... it's four hours long!) that Gone With the Wind is a movie at all. It's a historical and cultural event that happened, rather than a story on celluloid. When that happens, isn't Oscar almost a given? See also: Titanic, The Sound of Music, et cetera...

I'm suddenly curious about which of those huge unstoppably effective moments Mike was referencing and which of Gone With the Wind's disparate personalities Nick likes most and least.

MIKE: The big one for me was Viv's "As God is my witness, I will never go hungry again!" soliloquy. I felt it coming a mile off—it might as well have been heralded by a troupe of trumpeters. Chills ran up and down my legs and arms: here it comes. And then it was so shattering, so strong, so desperate—and so contrived. But it blew me away, even though I was expecting to giggle through it. See also: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

You bring up a good point, Nathaniel, about how hard it is to separate what's on screen from what went into it, and what came after it. Part of what makes it work is the fact that it was such a miracle that it worked at all, and there's a danger that its ubiquitousness will ruin the experience for first-time viewers (although it didn't for me).

NATHANIEL: "Never go hungry again"—the crazy thing about that pre-intermission curtain call is how "The End" and "Stay Tuned!" it is at once. If this movie were made now they would just chop it in half and demand your ticket dollars all over again for part two the following year.

A moment I love that I rarely hear discussed is the eruption of the news of war at the Wilkes plantation. The choreography is just thrilling. All those people running, colorful dresses swirling across the screen at various angles down towards the doors as Scarlett O'Hara alone zig-zags through them upstream, lost in a very different moment than the larger one. Movies today, outside of some action movies or auteur flicks, don't often have this kind of emotionally attuned and narrative revealing choreography—it's all closeups and reaction shots now—and I think the movies are worse for it.

That said, for as much as I can get swept up in the movie there is the nagging reminder that this lush world, built on the backs of slaves, deserved to be blown away. The slaves talking about beating the Yankees are particularly disturbing to me—Stockholm Syndrome anyone? It's always been a little odd to me that Hollywood romanticized the South so much. Are Civil War era movies ever about the North?

NICK: Sorry to duck out for so long from my own party. I was busy upstairs making a dress from my own drapes. I'm not even going to delve into the complicated waters of whether this movie actually waxes nostalgic about slavery or whether it has an appropriately harsh view of the Peculiar Institution. Though I will note that we see black slaves picking cotton in a field before we see anything else, and slave labor is often what's depicted beneath the occasional "That was the South, gone forever!"-type intertitles. Make of that what you will.

What I was getting at about the changing aesthetics, though I'm not the first to notice this, is that the first third or so of the movie (let's call it the Cukor part) has so many more close-ups, such gentler lighting, and so many more expressive movements of the camera or of choreographed bodies within the frame: that shot you mention, Nathaniel, of Scarlett floating up the steps while the men of Twelve Oaks are all racing downward is a perfect example. By contrast to this, Melanie's pregnancy and (even more so) the escape from Atlanta are rendered almost completely (and mostly by William Cameron Menzies, I think) through old-fashioned cross-cuts, like when Rhett worries out loud about explosives and we cut to a pile of boxes that say "Explosives."


Cukor's GWTW is lovely! Menzies' GWTW is...so literal!
And then as the film continues, under the hands of mad Victor Fleming and staid Sam Wood, the lighting and color choices get much harsher, there's a lot more black and weighty diagonals, and the camera stays further away for lots of group scenes. At moments, the movie looks like Fritz Lang shot it (check out Barbara O'Neil as the dead Mrs. O'Hara on her Caligari-ish catafalque), and some of the Technicolor has a kind of violent, Red Shoes intensity to it, as when Bonnie takes her final horse ride or when Scarlett's accosted by her own husband on those huge, nightmare stairs.


It makes sense that the prevailing mood changes over the course of these particular events, but the early emphasis on personality-driven characterization and elegant movement in the early scenes turns into a broody, sometimes very tense, occasionally clunky pile-up of narrative scenes about running a sawmill or duping the police or pond-hopping to London or semi-hating your own spouse. It's partly great acting but partly the totally different photography that sometimes makes Leigh look like a totally different woman in the first half of GWTW vs. the second. I'm mostly cool with that—this movie gives you SO MUCH, and so much to chew on—but I miss the verve and lightness of the magnificent first half when I have to flip the disc over and press onward through the sudsier, stiffer second.

But with all this talk of GWTW's iconic imagery, you can feel that The English Patient is often aspiring to the same kind of iconicity: the bi-plane crash, Hana's flight through the church, Almásy toting Katharine out of the cave. Do these images resonate for you, or are they instances of the movie trying too hard?



NATHANIEL: I like it when movies try too hard ("...sometimes", he quickly adds). At least I do if what they're trying for is heightened. It's one reason I am counting down the days impatiently until Australia hits... But back on topic: I love Hana's flight through the church—it's the image that always pops into my brain if i hear the three words "The English Patient"—but in other instances I feel how self-conscious the movie is, even as I'm a little bit swept up in it (i.e. Almásy & Katharine's affair). I guess I wish that The English Patient was either more heightened (more of the real through unreal filters please: like those odd birds-eye flights over sand, all foldy like bedsheets) or a little more focused.

I've never been in love with it though it didn't make me as crazy the second time through as it made Elaine:

Oh. No. I can't do this any more.
I can't. It's too long.
(to the screen) Quit telling your stupid story,
about the stupid desert, and just die already!
(louder) Die!!
Mike?

MIKE: "What I want to know is, did they shrink them down, or is that a really big sack?"

Huh? Oh, right, we're talking Oscars. Yeah, The English Patient works best for me when it's going for the big score: I still cry like a baby when Ralph's crying like a baby toting Kristin out of the cave, I get a little steamed up during their assignation in the alcove, and I feel dizzy during Hana's flight in the church—incidentally, the only thing that really works for me about the postwar storyline. I want more grand gestures, doomed romances, tragic sacrifices, and Ralph looking like a tormented Muppet (sorry, Nick, I stole that from you). The past is veiled with smoke and dust and gauzy curtains, lit with reddish fiery sunsets and sunrises, and it's a much better place for both the main characters and us, the viewers, at least when it comes to The English Patient.

And it's not even trying to bite off as much as Gone with the Wind, which does want to be all things to all people (and its reputation and box office might indicate that it succeeds). Nick, having you spell out the pre- and post-intermission differences makes them completely obvious, and while I'm not going to say I subconsciously noticed all of them, I am going to say that even absent the too-many-cooks explanation for them, all those tonal, compositional, and narrative changes serve the story pretty well. One could probably exhaustively explain why each one of them works, but someone else has probably already done that in book-length form, and besides, I wouldn't always agree with the reasoning: there's a definite change once you have to flip that disc, and it's a change from something I absolutely love to something I heartily like and respect. From certain off-board grumblings, it sounds like "like" and "respect" might be in short supply during our next installment...

---

As God as my witness, readers, I'll never watch Braveheart again! Actually, I have to, but to ease my suffering in advance, please tell us what you think about Gone with the Wind's rose-colored plantations, the fierceness of Vivien Leigh, the sensuality of The English Patient, and the relative merits of its duelling plotlines. And we didn't even start on Clark Gable, on Max Steiner's score, on Gabriel Yared's score and Walter Murch's sound bridges, on those political intrigues that bore Nathaniel, on birthin' no babies, on whatever happened to the size of Kip's role (he has arguably the biggest part in the novel), on that gorgeous notch in a woman's neck, on Kristin Scott Thomas bumping her head on those bleachers, on that poor horse who drops dead on the way back to Tara (best acting ever by an animal, or a snuff film straight outta PETA's collective nightmare?), or on the surreal strain of pretending for four hours that Leslie Howard is a sexpot. What do you remember, from the amnesiac haze of your hospital gurney, and from beneath your Muppet makeup? What do you give a damn about?

Tags:
This Week: Nathaniel's screen shots
Previously: ep.1: Wings & No Country; ep.2: Broadway Melody & Departed; ep.3: All Quiet & Crash; ep.4: Cimarron & Million Dollar Baby; ep.5: Grand Hotel & LOTR:ROTK; ep.6: Cavalcade & Chicago; ep.7: It Happened One Night & A Beautiful Mind; ep.8: Mutiny on the Bounty & Gladiator; ep.9: Ziegfeld & American Beauty; ep.10: Zola & Shakespeare; ep.11: You Can't Take It with You & Titanic
Compendium: My ongoing "Best Pictures" Special Section, with reviews, rankings, polls, and links to all of our discussions

Much Ado About Shakespeare on Film

That's Will Shakespeare's favorite knick-knack and a balled-up page of an abandoned first draft, two memorable props from the witty, tirelessly entertaining Shakespeare in Love (reviewed here), by far the more delightful of the two films that Nathaniel and Goatdog and I discuss in this week's episode of our Best Pictures from the Outside In series. The other film up for discussion is the old Warner Bros. fossil The Life of Émile Zola (reviewed here). Some people will tell you that if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. You cannot accuse the three of us of holding to that rule, but I don't hate Zola. It probably helped that, since I had just seen it recently, I re-watched it at 1.5x its normal speed as my refresher for this discussion. This is an old studying trick for boning up on familiar films, and while some of them are unwatchable at this accelerated pace (Shakespeare in Love would fly by mercilessly), I learned that William Dieterle may actually have made an 80-minute movie that has been wrongly projected all these years at 120 minutes. The long pauses, the stuffy performances, the actors' awkward navigations of physical space: all of it hugely ameliorated by a little flick of the DVD remote control. You can bet I'll be doing the same months from now for The Greatest Show on Earth and Around the World in 80 Days.

Shakespeare in Love also emerges as our collective favorite Best Picture winner from 1998-2002, and thus moves ahead, as does It Happened One Night, to the next round in our ongoing Best Pictures Tournament. Please don't forget the associated reader polls, and make your choices heard! Especially if you're a Cavalcade fan. It could use the extra push.


Shakespeare and Romeo & Juliet specifically also surface in that Top 10 Films of 1968 series that I trumpeted a few days ago over at the Encyclopedia Britannica blog. Raymond Benson's first three choices have been The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (#10), Romeo and Juliet (#9), and The Producers (#8), with energetic responses following each selection. Click over and gab; extra points if your comment is in iambic pentameter.

Tags:
This Week: Nathaniel's transcript and Goatdog's poster

Previously: ep.1: Wings & No Country; ep.2: Broadway Melody & Departed; ep.3: All Quiet & Crash; ep.4: Cimarron & Million Dollar Baby; ep.5: Grand Hotel & LOTR:ROTK; ep.6: Cavalcade & Chicago; ep.7: It Happened One Night & A Beautiful Mind; ep. 8: Mutiny & Gladiator; ep. 9: Ziegfeld & Beauty

A Plastic Bag Is Like a Melody

A shower of rose petals pours forth from Luise Rainer's bosom

And we're back! And we have two more Best Picture winners to tackle: MGM's lavish and lengthy The Great Ziegfeld, a mostly-biopic inevitably fashioned into an almost-musical from 1936, and DreamWorks' American Beauty, a satirical comedy married to a midlife-crisis drama making out with a rebels-without-a-cause youth pic going at least to third base with the digital effects department.

The movies were helmed respectively by Robert Z. Leonard (who didn't win Best Director) and Sam Mendes (who did), but creative control was a real team effort on both counts. Seymour Felix won an Oscar for his Dance Direction on Ziegfeld, as did Conrad L. Hall for his American Beauty cinematography, and I don't think either film's Best Picture victory is imaginable without these men's contributions. They are also emblematic of the splashy, tuneful, and expensive brand-naming that MGM was committed to reinforcing through the 1930s and of the "edgy," personal, unusual dramas that DreamWorks would become an in-house specialty in the late 1990s, even if they rarely delivered at this high level.

I'm interested off the bat, then, in what you guys think about the generic blends and creative points of view in these movies. And also in what they imply about why we tell stories about the people we do: is Florenz Ziegfeld worthy of a biopic outside of the excuse he offers for over-the-top production numbers (and don't you sort of wish there were more of these)? And what does The Passion of Lester Burnham have to say to American Beauty's unexpectedly massive audience? Does the film stay on a consistent message, or even agree with itself about what it's saying, or for whom, or why? Part of the attraction and also the frustration I feel for both movies stems from their shared tendency to be a little all over place.

NATHANIEL: I was thinking about this very topic (who gets bios and why?) the other day as I perused the National Gallery in D.C. For such an overstuffed genre with a veritably unlimited supply of source material, there sure is a distinctly limited set of protagonists. Ziegfeld is definitely one of the types: huge ego, massive dreams, big failures, epic influence on American entertainment. Oscar is a size queen but y'all knew that already.


Nathaniel tours the National Gallery in D.C.

Which is why the success of the smaller and more "personal" American Beauty is more fascinating to me as Oscar tales go. How did screenwriter Alan Ball's personal prejudices, pets, and demons—that's the way I see it because this movie is nutty with specifics—end up feeling so universal to moviegoers in 1999? Maybe the film should have been called American Neurosis, because boy, does it have issues. They're all visibly tangled up in your first question about the movie but I don't even know where to begin with the parsing.

Help me, Mike.

MIKE: I remember leaving the theater back in '99 so ecstatic about American Beauty that I was flabbergasted when a respected professor dismissed it as "a total male fantasy." How could she think that, when it was so sharply critical of the male fantasy that it was depicting? Seeing it again today, I don't think either of us was entirely right, because it's impossible to pin the film down on anything. What, exactly, is its point of view on any of the myriad "personal prejudices, pets, and demons" Nathaniel mentioned? It seems to genuinely love the very things it's tearing down, and genuinely hate the things it's holding up for praise, so in the end it's a huge, tangled, slippery ball of contradictions. Does it even understand when it's contradicting itself? Its only answer to this question seems to be a smirky "what do you think?" So in answer to your questions, I think it covered so many bases that audience members were almost bound to see something in it to identify with. The strength of that identification—the accuracy of the blindfolded knife throw—determines the amount of love people have for it.

I agree that The Great Ziegfeld wants its cake and wants to stage a huge dance number on it too, but it does it much less stealthily and stylishly. It wants Flo to be a rake and a cad, but a lovable one, but he ends up neither rakish nor caddish nor lovable enough. It wants to be a snazzy backstage showbiz film, but it doesn't have enough musical numbers, and the ones that were here were staged pretty shoddily, despite that Oscar for the enormous but utterly fucking boring "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody" number—hello, Oscar? Anything from Swing Time is better than this. (I'll tell ya, Busby Berkeley and Fred Astaire ruined 1930s musicals for me: if it doesn't have three hundred chorines stomping around in geometric patterns while wearing funny hats or two supernaturally gifted dancers flitting about an empty floor, I start to snooze, and all the numbers in Ziegfeld made me snore. But I digress.) It wants to be a Serious, Important biopic, but its rhythm is all wrong—scenes last too long or feel perfunctory, characters are built up and then disappear without explanation, there's no way to tell how much time passes between scenes, etc. The terrifying thing is that this is NOT the nadir for Best Picture-winning biopics in the 1930s: next time around we have to watch The Life of Émi

Sorry, I nodded off just thinking about it. What were we talking about?

NICK: We were talking about how I can't wait to hear what Nathaniel thinks about American Beauty, given how swiftly he passed that hot potato, but maybe we should knock out Ziegfeld first. Over and above the other pseudo-musical that we've covered, The Broadway Melody (R.I.P. Anita Page, who died this weekend!), I'll at least give Ziegfeld credit for archiving a stage aesthetic that makes almost no sense to me, but which was enormously popular at the time, and in which the filmmakers do seem to take earnest and sustained pleasure, even if they can't always communicate that pleasure to us. All of those outfits shaped like feathery candelabras, and sequined spiderwomen, and giant cake-shaped rotating stages where no one does a whole lot while a mostly arbitrary song plays over top of them... It's all about the crazy-ass designs, and alternating slow and fast rhythms, and I like the bizarre creativity of that, even though The Great Ziegfeld is helpless at making distinctions between "good" tableaux and "bad" tableaux.



And though I agree with every single one of your criticisms, Mike, I do find Ray Bolger's tap routine pretty delightful (even though it only represents about 1/100th of this gargantuan movie's running time), and the plotline about the sozzled chorine Audrey at least dramatizes the trade-offs between beauty and tackiness that generally fight a losing battle elsewhere in the film. Luise Rainer's Oscar is as mysterious to me as the film's, but with Frank Morgan hamming so relentlessly, hers isn't even the most distractingly overcooked performance. As opposed to William Powell's, which is the most distractingly undercooked.

NATHANIEL: I'm guessing I can safely say that I enjoyed The Great Ziegfeld more than both of you. But I temper this enjoyment confession with the following disclaimers.

1. I'm a sucker for the song and dance. Kick a leg up here or there, throw in some showtunes properly sung. I'm good.
2. My finger did slip, accidentally jarring the fast-forward button on occasion. (That damn DVD remote is so tiny!)
3. I spent some of the running time fantasizing that I was watching Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle. There was so much white on white on white on white in Ziegfeld's tableaux that I half-expected the chorus girls to dissolve into big hunks of sculptural vaseline like the props that they were. And then maybe drip down the walls of the Guggenheim.



4. I watched it in seven hour-long sessions as opposed to all at once. In one of those sessions, all that happened was that the aforementioned wedding cake rotated 180 degrees. Unfortunately, Madonna did not descend from it in full Virgin regalia. In another I swear Luise Rainer changed her mind 180 times. Thrice each minute!

On the subject of Rainer's over cooking and Oscar eager dining on the same... I'm OK with it. I prefer well done (Rainer) to medium rare (Powell) if the subject is extravagant show people. Okay okay... I prefer overcooking even if the dish is stylized marital discord. Y'all know where I'm headed with this. If Mena Suvari gets to have rose petals exploding from her underage tomatoes, nobody better be throwin' tomatoes at my very ripe Annette Bening.

Tread carefully, boys.

NICK: Did it just get cold in here? I'm going to go get a sweater...

NATHANIEL: A sweater? Wouldn't you rather have the dresser fetch you a nice second-hand shawl for your Follies debut? If it's good enough for Fanny Brice...

MIKE: Speaking of that shawl, and sort of avoiding the Annette Bening issue for a moment, there was a nice instance of When Biopics Clash in TGZ, with its tale of how The Impeccable Flo takes Fanny's glam outfit away, understanding intuitively that she had to perform in Salvation Army wear instead of silk and lace. Thirty years later in Funny Girl, however, it's Brice who has to give Ziegfeld the business about how Fanny Brice™ should be presented to the public. The later depiction makes more sense to me, and maybe if I bothered to look it up it might turn out to be true, but it's interesting how the earlier film seems to maim history and my sense of what feels intuitively right in the service of establishing Flo as some sort of tarnished (but not too tarnished) god of the theater.

About The Bening: she gives by far the best performance in the film, and if a certain other woman hadn't delivered a certain other performance in 1999, Bening would get my Oscar vote. She's consistently sharp and funny, and her take on Ball and Mendes's take on Carolyn Burnham remains the most rewarding thing about re-watching the film.

(Can I throw in a "but" here?)

But it's a feat of intuition and skill that comes despite, not because of, the way the film sees Carolyn. I think she's the only place the film doesn't want to have it both ways: it thinks she's completely ridiculous, and it never changes its mind. It's ridiculous for her to want to protect her couch from beer spills, even though this comes right after we learn that Lester has purchased a classic car "because I wanted it." Why is materialism OK for him but not for her? Why is Lester's lust for his high school sweetheart presented so forgivingly—"Laugh with us at this middle-aged guy's silly infatuation with this teenage git, this lovely, sweet, irresistible teenage git you all want to sleep with too"!—but Carolyn's athletic romps with the King of Real Estate are total, unredeemed comic relief? But Bening is so awesome that she almost makes me forget all of this.

NICK: I have repeatedly used that car-to-couch sequence as a little nugget for teaching film analysis in my classes, because, as you say, you instantly catch American Beauty right in the act of its anti-woman double-standards. For extra perks, notice that costume designer Julie Weiss has outfitted Bening in a stiff steel-blue sheath dress so that when she sits, she looks exactly like one of those Italian-silk vertical stripes on her sofa. Lester wants his car, but she is her couch, and this, apparently, is the problem.



Even the fact that most of the other principals—Spacey, Bentley, Birch, Suvari—go naked at some point but Bening never does seems like a kind of built-in defense against ever "looking closer" at an adult woman without all the shrill editorializing.

I can't agree that Bening gives the best performance; my vote goes to Bentley, followed by Cooper, and then to Spacey (if only in his scenes with Bentley and Cooper). But I will say this, partially to bowl over Nathaniel: I do think she has two of the best line-readings—"I must be PSYCHOTIC then!" and "We lived in a DUPLEX!"—and I think she stars in the single best-acted scene of the movie, when she's tipsily asking to pick the brain of Buddy the Real Estate King. She's light and funny, and her voice loosens up; she works hilariously with those olives in her martini glass; and she shows us Carolyn "being herself" while also keeping up a strange set of pretenses. We can't tell if she's suppressing or exaggerating her drunkenness, and it's sad and humorous and poignant to watch her strategize. Much more interesting and believable than that grotesque house-cleaning plus self-slapping bit. I have never given this scene its proper due in teaching, writing, or thinking about the movie, and I'm glad to have a companion scene for crystallizing American Beauty at its best: capturing the absurdity, humor, cynicism, and sexuality of white upper-middle class suburbia without all the strenuous effects and acting tics that distract the film from itself as often as they help it.

So, can we play this game for a second? Say something about American Beauty that you've never said before in private or on your sites. What's the freshest thing you noticed or thought this time through the movie? And does it break in the movie's favor or against it?

NATHANIEL: I love to play games, but yours come with difficult rules.

The first two times I saw this film were during its release, and I was entirely focused on the three adult couples: the Burnhams (Bening & Spacey) for obvious film-carrying reasons, but the other two as well: that happy jogging gay couple whom we never get to know, and the uptight military couple who have rendered themselves unknowable.

The third time through (last week, nine long years later), I was focused on the teenagers. I ended up really angry that Wes Bentley's Ricky and Thora Birch's Jane so viciously reject Mena Suvari's Angela in the end. Previously there'd been this strange The Kids Are All Right vibe going on in the movie. (Grading on a curve, are we, Alan Ball?) But then the trio breaks up and Angela is condemned for her normalcy. Though, let's be honest here: what's more normal when you're a teenager than being moody (i.e. Jane) and feeling superior (i.e. Ricky)? I suddenly realized that Angela was going to grow up to be Carolyn. They're both sexual, slightly wild girls who have basically normal suburban values at heart. One of them is just 20 years older than the other. I still wonder why American Beauty thinks that growing up to be Carolyn is such a terrible terrible thing. Or at least why it thinks that's such a worse fate than growing up to be Lester.

NICK: Right, but one never grows up to be Lester, because then you would GROW UP. But I'm sure the movie doesn't want me thinking that. And in truth, in many scenes, the movie convinces me not to feel this stingy and conned, because it looks and sounds awfully delicious.

Sorry, Mike. I interrupted.

MIKE: Will I be graded on this assignment, other than by public opinion? OK, two things I noticed this time around. (1) A deeper connection between Ricky and Lester, in that they're both obsessed with not wanting to miss experiences. Lester's catching up on the ones he let slip by, and Ricky compulsively records everything—because he "has to remember" or however he puts it. Both tasks are pretty hopeless. Lester's not twentysomething anymore, and he'll never get that back even if he buys a dozen cars and sleeps with a dozen cheerleaders. Ricky isn't experiencing any of it: he has thousands of tapes, but how would he ever get the time to revisit them (aside from the plastic bag, of course)? He's documenting, but I think he's forgetting to live. (Editor's Note: Even when we coop up inside with all these Best Picture winners, we are in no way guilty of this same mistake.)

And (2) this movie is really, really hard on its women. Maybe this should have been more obvious to me the first time around. They're either shrill harridans (Bening) or soon-to-be so (Suvari) or stoned into submission (Janney) or basically unformed (Birch). Count 2 works against the movie, but I'm not sure about Count 1. It's interesting to see more parallels between those two, but it's one of those things the film doesn't really examine satisfactorily. Does American Beauty think that seeing everything through a video camera is unproblematic?

I'd like to throw in that I still like this movie quite a bit, just not as rapturously as I did when I first saw it.

NICK: About Ricky and his videos and whether the movie sees them as problematic: I remember laughing when my friend Lynn saw Road to Perdition, Mendes' Beauty follow-up, and in response to the Jude Law character, who's sort of a grotesquely criminal vision of Ricky, she said, "Maybe it's just Sam Mendes who likes to take pictures of dead people." Of course, Alan Ball obviously does, too.

I also still like the movie, even though repeat viewings don't seem to help it. (I discovered on this second viewing that I might also like The Great Ziegfeld more than it deserves, even though that's still not much.) You gotta give Beauty points for theatrical showmanship and for its various ambitions, however twisted up they seem to get. Andrew O'Hehir wrote this in Salon, and it sounds like we all agree, though I've never heard it put so succinctly:

"American Beauty accomplishes more in its incoherence than most Hollywood movies do in tidy, soulless success. It's remarkable that any movie that's so ambitious and angry—and that treats ordinary American life so seriously—made it through the mainstream production channels in the first place. Plenty of "independent" films aren't half this daring."

NATHANIEL: O'Hehir is a tough act to follow, curse you! But while I'm feeling resentful about his brevity and skill, I must concede that he's right... if a little generous, curse him!

Watching this again and discussing it with both of you I've realized that this movie makes me angry. I get angry with Alan Ball and Sam Mendes (and their respective surrogates, Lester and Ricky) for their inability to really see the women in their lives. They only have it in them to objectify or judge. I get angry that Lester is such a hypocrite and that the movie applauds that character trait. I get angry with Carolyn for shuttering her own joy with grudges and the inflexibility. I get angry with Janey for being so disdainful of her parents' admittedly pathetic outreach attempts. I get angry with Colonel Fitts because no one should do that to themselves or their families. I get angry with the cheap "Who shot L.B.?" red herrings. I get angry at the concluding voiceover epiphanies which don't make any narrative sense to me whatsoever. And yet... I like the movie. It makes me feel something (not always anger) in virtually every scene and that's, well, something. That's not normal.

Above all else it's highly watchable—so much beauty. It wipes the floor with Ricky's plastic bag video.


Florenz Ziegfeld's famous Dance of the Plastic Bags

Help us out, readers. Is Beauty more than skin deep? Is it equal opportunity for every gender? Is Ziegfeld really Great, or is it a pioneering work in TackyVision? We'll look forward to your comments... Oh, and: will SOMEONE pass the asparagus??!

Tags:
This Week: Nathaniel's killer fashion spread

Previously: ep.1: Wings & No Country; ep.2: Broadway Melody & Departed; ep.3: All Quiet & Crash; ep.4: Cimarron & Million Dollar Baby; ep.5: Grand Hotel & LOTR:ROTK; ep.6: Cavalcade & Chicago; ep.7: It Happened One Night & A Beautiful Mind; ep. 8: Mutiny on the Bounty & Gladiator

High Seas and Epic Tease

In this crazy Eighth episode of Best Pictures from the Outside In, Nathaniel and Goatdog and I pop some giant horse-pills of testosterone to confront two big Man Movies: Frank Lloyd's Mutiny on the Bounty, Oscar's champ from 1935, and Ridley Scott's Gladiator, the first post-Y2K winner. General consensus is that Mutiny is yare, while Gladiator's the one at sea. Read the full transcript, and share your thoughts.

Unfortunately, the week catches me totally unprepared to embellish much beyond what I wrote in the conversation. 1935 is an even sparser year in terms of my own viewing than 1934 was. In my very distant memory, I loved John Ford's The Informer, though almost everyone I know tells me it's overly stylized and unconvincingly acted, so I can't stand by it as my Best Picture vote without another look. I'm a huge fan of Alice Adams (see here for the proof) and of Top Hat, and Broadway Melody of 1936 is steady entertainment, thanks largely to the dynamic Eleanor Powell, if not a full-on knockout. Sadly, I have seven Best Picture nominees left to see and, from my own viewing experience, only Alfred Hitchcock's crackling 39 Steps to insist upon as an Oscar oversight. (Lots of folks would stump for The Bride of Frankenstein or The Devil Is a Woman, but I'm a dissenter on both counts: I think the former is too facetious and the latter is just too tacky and skimpy on feeling, even though Marlene memorably, gruffly asserted it as the best of her Sternberg vehicles in the indispensable documentary that Maximilan Schell made about her.)



Meanwhile, I also have some 2000 dilemmas to solve. I've been trumpeting Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (reviewed here) as my favorite BP nominee ever since they were announced... but at this point, isn't my heart with Erin Brockovich (reviewed here and here), an issue picture, biopic, and vanity vehicle that glides over all three of those huge generic hurdles and improves with every single viewing? I didn't get to re-watch Tiger to find out, but the race is tight. Adventures in high concept: Erin Brockovich goes wuxia on PG&E!

So, no firm verdicts on either year, just a bunch of ambivalence and fond memories. When I eventually go back and review my Top Ten of 2000, I'll also be eager to revisit Timecode, The Wind Will Carry Us, and Yi Yi (A One and a Two...), three films I may well have undervalued at the time; Up at the Villa, a delicious perversity that I may nonetheless have over-estimated; The Claim, Traffic, and The Yards, which I always liked but have largely forgotten in their particulars; and a bunch of critically idolized titles that I couldn't access at the time, including Lodge Kerrigan's Claire Dolan and Laurent Cantet's Human Resources. And those are just the U.S. commercial releases! 2000 also yielded festival sensations like Shinji Aoyama's Eureka, Ousmane Sembene's Faat Kiné, Jiang Wen's Devils on the Doorstep, Chantal Akerman's La Captive, Jia Zhangke's Platform, Bernard Rose's ivansxtc., and Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies, all of them still hovering on my viewing horizon.

So, make like Commodus and cast your thumbs up and down in the Comments. Make like Captain Bligh and lead me in the right direction, however roughly. Make like Fletcher Christian and buck the prevailing authorities. I'm eager for your guidance.

Tags:
This Week: Goatdog's transcript and Nathaniel's Gable/Crowe profile
Previously: ep.1: Wings & No Country; ep.2: Broadway Melody & Departed; ep.3: All Quiet & Crash; ep.4: Cimarron & Million Dollar Baby; ep.5: Grand Hotel & LOTR:ROTK; ep.6: Cavalcade & Chicago; ep.7: It Happened One Night & A Beautiful Mind