Cannes 1995: Day 8: May 24

Ulysses' Gaze, Greece, dir. Theo Angelopoulos

Fewer films than usual on offer today: Critics' Week had ended, and many of the Quinzaine and Un Certain Regard titles proved elusive. But what remains is a full meal. Some might even say over-full. I imagine critics arrive to every Cannes with certain days in the schedule circled in boldfaced marker, and this would have been one of them. Theo Angelopoulos' Ulysses' Gaze, which finds the legendary Greek auteur pondering the evisceration of the Balkans and the evanescence of film, and Zhang Yimou's Shanghai Triad, with its visually and narratively operatic story of gangsterism and bitter redemption, had figured instantly on everyone's list of likely plays for the Palme d'or. By "everyone," I include the filmmakers.  Neither was renowned for hiding his light under a bushel, but even by those standards, they pull out all the technical and rhetorical stops in these projects.  I don't doubt their sincere commitment to their visions, but I also sense they can smell the velvet in the trophy case. Neither of these statement-pieces went home empty-handed, even if Angelopoulos' famous hissy-fit upon winning the runner-up prize suggested otherwise, but nor did they unite critical opinion or endear themselves uniformly to audiences. I found plenty to chew on in both, but oscillated like so many others between awe and skepticism. If anything, I was more galvanized by a one-hour Malaysian adaptation of William Faulkner's "Barn Burning" that slipped into Un Certain Regard to less acclaim than it deserved. You could watch it three times in the span it takes to screen Ulysses' Gaze, though that's not an automatic point for or against either of them. Good things come in big and small packages.

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Cannes 1995: Day 3: May 19

Beyond Rangoon, UK/USA, dir. John Boorman

1995 boasted the largest roster of Competition titles in recent Cannes history—which is all the more surprising given that some of these entries, like Angels and Insects, would have played equally well in the sidebars, and others, like Beyond Rangoon, could have been skipped altogether. But if the Palme contenders hadn't yet yielded much excitement, the sidebars were starting to pop with buzzy titles, hailing from Tinseltown and Tehran...

Updated: For even richer thoughts on many of the films listed below, head over to the first Jury Roundtable, where we all go into more detail about our reactions.
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Best of 2011: Adapted Screenplay

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Higher Ground (CAROLYN BRIGGS & TIM METCALFE)
... for taking so many perspectives seriously, and framing a woman's relation to faith in a manageable structure without tidying it up too much;

Jane Eyre (MOIRA BUFFINI)
... for seeming neither cowed by a classic novel nor headstrong about unnecessary changes, managing a deft balance of creativity and due respect;

Moneyball (STEVEN ZAILLIAN & AARON SORKIN)
... for sliding nimbly between scenes the way a dealer shuffles cards, without sacrificing momentum or vivid characterization or emotional hooks;

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (BRIDGET O'CONNOR & PETER STRAUGHAN)
... for wrestling a mazelike novel into an inevitably semi-opaque film, graced with piquant, peculiar notes that make the shadows more intriguing;

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (APICHATPONG WEERASETHAKUL)
... for appropriating the odd, fanciful memoir of a Buddhist monk, infusing it with his own concerns, and leading us places no one else would go.

In the Land of Ambiguous Categorization: I'm never a fan of Adapted Screenplay nominations going to filmmakers who fertilized their own short films and cultivated them to feature length, so I'm glad that Dee Rees and Focus Features stuck to their guns and campaigned for Pariah as an original script. Still, rightly or wrongly, folks have won Oscars in the Adapted derby for succeeding less well than Rees does in this regard. If you don't know the original short, I'll just say that once upon a time, Pariah built to a central conflict over a prop that Alike literally tosses in the trash in this new version. The full-length movie is not a superficial padding of the initial scenario but a genuine expansion and, in graceful ways, a deepening and a transformation. Parental dynamics have shifted and new characters amplify the humor, the romance, and the tension. Being able to gauge and revise her material this deftly makes Rees not just a director to watch (which she is) but a writer worth keeping an eye on.

Runners-Up: Another short-ish list in a year where the heat favored the original scripts, I have to hand it to George Clooney, Grant Heslov, and Beau Willimon for giving Willimon's play the extra oomph and narrative it needed to hold the screen in The Ides of March; Richard Curtis and Lee Hall for re-proportioning War Horse to make optimal room for Spielberg's contributions, and for limiting the bathos to much less than it might have been; to Christopher Hampton for moving some scenes around and trimming some others so that A Dangerous Method mostly feels tighter and less obvious than it did as a play; to Pedro Almodóvar for serving himself a finale that weeps and sings in The Skin I Live In, even if every subplot and temporal swerve doesn't serve the whole as well as it could; to Hossein Amini for seeing a movie in the thin narrative of Drive and writing the sleek, racing-striped, intermittently flavorful script that invited Refn's exercise in style; and to Denis Villeneuve for translating Wajdi Mouawad's Incendies in ways that don't efface the fussy unevenness of the source but aptly crystallize its strongest passages, making a fair, ambitious, sporadically effective stab at Socratic grandeur.

Monday Reviews: Never Let Me Go. Also: CIFF Looms!

I'll be surprised if Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go stays in the Oscar hunt in any category except Best Original Score, even though Rachel Portman's maudlin and overly conspicuous music is, sadly, the only thing in the movie about which I can't think of anything nice to say. Well, the music and the wigs: just awful. The rest of the movie is either an intriguing failure or a seriously flawed success, depending on my mood; almost every element has moments of working and moments of falling short. Did you feel differently, or do you plan to see it? Full review here, including two paragraphs guest-written by the main character, Kathy H.

The multiplex has a welcome aura of real appeal these days, with The Town and Easy A pulling down numbers and high critical marks. Buried is also on the way to Chicago on Friday, packing the same enviable cred of impressing reviewers and filmgoers back at Sundance, so I'll aim to see one of those three this week.

The full lineup for the Chicago Film Festival goes public on Wednesday, so in whatever time I have left, I'll try to say something about that and offer up some early reviews about the three movies I've gotten to screen in advance, all of them carried over from Cannes. Michael Rowe's Leap Year and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives come in about the same gradewise, though the former is sort of half full, using a taut, judicious shooting and editing to elevate a shaky premise, and the other, sadly, feels half empty, showcasing the filmmaker's ingratiating visual, tonal, and sonic trademarks through the first act, but then taking them nowhere truly satisfying.

Both films are easily worth a look, but neither is a patch on the Ukrainian showstopper My Joy, which starts as a kind of highway noir in the sunny but unsettling vastness of rural Russian highways but then gathers force as something more fractured, more uncanny, but equally gripping. Lots of movies sacrifice tension when they make a move toward national allegory, because you suddenly start seeing more or less how everything is meant to add up. By contrast, though, as My Joy raises its stakes and broadens its canvas, it actually becomes even richer and stranger, and the bravura technique astonishes even further. Standout passages, confirming Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu as even more of a world-class treasure, include a long sequence shot at a rural town market and a late, masterfully mounted rencontre among multiple characters at a roadside checkpoint. If you're reading this and already planning to hit the film festival in October, you've already got at least one movie on your docket that you owe it to yourself to catch.

Actress Files: Grace Kelly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Actress Files: 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

Actress Files: Lee Remick

Lee Remick, Days of Wine and Roses
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1962 Best Actress Oscar to Anne Bancroft for The Miracle Worker)

Why I Waited: 1962's race among Bancroft, Davis, Hepburn, and Page, all among the first Best Actress nominees I ever screened, constitutes such an illustrious cohort that I was both eager to save the fifth nominee as a belated treat and nervous about how well she'd be able to measure up.

The Performance: I screened the original, made-for-television production of Days of Wine and Roses from 1958 in preparation for seeing Blake Edwards's 1962 screen adaptation. Differences between the two versions announce themselves quickly, and they involve major repercussions for the actress playing Kirsten Clay, the increasingly dissolute drinking companion of her husband, Joe Clay. In the television film, Cliff Robertson's Joe meets Piper Laurie's Kirsten as she's heartily knocking a few back at an office party. She's already, if anything, more given over to the stuff than he is. When they leave the party to go walking together, culminating in some very writerly speeches under a dingy bridge and some panting physical contact, it's clear that their shared dependency is already a major force in their coming together, as are their ways of talking about why they drink without admitting that's what they're doing. Flash forward and they have a baby together in a tiny New York flat, where Laurie's ornery Kirsten tries to get Joe to quiet down occasionally so they won't wake the child or suffocate it by having to close the door to its tiny room. From here, the couple withstands some intense lows and some temporary recoveries, most notably during a spell where they dry out by working longterm with Kirsten's father, a farmer and gardener played by the venerable 1940s character actor Charles Bickford. Bickford's character sticks around in the script long enough to see the couple relapse, with Kirsten in particular growing even more incapacitated than she was before. When he confronts Joe for teaching his daughter to drink, the accusation stings even though we know it not to be true, as does Joe. So too, perhaps, in some broken-souled and self-deceiving way, does Mr. Arnesen.

The 1962 film, though adapted by the same writer who penned the original, J.P. Miller, ditches most of these key points, save for the overall narrative trajectory and the casting of Bickford as the aggrieved father. (Bickford's moving performance on this second go-round opens the question of how such an affecting turn by a beloved and winless three-time nominee failed to earn Bickford a fourth citation, over the likes of Victor Buono and the coarse-grained winner, Ed Begley.) Joe is now impersonated by that smarmy-pants Jack Lemmon, whose work grows more powerful as the film continues—as indeed it might, given his indulging of so many relentless mannerisms and narcissistic impulses through the first hour. When he meets Kirsten, now played by newly minted Anatomy of a Murder and Wild River star Lee Remick, he does so under lurid professional circumstances, while procuring eligible girls to "entertain" his high-powered boss at a yacht party. Not only is this Kirsten a teetotaler, but after Joe confuses her with one of the paid escorts, the film spends a subsequent half-hour on his attempts to sweeten her up after making such a piss-poor first impression. This dilated passage of falling in love involves many of the same purple monologues from the original Days, this time spoken on a moonlit wharf instead of that grimy riverside underpass.  It also features Joe introducing Kirsten to her first drink, in the desserty form of brandy alexanders. It's harder to know why Kirsten accedes to Joe despite his evident drinking problem, in tandem with so much else that's errant or tone-deaf in his personality, and when they find themselves as young, married parents having a squall about his drinking, the old lines about waking the baby and suffocating in such small spaces stand bizarrely at odds with the elegant, rambling, high-gloss condo in which they seem to find themselves. Later, of course, when Bickford arraigns Joe for teaching his flailing daughter to drink, the line still hurts but its blunt truth carries less weight than the haunted mix of candor and dishonesty suffusing the same moment in the 1958 version. Moreover, the implication in the second that Kirsten's choices and destiny really have been mapped by her father and husband feels so much more limiting—of the movie's sense of Kirsten, and of Remick's choices as her interpreter—than was the initial, scarier, richer conception of Kirsten as the faltering steward of her own sinking ship.

One thing Edwards's Days has over the televised version, directed in improvisatory, straight-from-the-hip style by no less than John Frankenheimer, are its occasional moments of compositional elegance, even if there are at least as many of hollow, gratuitous "style."  Edwards's version also exerts the peculiar tragic force that comes from seeing two basically cheerful people descend into such sallow unhappiness, such irreparable stalemate as a couple (though again, Days blows its opportunities at making their initial fall into love very convincing). Still, whereas Frankenheimer shapes his piece as an exercise in educational discomfort, entirely powered by his actors, Edwards needs his actors to save a project that laundered screenwriting, plausibility problems, and the bloating of budgets and story-points have threatened to undermine. Nowhere is this contrast more evident than in Piper Laurie's and Lee Remick's entirely disparate approaches to the putatively "same" character. Laurie, as neurotic and bullish as ever, is very much the aggressive stage actress, an obvious peer of Stanley and Parsons, Dennis and Page. She plays every moment as though Kirsten's guts are a towel she is constantly wringing out, and she plainly doesn't mind the rough edges and weird excesses of her performance, an inevitable outgrowth of working on live TV, so long as what she ultimately produces is a tangible, idiosyncratic human being. She's kind of a buckshot actress, whereas Remick trades in lasers. She's a forebear in the Jennifer Connelly lineage of diamond-cut beauties who seem to gravitate toward troubled-soul characters, relying on fine-tuned mental calculations and subtle shifts in facial expression to register the high-strung emotions of plainly intelligent women who are nonetheless prone to unraveling.

Remick's thoughtfulness, like her beauty, can be the same sort of impediment that they are to Connelly: some of her characters would make more sense if they seemed less self-aware, and frankly less smart.  The exquisite fineness of their features sometimes translates as a mask the actresses wish they could crack and discard, eager as they are to show us how honestly troubled they are inside. In Days of Wine and Roses, Remick's clear gaze and unfooled manner give Kirsten a refreshingly substantial presence on screen, even without the physical heft or outsized mannerisms of Piper Laurie. By the same token, hers is easily the most understated of the performances in her Oscar category, and though I wouldn't trade Bancroft's Annie Sullivan, Davis's Baby Jane, Hepburn's Mary Tyrone, or Page's Alexandra Del Lago for anything in the world, it's gratifying to see that AMPAS still had a taste for softer touches and stiller presences.

At the same time, Remick's elegant reserve, at least initially, exacerbates the problem of how Kirsten comes so quickly to deny and enable Joe's timebomb behaviors, which she patently clocked so quickly and with such distaste. It's exciting to see Remick turning so many internal gears in her close-ups, implying a strained and complex inner life that could account for Kirsten's outward inconsistencies.  Still, those mental gymnastics are not always dramatized on her glassy exterior, and you sometimes long for an actor who didn't seem so caught up in her own head, even when the script has virtually forced her into it.

None of this means that Remick's work isn't smart, affecting, even gutsy. In an early speech, wondering aloud why more men don't menace her when she goes walking late at night, Remick's unimpeachably beautiful Kirsten suggests a baffled, unpersuasively laughed-off insecurity that something else must be palpably wrong with her to invite such masculine indifference. Remick totally sidesteps the preciousness or the self-pity that might well be risked in this approach. She's lucid and confident in some fields of her life but a tangle of doubts in others, without just settling for playing Kirsten as a jittery mess. (Laurie, not surprisingly, reads this same speech with full and tough self-knowledge, as someone who knows that anyone leering in her direction would instantly detect what an intimidating piece of work she is, as are all Piper Laurie characters.) These character notes resurface later when a sobered-up Joe won't sleep with her: rejected yet again, despite her own almost embarrassing willingness, and from a man obviously lucky to snag her.

From a technical standpoint, Remick is very skilled at a lot of behavioral stuff that might seem simple but trips performers up all the time. She is great at laughing fits, great at looking and feeling tired, good at domestic annoyance without firing up all the way into full-tilt pouts and tantrums. She is superb in handling the well-known actor's boondoggle of drunken speech and movement—crucial, obviously, to the film's success. Through the second hour, when just about all the narrative and psychological beats feel more credible than in the first, she makes a convincing wreck of herself without coarsening her gestures. One of her best scenes is her last, when she summons a new kind of steeliness upon returning to a husband and child she has recently abandoned. She insists on her right not to go completely sober, and despite her evident longing for Joe and their daughter, she is a tougher, more self-conscious negotiator than Laurie was, with a quicker impulse toward self-assertion. She's also as believably baffled by Joe's latter-day capacity to reject drink completely as she was, in the first half-hour, by his helpless susceptibility to it. Even aside from the addiction spiral, Remick traces a humbling arc from showing us a woman who basically knows the score in most arenas of her life to one who wonders, transparently, whether she understands anything about anyone.  By the end, her only certainty concerns her needing to drink, at least a little, even as this blocks her from other relations and possibilities she desires, or toward which she feels responsible.

Remick is smart, engaged, and diligent, a code-breaker and aide to the script.  She empathizes with her character but does so with a tonic dryness, as though she considers herself a somewhat earnest student of The Mind, more than a student of Kirsten per se. She is a practiced gauger, fairly early in her screen career, of exactly what to offer the camera, how to shock it occasionally, and what to hold back—willing to shout, yet trusting the lens to ferret out her more whispered signals. She handles her part beautifully as an exercise but misses something that might make it hum more as a performance. And she isn't, finally, exceedingly memorable, partly because Edwards hasn't made nearly as good use of her most distinctive quality—her agitated watchfulness—as Otto Preminger did in Anatomy of a Murder or as Elia Kazan did even more in Wild River, Remick's own favorite of her performances.

When Remick's strongest in Days of Wine and Roses, you admire her very much; she's never bad, as Lemmon occasionally is, but neither does she excite the director or the audience as Lemmon irrefutably does in his peak moments. Something remains inhibited about her screen presence (again, as with Connelly's) despite her seeming to select parts with the explicit premise of pushing her own boundaries, and probing nervy issues in the culture. She's a sincere documenter of emotional dishevelment whose hands never get quite as dirty as one feels they ought, not because you see her holding back but because something about her seems obdurately immune. A less astute, less skilled actress might have just socked us with the pure, harridan force of her dissolution, and in that sense I thank Remick for her seriousness and discipline. Even allowing the handicaps that Blake Edwards and Warner Brothers imposed on the material, it would be hard to explain what it is that doesn't last or resonate in the performance, like trying to articulate to a promising B+ student why her paper just doesn't have the fire or depth that another writer—even a less polished and scrupulous one—might have brought to it. Remick's quiver is stocked with many arrows: she is strong, rigorous, careful, and moving, and every time I have seen her in a movie, I have wished for her sake that she go all the way and become the kind of cerebral yet hard-hitting actress she so obviously wants to be. She comes close enough to help put over Days of Wine and Roses, but in some ineffable way, she still comes across as a work in progress.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 21 to Go

Actress Files: Maggie McNamara

Maggie McNamara, The Moon Is Blue
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1953 Best Actress Oscar to Audrey Hepburn for Roman Holiday)

Why I Waited: Mike usually has a faultless needle for what I'll like or dislike, and he made a point of lowering my expectations on this one.

The Performance: Welcome to the 1953 Best Actress race, or, as it should probably be known, the Hussies vs. the Pixies. While Deborah Kerr rolls adulterously in the surf and Ava Gardner (whom I'll profile later) tries to out-humidify the African highlands, Leslie Caron and Audrey Hepburn contribute the rather undemanding impressions that not a single guilty thought has ever crossed their minds; Caron cavorts with puppets and Hepburn with Gregory Peck, who rate about the same in their potential for randy distraction or moral compromise. The fifth nominee, Maggie McNamara, finds herself in the middle ground of this battle in at least a few ways. The character she plays, an actress named Patty O'Neill, has neither an innocent nor a salacious nor a neurotic approach to sexuality, which is hardly any rarer these days in a female lead than it was in 1953. William Holden plays a bachelor who picks her up, with trouble obviously in mind, at the top of the Empire State Building. When, after several Broadway-style plot convolutions, he discovers her canoodling with David Niven, she simply can't see what the problem is. "Okay, so you found me sitting on his knee and kissing him—is that so awful?" she asks. Over the course of the plot, she reveals that she's an unexpectedly dab hand with a post-hangover potion, and we wonder why. Though she's demure enough to be labeled a "professional virgin" by one character, with less complex meaning than you might be guessing, and to be praised by another for her "look of wholesome rapture... the kind of smile I'd like with my orange juice every morning," she admits that she's mad about kissing men and seizes any occasion.

Compared to Caron in Lili, that's practically BUtterfield 8, even if in many another lineup, McNamara's Patty would be the glaring naïf. Kissing and "professional virginity" wouldn't go very far at imputing a sexually mischievous streak if The Moon Is Blue itself weren't so improbably notorious as the film that called the bluff of Hollywood's rating system, preserving its Broadway dialogue about mistresses, pregnancy, and yes, virginity. After thereby failing to earn a stamp of good standing from the Catholic Legion of Decency, director Otto Preminger released the film anyway, and so a film and a new star that frequently smell like soap bubbles arrived to the public with a bizarre patina of boundary-pushing. Even before she knew she was appearing in a Hollywood landmark of anti-censorship, though, McNamara must have recognized that she was playing a girl who accepts an invitation from a husky, virile stranger to repair to his private apartment, ostensibly so she can sew a button onto his coat (!). Good for her for making the character lucid about her own attractions, seemingly aware of what she's walking into even as she determines immediately not to go all the way, chiding Holden for talking down to her while espousing her own conservative convictions about romantic life: for example, her notion that a wife ought to be half her husband's age plus seven.

It's intriguing but also a bit disappointing that she elects to play Patty as a gawky ditz whose chirpiness and fogginess simply don't, in McNamara's approach, ensure that she is blind to the seductive maneuvers, the rhetoric, or the practical possibilities of sex. Arriving the same year as Roman Holiday but also three years after Born Yesterday, she bespeaks a perky but inexpert meeting-ground between aspects of Hepburn and Holliday, lacking the credible refinement of the former or the veiled, voluptuous savvy of the latter. McNamara's dark, beady eyes stay perpetually wide open as part of her overall posture of breathy buoyancy, though she uses the same basic expression to communicate pique at the bullishness Holden and the arch cynicism of Niven. She can be funny and rather dear, even in the absence of tangible personality. Her well-worked groove of baffled smiles and kooky poise is sometimes charming enough as a pleasing end in itself, lifting her above the script's silly, arduous feints at "sophisticated" humor; Niven's at his best in material like this, absconding with the audience the way Bill Nighy does in contemporary parts, but McNamara's cheer certainly succeeds better than Holden's stolidity does at making the dated living-room farce seem halfway larkish. In general, she seems more spry when she's with Niven. Their brief, hilarious exchange about whether to kill time watching television ("Is it in color?" / "Don't be silly, it won't be in color for years!" / "Let's wait till then") is a memorable highlight of repartee, not coincidentally because it has nothing to do with the plot. So too with McNamara's empty-headed melancholy as she stares out of the binoculars on the top of the Empire State Building: "I want to cry for all those people." Holden: "What people?" McNamara: "In Brooklyn." Reader, I chuckled.

McNamara's performance might be ideal for clip-reels, if you can get past the incongruity of this elongated, ponytailed baby giraffe as an object of immediate desire from multiple quarters. The problems in her performance are only detectable with time, but not with much time. For one, she never connects one iota with the script's conceit that Patty is a professional or even an aspiring actress. She has no craftiness, no vanity, no ambition, no obvious regard for how she moves or sounds. Moreover, McNamara plays too many scenes in an inflexible register of flat but high-voiced affectation, eerily close to Shelley Duvall in 3 Women but with none of the surreal ironies or dark shadings. She also lacks Duvall's genuine eccentricity, which at bare minimum would keep a character like this compelling even as the scenario repeatedly runs out of gas. What the part really needs is someone who could generate friction and sparks by heightening the two focal points of this elliptical character: her amiable oddness, and her amorous excitability. Think Joan Blondell, or Liza Minnelli. It's one thing to say that McNamara lacks the inimitable charisma of legends like those, but she actively plays down the daffy-kid and curious-adult facets of Patty as The Moon Is Blue wears on, in its bizarrely windowless, unmistakably settish set. She seems more and more average, like a new toy that wears out its welcome unexpectedly quickly. It's not even clear that McNamara is having fun with herself, though she never stops gamely going through the motions.

The other insuperable flaw in McNamara's work here involves how, in its nominal way, the last third or so of The Moon Is Blue turns on Patty's debates with herself, her capacity for choice between alternatives, her self-conscious reasons for acting as she does. McNamara has banked so heavily on the spaciness of her Patty as a way to get laughs and sell the character that she's left herself no foundation for showing us Patty's inner life, much less for making it interesting. She never fully deflates, and the performance never forecloses entirely on its appeal. But the youthful glow of mischief and the modest glee in her own shtick, amply evident in the first half of The Moon Is Blue, either disappear by the second half or become impossible to appreciate in the same way because they never deepen or evolve. McNamara's own career turned out to be a bright start with a rapid drop-off, and her story is finally a sad one. You wouldn't want to watch The Moon Is Blue thinking too much about the actress's own future, but even her first and most famous performance is a case study of qualified sparkle giving way to dwindling dividends.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 27 to Go

Actress Files: Julie Harris

Julie Harris, The Member of the Wedding
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1952 Best Actress Oscar to Shirley Booth for Come Back, Little Sheba)

Why I Waited: The recent arrival on DVD, though I've owned it on high-quality VHS for a while. Mostly, I waited out of high, optimistic investment. Member is a seminal classic of screen tomboyism and a favorite movie of a few lesbian friends and film scholars, which for me are big selling points.

The Performance: Fans of cinematic actressing who don't follow the stage or its history may not realize what a legacy of performers they're missing out on. You could follow Oscar's annals and never come across Uta Hagen, Zoë Caldwell, Diana Rigg, Colleen Dewhurst, or Irene Worth. Occasionally a great dame of the boards manages a single nomination, but barely ever a win: Kim Stanley, Margaret Leighton, Kate Nelligan, Rosemary Harris, Janet McTeer, Viola Davis. Sometimes they swoop in for a trophy and are gone from movies before you know it, as happened with Mercedes Ruehl. A few lucky ones, from Lynn Fontanne to Stockard Channing, have won opportunities to reprise famous stage roles on celluloid and gleaned Academy attention for their troubles, but real crossover stardom or simultaneously thriving careers on both coasts are rare. Outside of theater enthusiasts, Cherry Jones is still known to an awful lot of people, if at all, as the woman who didn't get to reprise her stage triumph in Doubt, although I suppose her ascendancy to the White House on 24 may have changed that. Whether it leads to actual movie parts for her, despite being one of the craftiest and most memorable sculptors of character currently at work in the United States, I'm nervous to even guess.

Julie Harris is a sort of patron saint of the Broadway legend-cum-Hollywood footnote. 30 credits on the big screen are nothing to sniff at, but most of the titles are negligible. She was very moving as James Dean's worried and delicate confidante in East of Eden and reliably fragile as the target of menace in Robert Wise's The Haunting, but almost nothing else made a splash, despite her copping a record-setting five Tony Awards as best leading actress, plus a sixth for Lifetime Achievement. Early in her theatrical career, she was Alice's White Rabbit and one of Macbeth's Weird Sisters in less than a year's time, and she's packed houses and inspired rhapsodies playing everyone from Emily Dickinson to the original, non-singing Sally Bowles. Harris won her first Tony for that last performance, the same year that Stanley Kramer, esteemed producer of noble feelings and stodgy drama, tapped her and costar Ethel Waters to reprise their landmark Broadway success of two years before in The Member of the Wedding. The film did well with critics and patrons, remaining director Fred Zinnemann's lifelong favorite of his own works. Probably the major scandal of the 1952 nomination announcements was that Waters, a prior nominee for the misbegotten Pinky, wasn't cited alongside her costar.

Writing about the performance in this context presents a challenge, because it embodies so many of the standing defenses for as well as the warning-shots against Broadway casts carrying their work into film. Member was divisively received for just those reasons in 1952, so that almost anything you could say about it arrives outflanked by prior comment or larger cliché. Harris's crewcut hair and beanpole androgyny don't quite qualify as a photo-realistic impression of a 12-year-old tomboy, but if you're watching for drama and not for documentary, the proximity more than suffices. She animates the two primary sets of a kitchen and a small yard with the aggressive, slicing movements of a frustrated impetuousness, which no doubt explains why Zinnemann and photographer Hal Mohr, better-known for more innovative and expressionistic lensing, hold to so many proscenium-style wide shots and full shots. By the same token, Harris's wan, freckled face and her soft but frequently anguished eyes capably hold the camera, determining the second major fixture of the film's cinematography: close-ups so intimate that Harris is frequently scalped by the top edge of the frame. She's playing an emotionally ripe, sometimes overripe scenario as a single daughter of a widowed, distant doctor-father. Lacking his company, she kills time more often with the family's black housemaid (Waters) and with the younger, sickly boy next door (Brandon de Wilde, soon to enter the canon in Shane). Repelled by the frivolous femininity of the local girls but devastated at never being invited to join their giggly society, proud of but also tortured by being such a misfit, Frankie Adams is a walking chain reaction of ferocity and woundedness, and her impatience to grow up is expressed via both of those registers. Moreover, and inexplicably to everyone around her, she is obsessed with the impending nuptials of her much older brother Jarvis. Her sentimentality about this occasion, fraught with anger and envy, implies blooming ambivalences of desire and of gender, maybe even of sex: "I couldn't be jealous of them 'less I was jealous of both of them," she admits, without fully knowing or fully not knowing what she means.

Frankie harbors hysterical, unreasonable hopes that Jarvis and his bride Janice—even their names are a parody of hetero pairing and seemingly automatic kinship—will take her with them on their honeymoon and into their conjugal life, though she appears furious that such an oblique contrivance as someone else's romance, bearing nothing in common with what we intuit about her fantasies, represents her only vehicle for escape. She's implacably fixated on something she clearly, at some level, can't stand, though she pours intimidating levels of energy into her plan, emitting eagerness and anxiety through as much through physical aggressivity as through speeches and intense mental focus. Virtually everything Harris finds to do across 90 minutes of barely changing scenery and of blocked, repetitious narrative serves to evoke these desperate double-binds: picking splinters out of her bare feet with a throwing knife, terrorizing the furniture, slumping and gazing morosely out of the frame, sobbing into her hands, raging at Berenice and John Henry, imploring them to absolve her, inviting passersby into her yard and then harrying them out. She's always pushing someone away and pulling someone close, frequently the same person at the same time, and quite often herself.

It's a very emphatic performance, laudable for its sustaining of energy and its refusal to be vised by the unforgivingly stagy filmmaking, but in many ways ill-calibrated for the intimacy of the camera, or the capacity of the audience to be exhausted, if not put off. She handles some of those tight close-ups very well, as when the light behind her eyes clouds over at the news that the clubhouse girls have once again denied her an invitation, before her face darkens subtly but unmistakably into a hard mask of disgust and vituperation. Harris, though, seems to equate the potential for subtlety with the closeness of the camera: when the mise-en-scène reverts to being stagy, so too does much of her acting, and the line between Frankie's histrionics and her interpreter's can be hard to draw. She's inimitable and cosmetically ideal for the role, a much-needed alternative to all the wistful dreamers or sympathy-begging tykes and preteens of the movies. In resisting those traps, though, I wonder if she hasn't opted too purely for violent tantrums over the kind of rolling, pouting, narcissistic loneliness that would agitate the other characters just as plausibly, and make at least as much sense in relation to Frankie's dialogue, but without alienating the viewer or the camera quite so much. The stark physical vocabulary and the impassioned vocalisms can also qualify Harris's eccentric but otherwise plausible impression of being a child herself, turning her Frankie much more into an older person's dilated presentation of adolescent angst—hardly a liability in every sense, but an odd fit with the realistic look of the film, and a tricky counterpoint to Waters's naturalism as Berenice.

I should add, though, that in such bruising scenes as Frankie's last-ditch effort to stowaway in her brother's company, few if any of these caveats matter, and Harris more than overrides the perils in her approach with a body-blow of feeling, scrupulously executed but conveyed with seeming spontaneity. Moreover, screenwriters Edna and Edward Anhalt have restored an ensuing episode from Carson McCullers's autobiographical novel that she excised for logistical reasons in adapting the Broadway play. For reasons I won't reveal, Frankie makes a late-film excursion into the city, where little goes as planned (how could it, with no plan?) and danger rears many heads. Ironically, though story incidents are even more heightened in this passage than in all the weary hours of Frankie being stifled by her home life, and if anything the character's emotions should be even more keyed up than usual during this threatening interval, Harris navigates this late, somewhat sensational sequence with fewer "theatrics": she is scared, restless, and uncomprehending, a fugitive child and an incipient adult in ways that feel well-scaled for cinema and don't insist on a bodily or shouty correlative for every shift and seizure of her inner state.

Was Harris just glad for a departure from a stage-regimen she had reiterated so many times? Was I just so relieved for a change of environment and an opening for narrative unpredictability that my interest revived in a performance I had started to admire in spite of its weaknesses, or maybe even to regret in spite of its strengths? Hard to say. I'd be keen to revisit Member some day, though not soon, to assess more closely what Harris does in this not-quite-finale, and how she has readied the character for this passage all along. In any event, the actress most fully shakes the impression that she's translating work from one platform to another, for better or worse—that is, sometimes with the depth and care that years of familiarity afford, sometimes calcified or reduced by old habits or confusions about the relative scaling required by specific artforms. The balance, I think, ultimately tips in Harris's favor, and I wish more plays were brought to more screens, and more often by their birth parents instead of more bankable Hollywood surrogates.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 31 to Go

Actress Files: Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor, Raintree County
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1957 Best Actress Oscar to Joanne Woodward for The Three Faces of Eve)

Why I Waited: This film has had a PR problem for more than fifty years, which probably explains its continued absence on DVD.

The Performance: What is Elizabeth Taylor doing in Raintree County? Is she acting, per se? Are we to trust the implication of this first in four consecutive Best Actress nominations that she is acting well? The questions of Liz's talent and taste never really resolve themselves. Sure, there's Woolf, but if as consistently hamstrung a screen presence as Hilary Swank can yield a Boys Don't Cry, there is no telling what any dubiously equipped but diligent actress might attain in the right circumstances. One wants to believe that Liz can act, even more so after Raintree earned her (alone, among everyone involved) some strong notices and bagged her this nod. What's on the screen, though, is hard to parse into categories like "good" and "bad," though there are interludes when it's pretty unambiguously bad, or when it's such high-calorie camp that it tastes indefensibly good.

Indeed, the tension between coveted ideals and plain facts is a poignant sticking-point for the whole film, which yearns so evidently to be the next Gone with the Wind, to salvage a capsized and smashed Monty Clift, to harvest a whole trawling-net of Oscars despite its profound failures of dramatics and workmanship. A viewer might be forgiven for feeling sentimentally sorry for such a lush, tacky, manifestly broken project. Maybe the affects of the antebellum South are contagious, since as with Old Dixie itself, I don't find any nostalgic foothold in Raintree County; its "glamor" looks pretty threadbare and calculated to me, yet its lush craving to be thought of as glamorous yields a peculiar pitying quality, a willingness to go along with the lie. Like Blanche DuBois, the film begs you to find it fetching, and its dreams for itself are touching even as, or maybe because, it seems suffused with self-consciousness that it wouldn't stand up to the faintest ray of direct light. In many ways, Liz's performance as the vixen Susanna Drake, the amoral wife with a secret, represents both an apotheosis of this quandary, this plea for esteem from a piece of obviously bruised fruit, but it's also the one element of the movie for which anything like a defense could plausibly, with heavy caveats, be mounted.

She doesn't appear until 30 minutes into the movie, though if you paused the film at that juncture, you'd be hard-pressed to recount anything that's really happened yet. Director Edward Dmytryk seems stymied by the bozo story, the hollow romanticism, and the mandate to frame as much of the MGM production design and the natural backdrops as possible in any given shot. Clift seems half-present even in the scenes where he doesn't look more materially impaired, and Eva Marie Saint is pure skim milk as a woman who will obviously be thrust aside once some generically inevitable, gutsy and enticing brunette shows up. But if sultry, forward, manipulative Susanna is pure convention, Liz remains sui generis. After who knows how much practice in real life, she fuses coy girlishness and undisguised libido with the best of them. "Are you a fast runner?" Susanna asks Clift's flummoxed and awed John Shawnessy, as they discuss an upcoming race in which John is to take part. "I'm a pretty fast runner myself," she supplies, with the kind of deadlocked gaze that, in a bar, always leads to a quick demand for the check. Exercising her Dixieland right to brazen hypocrisy as a social nicety, she apologizes instantly for her unladylike behavior. John immediately responds, "I like un-ladies." We know, Monty, we know.

Fixating on Clift's torments, Taylor's compassion for human wrecks, and the voluminous press about her being his nurturer on set and his protector among the higher-ups can feel like an unbecoming, extra-textual fixation, especially when Raintree County proves so bulging yet empty that thinking about almost anything else becomes tempting. Really, though, the translucency of the Monty-Liz narrative just beneath the John-Susanna affair redeems the movie on a key emotional plane. As written, there's no reason for him to put up with her, and nothing but dimestore neurosis, pathologized sensuality, and incipient Gothic madness underneath her naughty-doll carapace. (Dolls trail the character everywhere in the mise-en-scène, which eventually figures as a plot point.) As embodied by these two, Monty's gravitation toward her tenderness is as palpable as Liz's is toward his hurt and beauty. All of which leads to some profound dissonance with the unstable, unprincipled conniver and the stalwart teacher-soldier-politician that they're meant to be playing, but Raintree's script can stand to be sidelined. You almost wonder if Dmytryk and his team knew they were getting more from the celebrity melodrama à clef than from the ostensible scenario.

For the most part, Clift looks too helpless to exert any agency over the strange, unsutured double-film that Raintree becomes, but Liz, who's always got at least one set of wits about her (and usually more), seems to thrive on the chance to embellish both halves of her offscreen persona, the sexual mercenary and the maternal shoulder to cry on. She sinks her teeth into the ruthlessness and then the hysteria of Susanna, with something like the ragged, barely dignified verve of Suddenly, Last Summer, and secure that she needn't play up to this tawdry material, in the way she did for the following year's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, at some cost to her basic charisma. As I said recently about Ann-Margret in Tommy, Liz's willingness to Go There on behalf of a loony picture turns out to be a key asset. The kind of carnal and despondent raving she does on her funereal slab of a four-poster bad, her frazzled apostrophes about the vileness of Negro blood, the way she shuts her eyes and clamps her throat around the Nasty Truth of What Happened in the Past—she isn't the kind of actress who can make you believe any of this hornswoggle, which isn't to be believed in any case, but her tremendous capacity for taking it seriously as something to be effigied in the name of entertainment makes for some good spectacle. She utters the phrase "Find the raintree!" in exactly the beatific way she would later say "White diamonds!" but the movie needs that kind of credulous commitment. Something approaching a character, defined by her own excesses, actually comes into view, as does a saucy little essay about Americans who cleave so tightly to their myths, their guilty secrets, the literal and figurative toys of their childhoods that they'll mortgage their adulthoods and those of others in defense of these playthings. That she (Susanna) can fume and flail in these ways against her disbelieving husband (John), while projecting at the same time that she (Liz) is somehow sustaining and solacing him (Monty) through these very tirades of corrupt but earnest emotion makes the performance and the movie more senseless but also temporarily galvanizing. Co-dependency has rarely been so exposed in all of its reciprocal sickness, nor shown to be such a genuine balm between unlikely intimates.

Which isn't to say that Taylor's Susanna is a creation one dreams of seeing on an Oscar ballot. It's all so overblown, so rendered in crayon: the stay in the boobyhouse, the kudzu accent ("THHIS iz ware ah LEE-uv!"), the weepy collapses, the uproarious martyr complex. But there's a canniness, even a sort of breathtaking ambition to Liz's schtick, which wouldn't come through in any one scene but congeals across the three hours. (Something ought to.) Proud and catlike, she seems to know that she's doing four things at once: giving a fitfully witty but under-trained and sometimes embarrassing dramatic performance; furnishing a lewd, sparkling stripe of invulnerable movie-star charisma to a project in dire need; not competing with so much as constituting part of a parti-colored mise-en-scène that swallows up everybody else, except for Monty, so long as he's with her; and, as far as that goes, keeping her friend alive and at work, whether or not that's ultimately what's best for him. None of this constitutes a recipe that could or should be easily repeated, but bigger rewards have been conferred on lesser exertions. Given that Oscar often seems like just as much of a cheap-brass, ignobly sustained, self-flattering dream as Raintree County, or as pre-war Mississippi gentility, Taylor's nomination, a head-scratcher in many ways, makes its own kind of compelling sense.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 32 to Go

Actress Files: Jane Wyman

Jane Wyman, The Yearling
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1946 Best Actress Oscar to Olivia de Havilland for To Each His Own)

Why I Waited: No strong reason, except I was worried about pap, as though the movie would be two hours of two comely adults beaming at their sun-dappled son and his little deer (even though, honestly, I can imagine worse things to behold). But I recently re-watched National Velvet by the same director and saw more in it than I had before. Then, too, I got more interested in Gregory Peck after seeing The Keys of the Kingdom. So the timing turned out right on this one.

The Performance: Jane Wyman goes honey blonde! I wasn't expecting that. I also wasn't expecting her to be the bad cop. While Peck, the handsomest man in 1940s movies, hugs his son and invites him places and dotingly talks him to sleep, Wyman makes a thick, doughy mask out of her saucer face and seems barely susceptible to the claims of her child. She's stern—not quite disapproving but more than aloof. I don't like the word "literally," but in a film whose first image of shimmering Florida wetlands made me literally catch my breath, even on DVD, Wyman's log-brown eyes are where all that light goes to die. Her skin has a pinkish glow, and every now and then you catch her smiling: there is vitality here, so its habitual suppression feels like a willful act, not a fundamental absence or a natural state. She's not an essentialized archetype: the Bitter Pill, the Cold Mother. She's an internal manager, thinking, always, about what to disclose, what to retain, and yet her surface barely ripples. She belies this inward activity with an impressive mirage of outward tranquility, however downcast. In other words, she doesn't betray a more vivid exasperation like that of Dorothy McGuire in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, who's tough and confusing to her kids, too, and shows all the eddies of disappointment, preoccupation, and nursed anger in her body and her face. Wyman's Orry Baxter is more still than that, less easily arousable. Whatever drives her discontent or her remoteness lies deeper in the groundwater of who she is, even though it hasn't always been endemic to who she is, and it still isn't. When she gets mad, which is more than once during The Yearling, because of bad luck or short-sightedness or because of her husband's encouragement of unaffordable sentiment in their son, the flares of temper soon seep back into that more mysterious state, that flat, grim calm.

That you have to say all of that, and you can't just boil it all down to "Orry Baxter is a hard, quiet mother," distills the virtues of Wyman's steady, smart, and nuanced playing of the character. It isn't as subtly victorious a performance as Anne Revere contributed to National Velvet, as the stoically affectionate mother who has clearly been many other women in her life on her way to her current persona, and whose steadfast support of her daughter is both engine and byproduct of so much else in her personality and history. The Yearling is a less exultant, perhaps more technically accomplished movie than National Velvet, but none of its characterizations are as offhandedly skilled and rounded as the parents' in the earlier film. But actually, working within a constrained range and palette pushes Wyman down a productive road as an actress. Only the year before, she wore her thespian strategies and her up-and-down feelings rather too obviously as Ray Milland's frustrated but loyal girlfriend in The Lost Weekend. She plainly thought it was an "important" movie, and comes across as intrigued by the tunneling psychological bent of the story and of Wilder's filmmaking. This piquing of her interest, though, results in the only performance I've ever seen Wyman give that seems too worked over, like an over-eager rehearsal, full of ideas but lacking cohesion and credibility.

By contrast, and even allowing for the sizable disparities between these two characters, The Yearling's Orry Baxter spends a lot of scenes in mild perturbation or just lost in herself, and Wyman doesn't make a big show of it. Even in the scene that "explains" her temperament, at exactly the moment and through precisely the backstory that I suspected, she doesn't indulge herself. In a Hollywood decade that seems especially filled with vengeful or idealized or punchliney mothers, it's compelling in and of itself to see a mother so simply played—not because she lacks complexity but because she doesn't theatricalize her complications. Moreover, she presents them as a thinking person's storehouse of ambivalence, not as traces of any romantic, "timeless" qualities of her heart or mind (see: Irene Dunne in I Remember Mama), or as symptoms of intricate, transcoded psychological complexes (see: Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce). I can't help wondering if what Wyman learned here about projecting a recessive maternity—about filling her warm face with something like coldness, or sometimes with the semblance of feeling nothing at all—marked a crucial step toward achieving that muffling of personality in her famous films with Sirk. In those movies, she somehow remains appealing as a lead character while staying consistent with Sirk's fundamental skepticism about how deep people really run, and to what extent our affects are really "our" own. To the extent that The Yearling finds Wyman doing more with less and, in some scenes, quite contentedly doing less with less, I'm pleased to see some interesting facets of her persona taking shape—and also a bit surprised, however pleasantly, that Oscar paid attention.

In that respect, it can't have hurt that the finale of The Yearling comes outfitted with one of those scenes that pour out all of the saline emotionalism that has hitherto been absent in the character, reassuring the audience that she does have "maternal" feelings, in the way we prefer to see them. She's good, but not more than that, at handling this turn into pathos. I was more impressed, though, by the peremptory, fists-on-hips way she calls her fellas to dinner yet seems a little bored by them and their cliffhanger stories about their day's adventures: "Are you gonna tell me, or maun I live in ignorance?" She chides her son a little for being twelve years old and "still lookin' for a play-dolly," just as she admonishes her husband after a destructive storm for preaching optimism. "Yes, find the good in it," she spits as Peck's Ezra Baxter rummages for silver linings in their cottage full of rotting food. Because Wyman plays the whole part with such a weighty taciturnity, these digs are more cushioned than they'd be in a more openly acrid take on the character. By the same token, though, they entail a heavier sense of reproach, because they seem to arise not from a momentary outburst but from Orry's dense, private, and sedimented way of thinking. She doesn't say anything she doesn't mean, and little she'd like to take back. She's a solid, unexpectedly formidable person, but not invulnerable: look how she double-takes when Ezra, in an uncharacteristic pre-emptive strike, says from his sickbed that Jody will be allowed to keep his fawn and to feed it real milk, and (I'm paraphrasing) she'd better not be such a bitch about it. Orry's ashamed to be so scolded in front of her son, and before she's done or said anything, but stunned, too, just to see such fire in her husband; possibly she is brought up short by being so evidently predictable in her own lack of warmth. Wyman shows you enough of this that you catch Orry's momentary hurt; she keeps you and the film from turning her into a foil, set up to fail against a paragon and a towhead who are so easy to like. But then she sponges the insult back wherever she sponges everything else, keeping you waiting every 10 minutes or so for a glance of surprise, an unsolicited story or memory, a grin, a blush, or a gunshot that reminds us that there's a great deal more to her than meets the eye, and she's not to be dismissed.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 36 to Go

Birthday Girls: Judy Davis

Judy Davis, A Passage to India
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1984 Best Actress Oscar to Sally Field for Places in the Heart)

Why I Went Back: Happy birthday, Judy! From one Davis to another. No time to write a proper retrospective for a while, but surely at least a performance review is in order.

The Performance: It's been at least ten years since the first time I saw A Passage to India, during which time I have come to like the movie even less but Davis's performance appreciably more. My basic grudge against the film, not atypical in my experience of Lean's second career in the cinéma du globetrotter, is that the impressive scale and manicured mise-en-scène, however enticing in themselves, nonetheless detract from any sense of a storytelling point of view. Lean's camera barely attempts any empathetic or psychological closeness with his characters. It's all about getting the shot, and not enough about who's in the shot, and what they're doing there. No wonder, then, that Davis struggled to make any impression on me during my initial experience of the movie.

I still think she could have performed more vividly as the ambivalent, eventually hysterical, ultimately humiliated Adela Quested. Also, as much as I try not to mar my moviegoing by projecting my accumulated, telltale impressions of the actors' private personas, it's hard to look at the drawn, somewhat stern, "I wish I were anywhere but here" look that frequently occupies Davis's face and not make a connection to her purported "difficulty" and to her habit, even early in her career, of expressing her disaffection with anything prim, conventional, or wrong-headed in her movies. Knowing what we do (or think we do) about Davis, I would lay down money that she found A Passage to India to be annoyingly postcardish, emotionally remote, and politically dubious. Maybe I just wish she did, so that I could have the honor of agreeing with her.

But on this go-round, I saw something more in Davis's Adela than a sharp but inexperienced actress trying to make sense of an underwritten role in an only fitfully intelligent movie. As early as the first scene, as Adela books her passage on a steamer bound for India and spies a framed drawing of the Malabar Caves on the agent's wall, she wordlessly but unmistakably implies that Adela already has a neurotic fixation, a complex of attraction and revulsion with respect to the idea of the caves, and to India as a whole. Davis refuses to give a showy performance, despite the plummy overacting happening on almost every side of her, which is almost certainly why I underrated her work as a younger viewer and why she was barely a factor in the awards-season circuit until this borderline-surprise nomination. Watchful but undemonstrative, palpably judgmental but unforthcoming with the lion's share of her private verdicts, Davis turns Adela into the crypt-keeper of her own sheltered, contradictory, and highly susceptible feelings. Moreover, she outwits the garish literalism of so much of the movie by refusing to open Adela up by the end—even after the courtroom sequence, which all but invites the actress to release, lavishly and masochistically, whatever she's been bottling up. What does come through, as Adela shivers, cries, and somnambulistically drifts out of the courthouse, is that she's paying a tremendous toll not just for a false allegation and a political treachery but for some inward, guilt-saturated structure of desire that she's never disclosed to anyone, and may only have glimpsed for the first time herself, up there in the witness box.

Davis's Adela—wan and compromised, lacerated by cactus needles in her mad flight out of the caves but just as clearly abraded by her immature sexuality and her huffy superiority to colonial ideologies with which she's nonetheless complicit—is a kind of walking victim of the imperial vampire. Her unhistrionic retentiveness, a quality I don't exactly associate with this customarily carnivorous, take-no-prisoners actress, could absolutely accommodate some more nuances and illuminations. Frequently pushed to the background, limited to silent reactions even in some of her biggest scenes (including a paranoid, almost campy confrontation with an overgrown Indian ruin and the excitable, Aguirre-style monkeys who live there), Davis imbues reservoirs of mystery and disquiet into some of her shots but barely seems to try in others. A final coda in which she reads a letter from Dr. Aziz is a total wash, and I'm sure she'd have preferred a film that took a lot more risks with Adela, or at least avoided such obvious whiffs as offering two, nearly identical sequences in the real-time and flashback versions of the much-debated altercation in the Caves.

Not unusually in this year's roster of Best Actress nominees, by giving the smartest and most dignified performance that the material allows, Davis effaces her own talents more than a sharper filming of the same story would have necessitated, and truth be told, she isn't always sterling in the moments where some freer rein is possible. But not only is she not just treading water near the center of the film, as I once believed, she's almost single-handedly responsible for whatever provisions of mystique and perversity this flat, scenic, and oddly jaunty Passage to India has retained. Less, in her case, is mercifully more.