Supporting Actress Smackdown: 1955

As always, StinkyLulu is the Anna Magnani of this month's Supporting Actress Smackdown, dedicated to the tier-two ladies of 1955. He is the centerpiece, the star, the grande diva, and he make-a the prom dresses for-a all of us-a. If Stinky could actress at his own edge, I'm sure he would, but you can only be so many places at once, so he invites his own supporting cast. Nathaniel is the Natalie Wood: colorful, wicked, impassioned with his clipreel of the nominated performances. Goatdog is the Jo Van Fleet: marvelous, versatile, and brilliantly concise. His one-line captions for all five performances had me rolling on the ground. I am not accusing anyone of being the Marisa Pavan, or by all that is holy the Peggy Lee (Actress Edition), though Canadian Ken, Criticlasm, and Adam Waldowski could proudly count as the Peggy Lee (Singer Edition), beautifully carrying the tune and shaking up the rhythms of the Smackdown.

I am nominating myself as the Betsy Blair, and not just because I (alone) think she should have won. Van Fleet, as Ken sums it up especially well, is "a submerged mountain of radioactivity" in East of Eden, and Oscar should be proud of counting her among his anointed. And, as you'll see, Natalie Wood has her vehement champions. Still, to me, Blair gives her whole movie a raison d'être—Marty is just loafing along, pleasantly but unimpressively, until she arrives both to comfort and unsettle him with a persuasively wallflowery romance, a girlfriend who is both appealingly bright and almost spookily recessive, but without overdoing the "appealing," the "bright," or the "spooky" part. There's a bookish loneliness as well as an ingratiating decency to Blair's high-school chemistry teacher that I haven't often, or maybe ever, seen evoked quite this lucidly on screen. She eventually becomes a character who, like Van Fleet, is discussed more often than she is seen, and she manages to give a performance that allows everyone's competing opinions to be correct: she is wonderful, she is a threat to an uneducated mother-in-law, she is a surprising and somewhat abrupt choice to be Miss Right. The one thing she isn't, despite frequent allegations, is a "dog," but I also love that Betsy Blair lets Clara be so average in looks and demeanor, and not one of those Hollywood "wallflowers" who's really just a beauty behind big spectacles.

But why else am I the Betsy Blair? Well, again, she is the bookish nerd in the group, and I am bookish and nerdy enough to make webpages like this one, expanding my website's year-by-year archive of past viewings. (None of those other pages from the 50s are live links yet, but just you wait.) From my 1955 Oscar ballot, you'll note that Blair is the only one of Oscar's actual nominees who qualifies. Jo Van Fleet still wins, but for her gruesome stage mother in the Susan Hayward corker I'll Cry Tomorrow, not for East of Eden, though she's a close 6th for that performance. In truth, though you wouldn't necessarily know it from Oscar's list, 1955 was a great year for supporting actresses: there's Shelley Winters' obedient, sex-starved, and vulnerable widow in The Night of the Hunter and Lillian Gish's steely protector in the same film, Agnes Moorehead's acerbic and unsettled friend in All That Heaven Allows (where her slamming of a door on a vacuuming maid is the single funniest thing in Sirk), Jean Simmons' righteous reformer in Guys and Dolls, Ann Doran's angry, inhospitable, and sensationally layered wife-mother in Rebel without a Cause, and Harriet Andersson's lusty servant in Smiles of a Summer Night. Smiles didn't open in the U.S. until 1957, so in more ways than one, my ballot is impossible, but it's all about fantasy anyway.

Lastly, about Blair: she was married for many years to Gene Kelly, which is reason enough to want to be the Betsy Blair. She was later married for even longer to Karel Reisz, an important actressexual in his own right. (Screw Pete Kelly's blues; try Patsy Cline's. No, really: try 'em.) Blair was one of the first to propose and organize a non-discrimination committee within SAG and later was blacklisted for her liberal-radical convictions, which would be awful to live through but easy to admire, on principle. She apparently wrote a hell of a memoir; the reviews were mostly raves a few years ago when it came out. And speaking of books, Betsy came this.close. to being in The Hours; she filmed all of old Laura Brown's scenes opposite Meryl Streep when Julianne had to go leave to make Far from Heaven, though Stephen Daldry & Co. eventually decided that, for emotional continuity, Laura needed to be played by the same actress we'd been watching for the rest of the movie. Even if she was the world's oldest hugely pregnant woman. Which I'm fine with. Still: poor Betsy. Never could get a career break, that one. Wouldn't you love to see that footage somewhere?

And can't you see in Betsy Blair's Clara, in Marty, the possibility that she might marry Marty, but she also might leave him and cut all ties with her children to be a librarian in Canada, alone with her books and her memories? Can't you draw a pretty straight line from Ernest Borgnine's Marty to John C. Reilly's Dan, and even though Betsy isn't playing hesitation or misery in Marty—quite the opposite, in many senses—doesn't this train of thought sort of call into relief that strain of sadness and of craving for solitude that's still there, glinting and upsetting, at the heart of her warm, generous, but frightened Clara? It all comes back to how much I like her in this movie. I am not the Betsy Blair because I wish I could leave everyone I know and go seek solace among my books as a librarian in Canada; as I've just finished explaining, it's Australia that I want to flee to. But I would love to give a performance this candid and quiet and articulate and be remembered for it decades later, despite a truncated career. And if my career is ever truncated, I hope it's for the reason of firm and unimpeachable principles.

Something Wicked Awesome This Way Comes

No one works as hard as Gary Tooze, the DVD Beaver, to let the world know about imminent DVD releases, and to help us sort between the wheat and the chaff, down to the finest little decibel of audio quality and the slenderest little margin of image cropping. I'm not as exacting a DVD shopper as Gary, and I wouldn't even begin to know how to be as comprehensive as he is, but so much pure gold has been dropping on the market lately, with even more looming on the horizon, that I felt I needed to say something.

For all of you Barbara Stanwyck fans, or for anyone who wanted to believe my raves about Executive Suite but had no way of verifying them for yourself, Warner Home Video is dropping The Barbara Stanwyck Collection at the end of October. That's a while away—ask any academic, or any student, and we'll scream at you that the beginning of fall is still an eon from now—but it's never too soon to gear up for Barbara. I haven't seen any of the other films in the collection, but Robert Wise's thrillingly tense and sensationally acted boardroom thriller (that's not an oxymoron, if it sounds like one) doesn't pull any punches. Barbara helps, Fredric March is efficiently insidious, June Allyson comes vividly if briefly to life, and Nina Foch actresses at every possible edge, without once making a show of herself. Exquisite.

Even though I dislike their new logo and redesigned packaging (who picked Rancid Mustard for the color on the spines?), I must admit that the Criterion Collection has been exceeding even their own high standards of late. They've honored my three favorite Japanese directors already this summer, with deluxe editions of Mizoguchi's Sanshô the Bailiff (my rhapsodic review here), Shohei Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine, and a box-set of Hiroshi Teshigara masterpieces, so I can finally stop cruising used DVD stores in pursuit of the out-of-print Milestone imprint of Woman in the Dunes, one of the greatest films of all time. (Am I supposed to insert a personal qualifier here?) As if this all weren't enough, coming soon from Criterion are Mala Noche, the highly elusive debut of Gus Van Sant, and a director-approved re-release of Days of Heaven (original review and quick tribute after seeing the restoration in 35mm).

Auteur delights, or at least they delighted me: David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE, which scared the bejesus out of me in cinemas all three times I paid to see it, arrives with even more scarifying footage on August 14th; and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (reviewed here) gets the 2-disc treatment it always deserved on October 23rd, as do several other Kubrick titles.

My two favorite films of 2007 so far, Ray Lawrence's unnerving and trenchant Jindabyne and Robinson Devor's courageously and compellingly cryptic Zoo, will both reach wider American audiences on DVD than they ever enjoyed in theaters; Zoo arrives on Sep. 16 and Jindabyne on Oct. 2.

On the other end of the historical spectrum, the archivists and the deep-pocketed among you will be ecstatic to hear that those unbeatable compilations of early-cinema rareties and esoterica, Treasures from American Film Archives and More Treasures from American Film Archives, shall be followed in October by the National Film Preservation Foundation's Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934. The thematic rubric is new for this series (the other collections are purposefully and wonderfully eclectic), but there's still plenty of variety included in this new package, despite its pointed and fascinating emphasis on politics. I'll study up on How They Rob Men in Chicago, in case history ever repeats itself, but I'll be even more excited for Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl, the entire disc devoted to female suffrage and "The New Woman," and virtually every other snippet, sideshow, epic, and episode. Here are the full contents, and here's where you can pre-order at the greatest savings (though Amazon has a prettier page). The NFPF has already announced that they'll be hosting another theme party for next year's Treasures IV set, which will be devoted to the American Avant-Garde between 1945-85. (On that same page, you can watch selected clips from the first two anthologies; select Disc 1 to see a full minute of Watson & Webber's mindblowing The Fall of the House of Usher, and try to figure out how two amateurs made this in 1928!)

Finally, apologies for burying the lead, but if you've got a multiregion player—or even if you don't, because here's a reason to buy one—Chantal Akerman's legendary feminist opus Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which has never appeared in any home format anywhere in the world, is now available as part of a French-Belgian DVD package called The Chantal Akerman Collection. "A woman in trouble" if ever there were one, Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig, of Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel and Buñuel's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) is a Belgian housewife like countless others, preparing breakfast and cleaning her kitchen, and devoting her morning to countless other errands around the apartment...except that Akerman makes us feel the scale of these semi-mindless occupations, their essential fusion of tedium and fascination, by capturing these household tasks in huge 35mm and with unrelenting attention for almost four hours. Three days in the life of Jeanne Dielman, in what would feel like three years in the life of the audience if Seyrig weren't so subtly and unpredictably entrancing, and if Akerman's political platform weren't so fully realized within clear, confident, brilliant aesthetics. And I haven't even said anything about the gentleman caller. Or the ———... because I don't want to spoil them.

See Jeanne Dielman... on a big screen if you ever get any opportunity in your whole life to do so; it makes sense, despite the intense frustration, that Akerman has withheld her legendary masterpiece for so long, because the hugeness of her images in relation to their subject is deeply essential to the project. Still, not everyone is going to have that big-screen opportunity, and those of us who have certainly want to revisit Jeanne Dielman... and figure out how Akerman, Seyrig, cinematographer Babette Mangolte, and editor Patricia Canino pulled it off. If I know you love Todd Haynes' Safe, and by his own admission, that film, like so many others, is impossible without this one. I refer you again to my personal list of the greatest films ever made, and I insist (insist!) that, Treasures III and other anthologies aside, The Chantal Akerman Collection, which also includes the deliriously great Rendez-vous d'Anna and three other titles, is the DVD release of the year.

(Image from Jeanne Dielman c/o this Finnish-language bio of Chantal Akerman)

This Is How It's Done

As 2006 continues its quest for a great, definitive movie well into the final month of the year, why not flip back a half-century to 1954 and remember how a real, thorough-going masterpiece is supposed to look, sound, feel, and resonate? The majestic Music Box Theatre of Chicago recently hosted a one-week retrospective of restored 35mm prints of Kenji Mizoguchi's movies, and though my end-of-quarter schedule only allowed me to attend one film, Sanshô the Bailiff turned out to be a pretty unimprovable choice. I have never seen a Mizoguchi movie, partly because I was waiting for a curated opportunity just like this one. The VHS transfers of his movies, almost none of which are available on Region1 DVDs, have a besmirched reputation; furthermore, after finally introducing myself to Mizoguchi's countryman Yasujiro Ozu via the pristine Criterion DVD of his exemplary, affecting Tokyo Story, a part of me nonetheless wished that I had held out for a theatrical screening. Cinema this good deserves to be experienced at its full, shimmering size and in its intended venue.

Then again, I question my own convictions, because Sanshô the Bailiff is so dazzling that I recommend it whole-heartedly, even if a middling VHS print is the only available medium. The story is an intense, dramatic, and unpredictable reward in itself, beginning with the exile of a local governor in medieval Japan. The imperial lords have deemed this governor too sympathetic to the roiling, intensifying protests of the impoverished farmers and laborers in his region. Several years after his banishment, the governor's wife Tamaki, son Zushio, and daughter Anju are traversing Japan from its northern tip to its southern extreme, in the hopes of reuniting their family. However, in a frightful episode of deception and betrayal, marked by a horrifying score and harsh, unforgiving edits, Tamaki is separated from her children and impressed into a harem, while Zushio and Anju are sold into slavery in a distant compound, governed with an iron hand by Sanshô the Bailiff. Though the film and the age-old legend that inspired it take the name of this brutal overseer, the story emphasizes the heavy tolls on the son and daughter, as they struggle to retain the high moral principles imparted by their father and to nurture the ever-receding hope of reunion with their mother.

Mizoguchi's worldview is bleak in this picture. Corporal punishments and ethical corruption are ubiquitous in the various timeframes and locales in which the narrative unfolds, and the stark delineations of Good and Evil that one might expect in such a folkloric tale are persistently challenged. The BFI Film Classics monograph by Dudley Andrew and Carole Cavanaugh reveals that for all the consummate grace and exquisitely rendered light and framing in his movie, Mizoguchi offers a notably harsher, more daring version of the story than the one he inherited from the canonized retelling by Mori Ôgai that was a bestseller in Japan in 1915. Despite their pitiable circumstances, the grown children, Zushio and Anju, make difficult and morally debatable choices as they seek to escape a terrible destiny of unrewarded work and filial separation. They are hardly immune to the pressures of complicity and cowardice, which Mizoguchi invokes in strong but unsensationalized images of torture, suicide, and communal despair. That the film's gorgeous, fluid aesthetic of carefully composed images and thoughtful, evocative camera movements remains so constant throughout this melodramatic tale implies a mature, generous worldview that is equally informed by serenity, exploitation, pessimism, and hopefulness, and the acting, photography, soundtrack, and story structure operate in total synchronicity to tease out the psychological, political, and spiritual subtleties embedded in every scene. I am sure the film opens itself to even more layered readings for viewers better versed than I in Japanese history and religious traditions, though one need not press far into the film to detect its angry response to Japan's WW2-era militarism, or its determined separation of proud Buddhist ideals from overweening cultural separatism, or its aggrieved commemoration of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. The whole country's midcentury crisis of national identity and cultural destiny registers powerfully at every register of this film, and yet Sanshô the Bailiff at no point seems beholden to any simplified political rhetoric or unilateral symbolic equivalence, and its emotional transparency is never compromised.

The single infelicity in the movie, for me, is a pivotal scene where a recovered memory of childhood and the echoing call of the longlost mother jostle the adult Zushio out of his hard-bitten attitude of selfishness and cynicism; having rewritten the Sanshô fable to emphasize naturalism over sentiment and guilty repressions over mythological contrivance, both the staging and content of this story-point struck me as overwrought and out of step with the rest of the picture. Still, the movie hardly loses its footing even at this uncertain juncture, and the depth, power, and heavily qualified optimism of the latter chapters strike me as beyond dispute. The culminating episode weds a generous indulgence of the audience's desires with a contextualizing cloud-bank of uncertainty and loss. For that reason, among others, it's almost impossible to reach the end of the tale without wanting to immerse yourself again from the beginning, in order to measure its final ramifications against its opening movements, and to trace how Mizoguchi has derived such powerful, intricate feelings and thematic assertions from what seem like such modest techniques. I haven't seen a more elegant, more fully realized movie in 2006, and I expect in 2007 to make my way even further into the Mizoguchi portfolio. The Criterion disc of Ugetsu is a logical place to start, but I know that The Story of the Late Chrysanthemums and The Life of Oharu are just as highly regarded. Recommendations are welcome. Enthusiasm is total.

(Images © 1954 Daiei Studios, reproduced from the Osaka European Film Festival webpage and this Geocities page in Japanese.)

Best Actress Update: Counting Down by Fives

A few months ago, I wrote this update when I watched my 288th Best Actess nominee, meaning that I had exactly 100 nominees left to investigate in that category. I thought now might be a good time to catch you up on the 15 contenders I've since crossed off my list, urging you all toward the best of the lot. Plus, since Supporting Actress Sundays has turned into such an energizing treat, I've grouped these fifteen gals in brackets of five, determined by the order in which I watched them, and I've rated them along the same five-star system that StinkyLulu uses for our Smackdowns. Enjoy!

(This from Derek, as I prepare to write yet another Oscar-themed blog entry: "Is Best Actress, like, its own sexual orientation?" I haven't thought of a way, or a reason, to disagree with this.)

#96-100
Greta Garbo in Ninotchka (1939) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind)
Utterly beguiling. I'd halfway expected to feel like Garbo was being goaded along by Lubitsch and the studio bosses, given how the "Garbo Laughs" premise was such an instant, easy sell. Happily, if anything, she keeps the movie going even when the script and the supporting cast hit a few ruts. Her poker face is somehow a different creation from the familiar, enigmatic mask of her romances and dramas, but her eruption into laughter in the famous café scene with Melvyn Douglas is perfectly timed and pitched. Great line deliveries, too. The movie doesn't allow the performance to grow or deepen as much as it might, but it's still a totally fetching piece of work.

Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver (1942) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Winner)
Previously, I only knew Garson from her sweet but minor love-interest turn in Goodbye, Mr. Chips and from her spry, sensitive, and charismatic performance in Random Harvest, made the same year as Mrs. Miniver. Her appeal on screen is never to be underestimated, and given how doggedly the Miniver script means to endear us to the character, it's impressive that Garson humanizes and particularizes her. She seizes opportunities like the spendthrift purchase of a silly hat to make Kay Miniver a little more approachable, and she works smartly and generously with all of her co-stars. Still, the notes of tactful pluckiness and unpretentious nobility don't stretch her all that much, and she isn't covering the amount of ground or plumbing quite so deeply as the best nominees and winners do.

Shirley MacLaine in Some Came Running (1958) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Susan Hayward in I Want To Live!)
When we first meet her on a long bus-ride with Frank Sinatra, MacLaine's character comes across as a pretty standard-issue "free spirit," and it's hard to fix exactly why she hops off with him, uninvited, in his home town. From there, this lengthy, deceptively simple drama will keep MacLaine's character waiting in the wings, and she holds out beautifully until her brilliant closing moments: once everyone else has tied their love-lives into intransigent knots, Ginnie figures it might finally be her turn. Actress and character seize their chances in perfect synch. MacLaine's lovely in her frank prostration before Martha Hyer, and she's truly sympathetic in the film's unexpected finale. All in all, she unearths the human being inside a Kooky Sprite.

Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame (1958) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Susan Hayward in I Want To Live!)
A bull terrier among actresses, Roz is perpetually prone to driving a solid character approach right into the ground. In the early chapters of Mame, especially in the delightful opening soirée, she is grand and fabulous, with gleeful, impeccable comic timing on simple lines like "Knowledge is power." By the end, though—like the film, and in some ways because of the film—she pounds down on all the same keys for far too long. I ended the movie quite eager to escape her rigidly "eccentric" guardianship, especially since she keeps Mame from really learning anything or evolving while the decades swim by.

Teresa Wright in The Pride of the Yankees (1942) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(Lost to Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver)
I'm all for actresses having stellar breakout years, and Teresa Wright is such an instantly likeable performer—charming and lovable, while always communicating a sincere thoughtfulness—that I hate to begrudge her anything. She even goes far toward redeeming the "meet cute." Still, this is a supporting performance that, like everything else in Pride of the Yankees, is relentlessly keyed to reflect further glory unto Gary Cooper's Lou Gehrig. It goes down easy but lacks weight and insight, virtually by design.

The Pick of This Litter: Greta Garbo wins for showing us so many untapped facets and potentials in a persona we thought we knew so well. Her Ninotchka is several rungs above the stunt casting it could have been... though MacLaine's careful, delicate managing of another "type" is nearly as impressive.

Images © 1942 MGM, reproduced from this Japanese fan site; © 1939 MGM, reproduced from this Spanish-language Bela Lugosi fan site; © 1958 MGM, reproduced from this Lyonnaise movie site; and © 1942 Samuel Goldwyn Co./RKO Radio, reproduced from Modern Art Reproductions.

Picked Flick #54: Suddenly, Last Summer

Sometimes even the major, personality-shaping fixations in our lives recede for a while, but then forcefully reassert themselves at unexpected moments. Literally, in this one week, I am experiencing a mini-revival of my Tennessee Williams fandom, on three wholly different fronts. Professionally, as my students pass in their senior thesis projects, I have pulled my own undergraduate thesis out of the mothballs: a structurally daffy, theoretically promiscuous, but mercifully unhumiliating argument about Williams' plays as pre-Foucauldian parables of panoptical social regulation, taking Not About Nightingales as the central text. In a public context, Warner Bros. has just released a seven-disc box-set of films adapted from Williams plays: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, Baby Doll (which is actually an original Williams screenplay), Sweet Bird of Youth (a slightly neutered version of one of my favorite plays), and two DVDs devoted to A Streetcar Named Desire, which figured further down on this list. Theologically, today is May 19, which was not Katharine Hepburn's birthday, but it was the day she often cited as her birthday—May 19, 1909, rather than May, 12, 1907—in order to shave two years off of her age.

Suddenly, Last Summer features one of Hepburn's best and steeliest performances, and certainly her most gleamingly villainous. She literally enters the movie from a great height, soaring down in a rococo elevator, spouting redolent mythologies about herself and her dead son Sebastian—the ghostly, depraved Rosebud of this particular mystery. Now get ready for this plot: Hepburn's fabulously venal Violet Venable has called one Dr. Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift) to her eerie palace in order to persuade him to lobotomize her niece Catharine (Elizabeth Taylor), whose first-hand account of Sebastian's outlandish death has landed her straight in the booby-hatch. Catharine's story is quite a whopper, pivoting on details like pedophilia, prostitution, homosexuality, and cannibalism: it would seem that Sebastian has been gobbled by a ravenous band of young Spanish street-hustlers. Being a Williams play, this Guignol tale is, of course, a benchmark of truth. Instead, it is high society and social institutions that are unmasked as killing lies: the deceptive, carnivorous will of old-money aristocracy, embodied by Hepburn's Violet and her garden of Venus flytraps, and the buyable ethics of modern corporate medicine, represented by the endowment-hungry trustees of Monty's hospital. Granted, political content is not the first thing one might look for in Gore Vidal's mad adaptation of Williams' play, itself as purple as a low-hanging cluster of grapes. The script needlessly and distractingly pads the sensational atmosphere with predictably googly-eyed sanatorium scenes. Clift, recklessly sunk into this maelstrom of insanity, crosses his arms and darts his pupils in several scenes as though he is barely, quietly holding himself together, while his famous pal Liz Taylor sallies forth with her lurid monologues without quite adding much to them. Still, Suddenly, Last Summer fascinates almost as much as it entertains, which is tremendously. Director Mankiewicz, having helmed some of the greatest Hollywood movies about dubious, contested tales (All About Eve, A Letter to Three Wives), cleverly whets our appetite for the naked, bleeding truth, even as his direction of the actors and his gamely bold production design make clear that he is most interested in the nervy climate of repression and panic that surrounds the breech-birth of a horrible family secret. When Mercedes McCambridge, the most proudly perverse of 1950s character actresses, shows up as a fluttering flibbertigibbet, the movie's fruity compote gets even more aromatic and flavorful. It simmers enticingly, and sometimes, gloriously, it boils right over.

In short, if it's camp you want, it's camp you'll get, as when Monty gives a blond male nurse a visible once-over, or when Liz starts struggling with a locked door in the wrong place at the wrong time, triply imprisoned by an iron-barred causeway, an expressionist camera angle, and a triangulated bra. The movie makes it so easy for conservative culture vultures to tear away at it, like the flesh-eating birds that feast on baby sea turtles in one of Hepburn's centerpiece monologues. Tear they did: Suddenly, Last Summer sparked a bonfire of disgusted protest in 1959, but the movie, even more than the play, belongs in that beastly menagerie with Faulkner's Sanctuary, Pasolini's Salò, and Mary Harron's film of American Psycho, aggressively vulgar works in which a hard, proud skeleton of social critique and complex implication is nonetheless palpable, even to viewers as green as I was at age 15, when I first saw the movie. Floating between its scenes of family terrorism, pulsing beneath the shiny enamel of Williams' lyrical prose ("Most people's lives—what are they but long trails of debris, with nothing to clean it up but, finally, death"), triumphing over the drag-revue flourishes like Hepburn's emu-feather hat and Liz's perpetually breathy delivery ("We! pro! cured! for! him!"), there is something remarkably formidable about Suddenly, Last Summer. It makes you chuckle, sometimes against its own interests, but it also lingers like few "better" films ever do, and in that way at least, it's a better Williams film than those bashfully catered affairs that Richard Brooks whipped up out of Cat and Sweet Bird. Just you try flossing it from your mind. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1959 Columbia Pictures.

Supporting Actress Sundays: 1958

1958 can hardly be accused of being a banner year for Oscar. I've seen three bonafide American masterpieces from that year—Hitchcock's Vertigo, Welles' Touch of Evil, and Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time to Die—but none of them made much headway with the Academy. The Hitchcock and the Sirk settled for technical nominations, while the Welles was shut out entirely. Meanwhile, the Academy's own choices for the Best Picture lineup are a uniquely mediocre lot: the festive but bloated Auntie Mame, the sanitized and weirdly restructured Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the aggressively preachy The Defiant Ones, the instant antique Separate Tables, and the improbable nine-noms-and-nine-wins juggernaut Gigi, an opulent exercise in treading water, whipped up by Lerner and Loewe to kill time until the film rights to their still-running Broadway bonanza My Fair Lady finally became available. Fallow Oscar years tend to produce either especially interesting or especially dull acting rosters: the Academy either culls what it can from the movies it's nominated elsewhere or, out of desperation, it branches out toward performances and films other than the kinds they typically prefer. Surprisingly, the two Best Picture nominees most likely to yield Supporting Actress contenders that year were the two that got blocked: Judith Anderson, a past nominee for Rebecca, couldn't make it in as Tennessee Williams' Big Mama, and Hermione Gingold, despite winning the Golden Globe for Gigi, got smacked with a resounding non.

To find out whom Oscar did anoint, follow the rabbit hole over to StinkyLulu's blog, where he has been profiling the nominees all month in the trial run for his new feature, Supporting Actress Sundays. Today is the Big Day where he and his invited guests, Nathaniel and I, rate the entrants from 1958, pick our own winners, and speak up for anyone whose absence from the list really galls. Extra sweet dessert: Nathaniel's homemade clip reel. Have fun... and cast your vote for the next Year in Review!

Image © 1958 United Artists, © 2002 MGM/UA Home Entertainment, and reproduced from DVD Times.

Picked Flick #79: Executive Suite

Among the great, semi-forgotten American films of the 1950s is Robert Wise's Executive Suite, my favorite among his many directorial outings and still an incisive, attentive character drama about the high, hallowed halls of corporate intrigue. "Because it is high in the sky," an anonymous narrator intones over the opening shots of then-modern skyscrapers, "you may think those who work there are somehow above the tensions and temptations of those who work on the lower floors. This is to say, it isn't so." And how. The names of the film's dynamite lead cast are heralded onto the screen by the low chimes of a public clock, and with a lineup this sterling—William Holden, Fredric March, Barbara Stanwyck, Walter Pidgeon, Louis Calhern, Dean Jagger, Paul Douglas, Shelley Winters, a surprisingly tough and never-better June Allyson—the gesture hardly feels grandiose. As the movie begins, it demonstrates an affinity for formal stunts like the stark absence of any musical score and the long, tracking POV sequence shot in which the unseen Avery Bullard, president and redeemer of the Treadway Furniture Company, concludes a business meeting in Calhern's office, sends a telegram to his home office, and dies of a sudden stroke on the sidewalk while hailing a cab. From this point forward, however, the movie coils its springs and employs much more modest means in achieving its magnificence: the actors, equipped with great roles and fellows and a drastically under-explored American theme, light into their parts with heroic, muscular conviction. Ingeniously plotted, the film delays each character's awareness of Bullard's death in clever ways, digging into their reactions in some cases—Pidgeon's sorrow, Calhern's duplicity—and cleverly excising these reactions in others, so that we are all the more surprised by their battle strategies for filling the vacuum at the top of the ladder.

Wise, famously, was an editor before he was a director, and as with all of his films, the cutting expertly serves the tone and theme of the film, hastening the ends of key scenes by beats and half-beats, just enough to aggravate the tension. In concert with Ernest Lehman's typically shrewd script, Wise also makes time for unexpected accents and cul-de-sacs in the narrative. When Holden's earnest factory supervisor, now a coalition candidate to take over the company, is called away from a backyard game of catch to keep up with the latest machinations, wife Allyson dons his mitt and takes their son back out to the yard. Throwing and catching some mean fastballs in deep, unedited shots, Allyson keeps up a smart dialogue scene at the same time, which not only constitutes a small and unexpected moment but prudently keeps us guessing about what Holden and his cronies are up to. We know the basic idea; he's collaborating with Calhern, at least, to ensure that crafty, officious fussbudget March doesn't become the top banana, even if March himself capably and unshowily takes top honors in a cast of expert rivals. His prime competition, if we allow the film to teach us that everything is a competition, comes from the unexpected quarter of Nina Foch, Gene Kelly's haughty patron in An American in Paris. Cast here as the late CEO's loyal, proficient, and keenly alert secretary, Foch has one of those roles like Kelly MacDonald's in Gosford Park, watchfully slinking among more obviously dramatic characters, but all the while managing the tough double-trick of clearly delineating a specific character while also serving as the audience's general window into what's happening.

The climax of Executive Suite's script preserves all the slippery power and impressive dexterity of the earlier chapters, and continues to stoke our sense that all of the characters must be closely watched. The closing soliloquy is perhaps the one truly predictable element of the film, but its lucid optimism and core values are still quite rousing. Its grasp of corporate psychology, much less human psychology, seem much richer than in Billy Wilder's glib and opportunistic The Apartment, and the tough, simple confidence of its formal choices register much better with me than the more elaborate noir stylistics of Alexander Mackendrick's celebrated Sweet Smell of Success, which Lehman helped to write. Too, it's one of those movies that you're most likely to see if you pop onto cable TV and find that it happens to be playing, so for most of us, the film is brightly tinged with a genuine sense of discovery. 'Tis pity, though, that this is so.Why we hardly recognize a film this relevant and top-drawer, replete with such famous names ticking off some of their best work, is beyond me, but unlike capitalist profiteering and white-collar backstabbing, it's an easy enough habit to kick. Rent it. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #81: A Streetcar Named Desire

Is there a more poignant character arc in American drama, in American literature, than the disintegration of Blanche DuBois? Throughout A Streetcar Named Desire, her wounds and anxieties, even her dreams, are those of Gothic fiction: frittered estates, fabled suicides, eleventh-hour suitors, secret histories. Meanwhile, Stella and Stanley Kowalski, her sister and brother-in-law, united by consonance, alliteration, and carnality, have more tangible concerns, like a pregnancy Stella doesn't mention, a ritual poker night Stanley means to safeguard, and, bien sur, the Napoleonic Code. Tennessee Williams' play, among its multiple and ingenious geometries, positions Blanche and Stanley as nearly parallel vectors, moving nonetheless in opposite directions. It is somehow heroic that Blanche, with Williams' help, sustains her romanticism, her "enchantment," as long as she does—even with a paramour as stolid as Karl Malden's Mitch, a walking sack of flour. It is similarly heroic, for quite a long time, that Stanley manages to insist on the proud vulgarity of his petty fiefdom, even as his cohorts offer to stand for the ladies and dance to their radio, as the sisters DuBois share a laugh and later a derogatory confidence at his expense, as prospective parenthood dares to soften him into a stabler companion-provider. Williams is brave to venture these two as complementary egos, each creating worlds within worlds, as Blanche's steamy baths and Stanley's stinking shirt carve a two-room apartment into separate universes.

But A Streetcar Named Desire is not, finally, a relativist play. It stands fully behind Blanche when she names deliberate cruelty as the one truly unforgivable thing, and as her inventions and self-insulations grow more threadbare—who but a desperate woman could even imagine a figure like Shep Huntleigh?—her cold fate is sealed. Elia Kazan films her lowest moment so that we hover over Blanche, her face and body upside down in the shot, rolling back her eyes in high-angle so as to acquire some sense of whom she's talking to. Blanche, as she herself might put it, is utterly boulversée, her blazing imagination finally bereft of all billows. With more severe lighting, it would be a Bergman shot, but it is better for being a Harry Stradling shot: as in the rest of the movie, the low-contrast grayscale here is the color of cobwebs while still assessing incredible visual detail in every frame.

Streetcar is to me what The Wizard of Oz or The Ten Commandments or It's a Wonderful Life or Top Gun are to others: a movie and a story that have always been there, past which it's difficult to remember. I read the play in 7th grade and simply never stopped, and Kazan's version has become such an iconic counterpart to the play that it's hard to separate the two, despite their overt differences. In fact, these disparities are interesting: something as simple as following Blanche immediately to the bowling alley to find Stella, instead of letting her nip her liquor and calm her nerves alone for a few beats in the Kowalskis' tenement, changes the whole energy of the character. She doesn't even have her little spat with the upstairs neighbor Eunice, which is especially surprising because Kazan is noticeably preoccupied with Eunice and her husband Sam as an implied parallel narrative. We even cut upstairs to their apartment a few times, once when Eunice is alone, and she is the last character we see in the movie. That I had forgotten these and other variations entirely speaks, I'm sure, to the memory-filling power of the headline performances and the uncanny perfection of the play. Vivien Leigh gives probably the best performance to ever win the Best Actress Oscar, somehow making Blanche "work" even within Kazan's aggressively realist screen poetics. It doesn't hurt her work at all, and in fact it probably helps, that we do have a sense of watching Leigh construct the performance as she goes—the odd accent, the stiff turns of the neck, the ingenious acting she does with all of her outfits and props. Watching Blanche create herself for such a long span is an ideal lead-in to watching Stanley, Mitch, New Orleans, modernity, the world take her apart. Brando only improves as I get older, reacting no longer to the notoriety of the performance but to its exorbitantly confident, lived-in quality, the hyperfamiliarity with the part that allows him to muffle key lines with no loss to Stanley or to the piece. Hunter and Malden never entirely win me, but the production is so grounded in its superior qualities that what's merely good in it becomes elevated by extension. There's nothing rattle-trap about this Streetcar. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Nick Comes Knocking on 'Broken Flowers'

It's a bird... it's a plane... no! It's an actual full-length movie review on Nick's Flick Picks! Will wonders never cease?

Too bad the film in question is Jim Jarmusch's promising but dismayingly fallow Broken Flowers. During the Cannes Film Festival in May, where Broken Flowers won the Grand Prix (i.e., the runner-up prize for Best Picture), all the hubbub was that this film was poignant and layered, and much better than Wim Wenders' Don't Come Knocking, which also centers around a father seeking out a son he didn't know he had (and, not to be discounted, the mother of the son, too.) Based on how much I disliked Broken Flowers, I'm perversely expecting that Don't Come Knocking might be more my cup of tea. Since I can't seem to get with the critical or popular consensus at all this year—I didn't like Mysterious Skin but enjoyed 9 Songs, I much prefered The Interpreter to Walk on Water, I found Hitch utterly charmless, and I'm positive that Johnny Depp was the worst thing about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—it'll just go to show if I wind up championing all the movies that everyone else hates. Wouldn't be the first time.

Now, I just need to dig up those notes I took during The Beat That My Heart Skipped, since that's a winner everyone seems to agree on...

Meanwhile, in attending to my Cinemarati duties, I've also posted a capsule review of George Stevens' Giant, which I just screened for the first time in the gorgeous Cinestudio theater on the campus of my new stomping grounds, Trinity College. The movie theaters of Hartford—I visited four of them in my first eight days of living here—deserve a blog entry of their own, but for now, it's all about Giant, one of those mid-century Oscar darlings that you expect will be awful until you give the thing a chance and come to find that, dang it, that's one thoroughbred of a mainstream American movie. It's the kind of film you expect will go to shit once Rock Hudson and Liz Taylor have got their hair painted silver so they can act more than twice their age, but even against the formidable odds of old-age makeup, they, and the movie, hold their own.