Who's Afraid of Best Actress 1966?

Both polls for the 1997 Best Actress race have been landslides on behalf of my own pick, Helena Bonham Carter. Which is lovely, if a mite unsuspenseful—and I'm guessing that outcome won't change too much in the polling for my latest group, the leading ladies of 1966. Liz Taylor, absent but at least out of surgery on Oscar night, had nothing to worry about in that year's race and I'm confident that she won't here, either. Feel free to prove me wrong—I know there are staunch fans of A Man and a Woman fans out there—but she's superb in Woolf, and though the other four films were all popular hits with major prizes under their belts, none of them have the enduring visibility of Taylor's vehicle.

To keep things interesting, then, I've added a third question to this round of polling, which will become a fixture whenever I delve into a long-ago year where I haven't seen as many films or performances as I have from the recent vintages. Decide my fate, reader. Chart my course. Be the wind beneath my actress-loving wings. What performance from Oscar's eligibility field would you support as my next pit-stop on the 1966 trail? Hana Brejchová's in a Czech New Wave hit and Best Foreign-Language Film nominee (and thus a generic sibling of Ida Kaminská's film and an also-ran to A Man and a Woman's Oscar win)? 1965 nominee Elizabeth Hartman in very early Coppola? Fellini and Herzog favorite Claudia Cardinale in the American west? Late starlet-period Jane Fonda? A Criterion-certified masterpiece by Carl-Theodor Dreyer or late-arriving Chabrol, or outsider icon Tuesday Weld in a proto-Heathers, or Godard muse and wife Anna Karina, or Lauren Bacall scoping out Paul Newman? The cross-cultural stars of a very early Merchant-Ivory? Maybe you prefer Frankenheimer weirdness or Tony Richardson hit-and-missness, or you feel like putting me through Shelley Winters or the stunted-camera time-capsule The Group, with its eight female leads? Which ever way you're leaning, read up on Oscar's own priority list and then let your voice be heard! And if your implicit vote is "other," arrest me with your alternative options in the Comments. (N.B. Since I've promised to provide these direction-seeking polls in all the years where I am under-versed, I've put one up for 1932, also.)

(By the way, speaking of big female ensembles, a quick plug for the 1966 John Ford doozy 7 Women, especially for you Paradise Road fans who spoke up in the '97 discussion. 7 Women, Ford's last film, presents a palpably perverse Christian mission that now has a Mongol warrior to worry about, all of which gives prim autocrat Margaret Leighton some fascinating context for her trembling-neurotic routine. Sue Lyon finally gets to play the good girl instead of the fantasy or the sexpot, and Anne Bancroft gets her Johnny Guitar on as a butch expatriate doctor willing to go a long, long way—and I don't just mean to China—for the good of civilization. And she's a Ford character, so she's not even sure she likes civilization! Pretty non-stop intensity for 87 minutes, give or take its lapses in judgment and cultural sensitivity, and a literally killer ending to boot.)

Supporting Actress Sundays: 1962... Plus a Major Twist

StinkyLulu's monthly feature Supporting Actress Smackdown fully earns its name today, as the usually simpatico participants file notably divergent opinions on almost all of the performances. True, no one waves a flag for Thelma Ritter's sixth winless nomination, for Birdman of Alcatraz, but she's very much the exception that proves the rule. Oscar's own anointee, Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker, snags an easy echoing vote from me. Neither StinkyLulu nor Tim nor Nathaniel casts any aspersion on the performance, but sadly, Mrs. Iselin's voracious brainwashing campaign has rolled onward, unfettered, and claimed all of my comrades! Or, while we're grabbing at crass and obvious metaphors, am I simply blind and deaf to Angela Lansbury's brilliance in The Manchurian Candidate? (Her inspired scene work, I appreciate; her irreproachable proficiency, I get; but I see no brilliance, hear no brilliance.) Read all about it here, though your tour isn't complete this month until you've also taken in Canadian Ken's vivid, funny, and beautifully argued impressions of all five performances.

Unfortunately, one turn you won't hear us dissect is Jane Fonda's in the redolent, subversive, and nearly extraordinary 1962 drama Walk on the Wild Side. In only her second or third movie role, Jane Fonda plays Kitty Twist (!), a hot-tempered hot patootie whom Manchurian idol Laurence Harvey meets on the side of a dusty Texas highway. They're both hitching to New Orleans—he in order to reclaim a lover who's gotten away, she in order to hit, gobble, and fucking own the whole town. If Fonda's acting serves any indication, usurping the screen as her own birthright and eminent domain, we should all be placing our bets on Kitty.

In the first of many curves in Wild Side's walk, Kitty gets dumped just as she's poised to seize the picture. She'll re-emerge later, and you can basically guess when and how, but the script throws Kitty a few more twists, and it's hard to say whether she or New Orleans ultimately emerges victorious in their brutal, feline fight. Fonda's insolent sexuality and growling entitlement explode into the same sort of fireball that Angelina Jolie detonated in her early, Gia-era performances. If you only know Fonda as that silly noodle from Barbarella, or as the national landmark from Klute and Julia, or as the latter-day harridan of Monster-in-Law, you owe it to yourself to see how it all began—how her carnality, her intelligence, and her defensive anger were inextricable from each other, bleeding out of her very public persona as Henry Fonda's volatile daughter, yet all in the service of an increasingly complicated character. She's also a whiz with a laugh-line: just look how, when a dumbfounded Harvey stumbles across her in a high-end bordello, he asks her what she's doing there, and she slings out the retort, "I run the candy concession."

From what I can glean, Walk on the Wild Side still labors under a derisive, almost bilious critical reputation, but I can't for the life of me figure out why. For one thing, it's a Supporting Actress Smackdown in itself, rounded out by Anne Baxter, using her smarts and sensitivity to neutralize her odd casting as a Mexican diner matron; and Barbara Stanwyck, alternately imperious and obsequious as a French Quarter madame, abjectly in love with her costliest girl and willing to kill to keep her. The mononomic French actress Capucine is a knockout as Stanwyck's reluctant ward—also, crucially, Harvey's long-lost paramour—but it's the agency, introspection, and dawning bitterness of her performance that anchor the picture. Even Harvey's good, if outclassed by the orbiting women. Elmer Bernstein delivers a tasty score that's an utter contrast to his To Kill a Mockingbird compositions of the same year, and Edward Dmytryk mounts his scenes with ferocity and precision, transcending the "moody" photography and deepening the nonetheless-succulent camp. (Need I remind you: Jane Fonda as a would-be hooker named "Kitty Twist," Barbara Stanwyck as a desperate dyke, and Anne Baxter as a Mexican.) Walk on the Wild Side gets much further with tragic love and futile rescue missions than Richard Brooks' Sweet Bird of Youth does, and the fully believable whorehouse is more tangible as a jail than the one in Birdman of Alcatraz. You might quibble with errant peripherals, many of them related to Stanwyck's legless husband (!), but Walk on the Wild Side stands mighty tall among 1962 releases, and Fonda is a miracle worker unto herself. A–

(Images © 1962 MGM/UA, reproduced from the IMDb PhotoGallery; and © 1962 Columbia Pictures)

R.I.P. Anne Bancroft

Who didn't love Anne Bancroft (1931-2005)? Hilarious and classy, but tough enough that you wouldn't really want to cross her. She wasn't afraid to overdo her performances, and though it sometimes counted against her, especially in her late career, it also made her indelible when she was 'on.' And what a joy she was as an interview subject, a personality, and an awards presenter. One classic exchange from Oscar history came in the 1992 ceremony, when Anne and Dustin Hoffman co-presented the Screenplay awards, via satellite from somewhere. Ad libbing, the 55-year-old Hoffman asked, "Are you trying to seduce me?" Ad libbing right back, the 61-year-old Bancroft quipped, "Not anymore."

The obituaries are obliged to prioritize The Graduate, where she played her most iconic role, and The Miracle Worker, for which she won a Best Actress Oscar out of one of the two or three richest lineups that category has ever seen. In 1963, she became the first Mother Courage that Broadway audiences ever saw, missing her big night with Oscar because she was starring in the central role of the greatest play of the 20th century. (Purty good excuse.)

If you head out to savor some Anne this week, by all means re-rent the famous titles, but she was hearty, delicate, and luminous in a second-tier role in David Lynch's The Elephant Man, she makes Harold Pinter and Jack Clayton's The Pumpkin Eater seem much more serious and potent than it is, and she's a frazzled, affecting delight in Jodie Foster's perennially unsung Home for the Holidays. Amongst the wigged-out drag-queen roles she often took in her twilight years, I am still partial to Philip and Belinda Haas' Up at the Villa, though admittedly, I am almost alone in this. Meanwhile, I have my own long-deferred dates with John Ford's 7 Women and Herbert Ross' The Turning Point to look forward to. We'll miss you, Anne Bancroft.