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Archive for the ‘Jayne Meadows’ Category

Undercurrent

13 Jul

Undercurrent –­– directed by Vincente Minnelli. Turgid Melodrama. A confirmed spinster marries a handsome tycoon and finds things about him no one would want to find. 116 minutes Black and White 1946.

★★

Does the idea of Katharine Hepburn becoming the lover of Robert Mitchum seem seemly to you? Well, that’s what happens here.

Actually one must ask whether the idea of Katharine Hepburn becoming the lover of anyone seems natural. She played many spinster roles and in what you get, for the most part and with one exception, Woman Of The Year, you never sense her as a sexually attracted woman.

This is not to say she is not sexually attractive. Men are attracted to her. But what attraction is in her for any sex at all is bodied forth here in her preposterous performance opposite Robert Taylor, who certain knew his way around sex.

It’s a fascinating performance. She is moment by moment touching and completely phony, coy and actually frightened, arch and straightforwardly honest. As an actress she does not seem to have any sense at all of when she is being just terrible, just false, just fabricated, just artificial, and when she is true blue.

She is an actress first of all devoted to The Noble. And it is also probably true that she had no real attraction to males – or let us say, felt it so rarely that she could not summon it at will. So what we get is an actress pretending to love. And her means to that are to woe the audience into sympathizing with her. And the means to that are to make her characters gauche and gawky and full of lollypop sentiment and glassy-eyed idealism. So, being devoted to The Noble, she is well within her ambition to make sexual attraction seem adolescent – or her idea of adolescent – for no adolescent would carry on with such Golly-Gee gyrations and such brutal bashfulness. You cannot believe her for a minute. She is just play-acting.

She is an actress who produced herself. All actors do that. They make something up in the shower, and that is what you get. It is a true strand of their nature. But Hepburn wants something more; she wants to be fascinating to those who watch what she does, and everything she does is subordinated to that questionable ambition. Noble and Fascinating.

No wonder she was box office poison. She is so because as a show-off she is irritating.

But she is also, the next second, brilliant, unusual, and lovable. Such a curious flower not suitable for every occasion, our Kate. Our Kate with the blinders on.

 

 
 
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