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Archive for the ‘Judith Anderson’ Category

Salome

17 Nov

Salome – directed by William Dieterle. Biblical Epic. The king of Galilee and his queen are in mortal conflict over the rant of a desert prophet, but whose side will their daughter take? 103 minutes Color 1953.

★★★★

What sands, what scimitars, what sanctimoniousness!

John the Baptist on a soapbox in the dessert preaches not salvation but sedition. That is, he defames Queen Herodias because she has married twice — which is hardly prophetic, since she has been married to Herod for twenty-five years.  It seems rather hard of John. And what is worse the poor actor who has to spout this rigmarole is ill equipped for the chore. He plays it with his blue eyes constantly raised to the second balcony. Ya know what it is? It’s a bunch of hooey, that’s what it is. And it’s so aggravating, ah, if only someone would come and behead that actor – and – oh, blessed chance – whadyaknow? – someone does. But I won’t tell you who.

Into this Biblical thingamajig we have four good actors, in major roles, and all at their  professional best.

Judith Anderson with her voice of an old Chevrolet reprises her peculiar-relation–to-daughter-figures number from Rebecca.

Then we have Charles Laughton, one of the most inventive actors ever to draw breath. As he is warned against the prophet. watch him hug the pillars like a baby. Watch him put the make on his step-daughter. Watch him respond to each of Salome’s veils as they drift off of her. Watch how he agrees to Herodias’ request. He is so marvelous, you would suppose him to be playing one of the greatest roles ever written. Well, actually he is playing Herod, so perhaps he is.

Then there is Stewart Granger, who is handsome, sensual, humorous, intelligent, sensitive, and has a delicious speaking voice. Professionalism can do no more. For there again you see an actor completely convinced; the role is of a Roman Centurion, at ease in the role and also in a little white skirt. Every time he is on screen, your morale goes up. With his grey-at-the-temples look, he is well cast opposite superstar Rita Hayworth.

For, oh dear, she is twenty years too old for the part. Salome has to be a fifteen year old girl, and Rita Hayworth was well into her 30s when this was mounted for her. She, of course, is wonderful, as good an actress as you get in movies, you get behind her completely. And her dance of the seven veils (we get to, but not past the seventh) is sensational. Her power to taunt and entice was unequalled. And her dance is all about those kind of illicit, illusory invitations. Worth the price of admission.

Also worth for the costumes, by Jean Louis. They will take your breath away. C.B. DeMille never had things so wonderful on the human form. Nor did he ever, as Dieterle did, shoot 18,000 feet of exteriors in the Holy Land. Nobody had ever done that, and they are very interesting. Indeed, no expense has been spared on the production; beautifully shot by Charles Lang; sumptuous, even dazzling; and, apart from those four performances, another reason for seeing Salome.

 

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

22 Mar

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof – directed by Richard Brooks. Melodrama. The scion of a huge Southern estate is to die, and everyone is out for the take. 108 minutes Color 1958.
★★★
This rattles along like an old flivver, threatening to fall apart any minute. Individual scenes are well played, such as the long ones between Brick and Big Daddy, but the whole lacks a coherence of style and approach directorially and narratively.

One of the great dampeners on the piece is the art direction, which smells freshly painted and pretty in pastels; it sabotages the play’s underlying forces. It does, however, provide a light background for the filming of Elizabeth Taylor by the great William Daniels. Daniels filmed most of Garbo’s films from the silent era on, and you might say his skill at doing this made her the goddess we know her to be. His camera was in love with a beautiful woman. You can just see the stage light up a certain way as it waits to film Elizabeth Taylor. It’s lovely to behold, but, of course, what does it have to do with this material?

Taylor plays a woman whose husband will have nothing to do with her. Now, Elizabeth Taylor made four films of Tennessee Williams’ plays, but as an actress she is not really at home in this milieu; her Southern accent is put-on; she hasn’t studied it to a particularity. She is now early in that stage of her work when she was taking on heavy dramatic roles; such parts were not really suited to her instinct or her gifts. She had been mightily impressed by Montgomery Clift’s acting when she was 18, but she had never troubled to study with Stella Adler or anyone else. Her roles tended to parallel her life as a heavy in her personal life. Cat is an early chapter of her downward spiral as an artist.

You also might question her casting in a role which Barbara Bel Geddes played on Broadway in the Elia Kazan production. By which I mean, isn’t Taylor too beautiful to play Maggie? Too beautiful to have vulnerability as a woman? As a human? —  yes — but as a woman?

It’s true that she does have a number of gentle moments, when our hearts go out to her. But this version, of the many versions of this play, stumbles from its casting. Madeleine Sherwood plays it just as she played it on the Broadway stage and at just the same pitch, which over-carries in a film. Jack Carson quietens her somewhat, and is excellent as Gooper, touching, real, and funny. Burl Ives is much better in the film than he was in the Broadway production, where Kazan simply stationed him stage center and let him hold forth. He brings the required ruralness to the part. Paul Newman is beautiful, reserved, and fine, but he has nothing inherent in him of the South. (Put a hot-blood like Tommy Lee Jones in the part and you’ve got something.) But the Australian actress Judith Anderson has no business at all as Big Mama. Her essential energy is off; indeed she fades out into Mrs Danvers from time to time. She loosens the movie from its moorings. And Big Mama is the play’s moorings, because she is the only one who cares a rap about anyone.

What would have grounded the piece would have been to have Mildred Dunnock who played Big Mama on the stage do it here. She was from the South, she had specificity of the accent, she was coarse, and vulgar. She would have given the production a foundation in the region and the style and the heart which it lacks.

I feel about the film what I felt about the original stage productions and all productions since. The play is cold. It has no heart. There is no one in it and nothing about it to care about at all.

 

The Furies

05 Sep

The Furies – Directed by Anthony Mann. Western Melodrama. An aging cattle baron and his baroness daughter clash over their mates, their land, and some squatters. 109 minutes Black and White 1950.

* * * *

Barbara Stanwyck is 43 when she makes this, and she is too old. True, she was a great star, and the best of all the two-dimensional female film actors. She refused Technicolor because her hair was gray, so she does look blond, her face admittedly is unlined, healthy, unchanged, her figure is lithe and trim, her stride is strong, and she looks great on a horse. But everyone who saw this when it came out knew that she was 43, because everyone had grown up with her. There was something older about her anyhow, even when she started in film aged 20 in 1927. The picture is a turgid melodrama, and it is ingenuous to claim it to be anything more. It is not epic, it is not noir, it is not The Eumenides or Greek tragedy. The execution of the film by the director is unremarkable because nothing in it can escape the necessities of turgid melodrama, which means an impenetrable thickness of plot on all levels that must be obeyed. The writing is occasionally witty, but the direction of the performances is questionable. Walter Huston overplays and indeed garbles and miscalculates the role of the rapscallion, domineering, and impractical cattle baron. By “overplays” I mean, when everyone in a story calls you a rogue, the best thing for an actor to do is not to “play The Rogue” but to play the opposite. Even if it was ever supposed to, the tension between Huston and Stanwyck never adds up to an Electra complex, because they both enjoy one another so much in their dash, ego, similarities, and common respect. They have too much sense of humor about one another to be neurotic and too many honest, horn-butting clashes to be unhealthy. Anyhow, while Stanwyck is a two-dimensional actor and therefore is incapable of over-acting, likewise there can be nothing beneath the performance. When Judith Anderson, with her lizard voice, comes in it is not as a sexual rival to Stanwyck but as a rival for her management of the ranch, and when Wendell Corey comes in as Stanwyck’s boyfriend, it is not as a sexual rival to Huston, but simply as a claimant to part of his property. Jannine Basinger in her book on Mann claims that Corey is like Huston and Anderson is like Stanwyck, and there’s something to be said for that, but not enough. The story and its execution is just old Stetson. Gilbert Roland is lovely as a blood brother to Stanwyck (and in love with her), Blanche Yurka is delicious in the Blanche Yurka role of Roland’s bruja mother, and Beulah Bondi commands the screen for our reassurance in both scenes in which she appears. Henry Bumstead deserves great credit for the adobe ranch mansion he made for the set. Otherwise the filming and direction are ordinary. Supposed to be New Mexico, it does not look like New Mexico. Rather like The Old Germany, The Furies is The Old Hollywood.  Its story is unconventional, the treatment of it conventional. It had to be: Stanwyck was starring. Yet, who could have played this part besides Stanwyck? No one. All the younger stars were too goody-goody. Hollywood fell partly because a failure of taste in developing strong-willed female stars to-be. In 1930 there was Crawford, Davis, and Stanwyck. In 1950 there were no young tough ladies on the horizon at all.

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