Toys in the Attic (1963)

In a recent 60 Minutes interview promoting The Iron Lady, Meryl Streep, when asked how current films and performers stack up to those of years past, claimed that while the classics are the classics, her contemporaries are just plain better actors. Certainly Meryl, like almost everyone else in the film-watching world, forgot about Geraldine Page.

Although Page finally won the Academy Award for Best Actress in the year before her death for The Trip to Bountiful, the award smelled of a payoff as she had previously been nominated for Oscars seven times, beginning with 1953’s Hondo. She was at her formidable best in the sixties, handling character-style leads in the adaptations of Summer and Smoke (1961) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1962). She earned Golden Globe nominations for the subject of this essay, Toys in the Attic (which merely got a costume nod from Oscar) and for the following year’s Dear Heart, a seldom seen dramedy opposite Glenn Ford in which she is absolutely spectacular.

I’ll give myself credit for one thing as a film watcher: my range is exhaustive. You name it, I’ll happily watch it if I haven’t seen it already. Genre? Who cares — and after having passed the twelve thousand mark, I’ve probably seen it already. Regardless, I’ve seen enough movies, read more than enough books, and surfed enough film writing on the internet and in newspapers to know with a large degree of certainty that Geraldine Page is one of the five greatest actresses in movie history, and undoubtedly the most underappreciated actress of all time by the masses and film buffs alike.

Like Streep’s The Iron Lady, Toys in the Attic is by no means a great film, but the 1963 adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play is fascinating. Page is in her wheelhouse as Carrie Berniers, a New Orleans spinster who shares a house with her older sister Anna (Wendy Hiller, underappreciated as well, and no slouch either!) and dotes on her foolish younger brother, Julian, played by a game but off-cast Dean Martin, in his final dead-straight film role. Julian is a dreamer who bounces from one get rich scheme to another, always in trouble and falling back on the good will of his sisters. At the beginning of the film, he arrives unannounced at the family home, except this time he has money, gifts aplenty, and a brand new wife. His newfound fortune raises the eyebrows of Anna, while the presence his shy wife (Yvette Mimieux) seems to particularly upset Carrie. The film burrows — sometimes unpleasantly — into the issues of the Berniers family’s past and present. Where did Julian’s money come from? Who is his wife? What is the nature of his relationship with each of his sisters?

At the center of it all is Page, her performance here is probably too big for the film itself, once again bringing Streep to mind. Page dominates the thing so much that it’s as if the other actors are barely there, and she does it all without giving the impression of chewing the scenery. Her Carrie is someone we all know: the shrill, affected soul (gender doesn’t matter) who tries to hard — the one who pretends to be the smartest person in the room yet suspects deep-down that everyone exchanges secret, knowing glances when she makes an entrance. And yet in spite of this faint self-realization, she blindly plows forward in her pretension and vanity — becoming more and more manic as the scenes unfold and her sense of security is slowly stripped away, like the dark paint flaking off an aging iron porch rail.

Hiller accedes to her colleague’s meatier role and gives Page all the space she needs, but Dean Martin doesn’t fare well against her, and Mimieux — terribly miscast in the first place — seems lost. Jason Robards played the part of Julian on Broadway, and it’s interesting to imagine how the dynamic of the film might have changed with him in the male lead. A handsomely aging Gene Tierney appears as well, in a small but critical role, and she’s able to draw on her own sad misfortunes enough to generate adequate pathos to match Page in their brief time together. Actually their exchanges are some of the most gratifying in the film.

Hellman seems to wander into Tennessee Williams territory here. This is a story of unfulfilled, incomplete people. Dreamers, fools. The naïve and the cowardly. Beaten, broken, and at times — vicious. The moral center of the movie is Hiller’s Anna, though she seems to lack the courage to speak her mind or act on her suspicions. As the onion of the narrative is peeled back, the relationships of the characters are exposed layer by layer, until tragic consequences are unavoidable. And frankly, for such a verbose and theatrical production, the film’s climax is jarringly brutal. Toys in the Attic is a roughly made film that gets better as it goes: it plods through its first few acts towards an exciting and well-constructed finish. Although its home video status is rather vague, it is worth seeking out. If only for Page. 

Toys in the Attic (1963)

Directed by George Roy Hill

Starring Geraldine Page, Dean Martin, Wendy Hiller, and Gene Tierney

Running time: 91 minutes

Released by United Artists

Grade C

Golden Girl (1951) and Les Girls (1957)

Mitzi Gaynor is a recent re-discovery for me, having never been a fan of South Pacific, which I saw once eons ago and promptly moved on from. I just watched a much younger Mitzi in 1951’s Golden Girl, and found something in her first featured performance quite endearing. The forgotten film casts Mitzi as Gold Rush honey Lotta Crabtree, making her name as a performer in the mining camps throughout California during the Civil War period. There’s not much to speak for Golden Girl beyond Gaynor — the songs aren’t memorable and the romance with a dashing southern spy / officer (TV Western star Dale Robertson) who robs Union payrolls feels dated and a little uncomfortable. The climax finds Gaynor bleating a tearful rendition of Dixie in a high-falootin’ San Francisco auditorium just as news of the surrender at Appomattox has made its way west. Golden Girl has never been released on DVD (or VHS?), and the print showing on Turner Classic Movies is so poor as to not bode well for its future. On a side note, the poster for Golden Girl is simply one of the most awful I’ve ever seen.

And then there’s Les Girls. If it were not for Mitzi, whose part is too small for my tastes, I would have liked it a great deal less. If you are a fan of MGM musicals however, Les Girls is available everywhere and is a film that you simply have to see, even if I say that in a somewhat weary, obligatory tone of voice (being a completist has its downside). The production values are as sumptuous and as artistic as anything else Metro did during the period — particularly in Mitzi’s big number towards the end of the film. (The film was an Oscar winner for its costumes.) The narrative gets a little tedious though: the story is centers around a London courtroom libel suit that finds two of Gene Kelly’s former troupers — Les Girls — at each others throats over a tell-all book one has just written. The same set of events are related three times, each time through the eyes of a different character, and before long we see way in which all the strings are going to tie neatly together.

In addition to Gaynor and Gene Kelly, the film casts lanky Brit Kay Kendall as the author of the tell-all, and sexy Finn Taina Elg as the libeled lady. Elg was certainly a stunner, but she never really caught on with American audiences, while Kendall had all the talent in the world yet never had a fighting chance to use it — she would succumb to leukemia two short years later, in 1959. While each of the girls brings something worthwhile to the film, they never quite gel on screen together in the way they do with their male costars, and the movie suffers a little for it.

The biggest drawback for me is that this is yet another late-cycle musical that fails to properly integrate the musical numbers into the story. As so often became the case as the fifties grew tired, the musical interludes show up like television commercial breaks — here in the form of the Les Girls nightclub acts, each one a little more artsy-fartsy and self indulgent than the last. (And don’t get me wrong either, I think An American in Paris is great stuff!) This is not a bad film by any means, but it is rather soul-less and clearly shows that the musical was running on fumes in 1957, and desperately needed the shot in the arm that West Side Story was stirring up on Broadway at the time, and would in a few years give the motion picture musical.

At almost 80, Mitzi is still out there somewhere, though her motion picture career was too damn short: eighteen credits, and no big screen work after 1963. She did a number of TV specials in the seventies, but they are nowhere to be found. It’s too bad, Gaynor had a look, style, and screen presence that doesn’t translate to photography — you’ve gotta see her in films.

Golden Girl (1951)

Directed by Lloyd Bacon

Starring Mitzi Gaynor, Dale Robertson, and Una Merkel

Released by Twentieth Century Fox

Running time: 108 minutes.

Availability: Has aired on TCM

Les Girls (1957)

Directed by George Cukor

Starring Mitzi Gaynor, Gene Kelly, Kay Kendall, and Taina Elg

Released by MGM

Running time: 114 minutes.

Availability: Widely on DVD, airs on TCM

The Other Side of Midnight (1977)

Billed as “The Romance of Passion and Power,” The Other Side of Midnight is one of the most stunningly asinine movies ever made — and widely known to be one of Andy Warhol’s favorites. It was also intended to be one of Fox’s biggest 1977 releases, with high hopes for a major run at that season’s Academy Awards. As a matter of fact, legend holds that Fox executives considered the film to be such a sure thing that studio chief Alan Ladd Jr. drew on the block-booking tradition of the previous era in order to force theaters to accept Midnight as a package deal with one of the studio’s B products — in this case a science fiction picture from a new director named George Lucas. While it is certain that, at least in this instance, theater owners ended up with nothing to grumble about, Midnight failed at the ticket booth and turned out to be a train wreck for everyone involved, except for costumer Irene Sharaff, who managed the film’s lone Oscar nomination — though the nod owes more to Sharaff’s reputation as a five time winner than it does her work in this film. Marie-France Pisier is a wonderful mannequin, but the costumes aren’t that good.

The sprawling three-hour adaptation of Sidney Sheldon’s trashy novel concerns a French girl named Noelle (Pisier) who flees her Marseilles home for Paris in the years just prior to the second world war. Just as it appears she’ll be devoured by the shadier aspects of the city of lights, Noelle is rescued by Larry Douglas (John Beck), an American RAF captain, who seduces her with dinner and the promise of a place to sleep. They couple enjoys a short-lived fairy tale romance, that ends abruptly when Larry is called back to the U.S. in order to train fighter pilots, leaving Noelle — now secretly pregnant (!) — jilted and alone. In a rather shocking bathtub abortion scene, jarringly out of character with the rest of the film, Noelle terminates how own pregnancy and vows to start a new life as a (wait for it!) … film star! Over the course of the next eight years, her career flourishes and eventually she becomes the trophy of a Greek shipping tycoon, who happens to be the world’s richest man. Meanwhile, Larry romances and weds Cathy (Susan Sarandon), a fresh-faced girl Friday to the chief of a Washington DC public relations firm. Unable to hold down a job as a commercial pilot in the years after the war, Larry bounces from job to job and his marriage slowly crumbles — that is until he’s hired to pilot the private plane of a certain Greek shipping tycoon. Old flames flare once again, and in true Postman Always Rings Twice fashion, plans of murder follow — though in this case the target isn’t the Greek, but the shrewish American wife. The film tries hard to take itself seriously, but the ending is so delightfully contrived and over the top — some might say bad, others, hilarious — that it almost makes the whole affair worth watching.

This is an awful film, in all of its late 70s Sheldon glory. It’s poorly executed, especially considering the narrative continuity and film editing. The story moves through time, but does little to help the viewer situate the story in a time or place, using only spoken dialog to do so. It fails to capture the flavor of the war years — barely addressing them at all — making only a half-hearted effort to authentically portray the French capital, expecting viewers to be held rapt by the movie’s melodrama. Even Leonard Maltin, that faithful friend of classic film, rates this as a bomb. Yet it somehow manages to maintain a shaky hold on your attention, though I’m certain that in the case of most male viewers, myself included, it’s the film’s abundant nudity that does the trick. Pisier is certainly beautiful, and Charles Jarrott (the same director responsible for previous big Oscar contenders Anne of the Thousand Days and Mary, Queen of Scots) gets her out of her clothing as often as possible. The requisite shot of a topless Susan Sarandon is to be found as well, but Pisier is clearly the film’s leading actress. The casting of John Beck is one of Midnight’s biggest flaws. Essentially a TV actor, and one of little note, Beck has neither the looks nor the chops to make good here. The film lives or dies on his ability to have believable, even if not smoldering, chemistry with both women, yet Beck just doesn’t deliver. His performance is awkward, clumsy, and shows that the actor was well out of his depth. Frankly, given Beck’s resume, one wonders how he got such a big part in such an important picture.

If this weren’t so unbelieveably long, I’d happily recommend it as a piece of fun camp along the same lines as Meyer’s Valley of the Dolls or even Jacqueline Suzanne’s Once is Not Enough, but in the case of The Other Side of Midnight once is plenty.

The Other Side of Midnight (1977)

Grade: F

Directed by Charles Jarrott

Starring Marie-France Pisier, Susan Sarandon, and John Beck

Released by Twentieth Century Fox

Running time: 165 minutes

Availability: DVD, Netflix

Pal Joey (1957)

Damn you, Kim Novak, why can't I make up my mind about you? If ever there was a woman — an astonishingly beautiful woman at that — who photographed better than she filmed it was Kim Novak. There are photographs of Kim that stagger the mind, that grab you and force you to admit that this was one of the world's great faces. Those eyes framed with the too-thick painted on brows, lips always parted, and the platinum hair swept back from her face — If Monroe's approachable sexuality begged the photographer to step back and take her all in, Novak's did just the opposite, asking us to look closer, to zoom in, to try to unravel the mystery. It was a quality almost entirely lost in motion pictures — only Hitchcock truly understood how to use her.

Her first name was (I mean, is … Kim is still with us) Marilyn, but that couldn't be used for obvious reasons, so Columbia boss Harry Cohn landed on Kim. The studio brought her along slowly with the idea that eventually she'd replace Rita Hayworth as Columbia's resident "Queen of the Lot." Pal Joey, which is one of those movies that has backstories related to everything from the source material to each of the stars was meant to be the moment where Rita more or less passes the torch to the younger star. And while that seems to take place, the movie rests firmly on the narrow shoulders of Frank Sinatra.

I don't like Kim here. Pal Joey was her second film with Frank Sinatra after their success three years earlier in The Man with the Golden Arm. The role is simply too straight, and calls for an actress with more a more deft comedic touch than Novak had at that time, or ever. It's easy to criticize Hayworth as an actress, but, had she been younger she would have hit a home run in Novak's role. Kim is simply too much woman for the diminutive Sinatra, too sultry for her good-girl character, and she looks uncomfortable in almost every scene. Her very next film would be her most famous, and it's easy to understand what doesn't work about her and Frank together in Pal Joey by looking at what does work between her and James Stewart in Vertigo. The Hitchcockian restraint, the mystery, the elegance, and even the leading man suit her better.

Sinatra lovers rejoice, he's at the top of his game. (I know, you've seen this many times already.) And I don't mean as an actor, or as somebody hitting his marks and speaking the lines — it always seems to me that Sinatra mailed it in in that regard. I'm thinking of the musical numbers, especially the ones in which he appears on the nightclub stage. The guy really comes to life under the hot lights. He works the audience and looks like a man who knows what he's doing and loves it. Of all Sinatra's pictures I think this one gives the best impression of how he must have appeared on stage in one of his Vegas shows — albeit in a much smaller way. Watch Pal Joey and think swagger, without the bullshit rat packers hanging on his pant legs.

There's a melancholy feeling that one gets watching Rita Hayworth in this film. Although out of respect Sinatra conceded top billing to her, she has the smallest and least affable part of the three leads. She's the older woman — a gold digger who scored to boot — who plays sugar daddy to Sinatra's dream of owning his own club and consequently keeps him away from Novak, the girl he really belongs with. Rita loses out in the end, but she does it with class. There's one great moment early on when we are reminded of her signature number in Gilda, but it's fleeting. Instead we are left with the impression that this is an actress getting put out to pasture, and there's something in the pursing of her lips that lets us know she doesn't quite like it. She's as beautiful and talented as ever, but Hollywood was even more fickle in those days than it is now and the parts just weren't made with her in mind anymore. Like Kim, Rita's next film was a heavyweight, though admittedly Separate Tables is an ensemble film, and Rita would never again appear in a production of this magnitude.

Pal Joey doesn't add up to the sum of its parts, but it's an enjoyable musical and something of a minor essential.

Pal Joey (1957)

Grade B

Directed by George Sidney

Starring Rita Hayworth, Frank Sinatra, and Kim Novak

Released by Columbia Pictures

Running time: 111 minutes

Availabilty: Widely on DVD.

THE OSCAR (1966), Frank Capra, and It’s a Wonderful Life

Frank Capra, a brilliant a determined man who enjoyed everything Hollywood has to offer, learned a hard lesson over the course of his career — a mean sonofabitch of a lesson that Hollywood has taught to thousands and thousands over the decades: there’s no such thing as absolute control in the movie business. Picture making is a collaborative process — whether you like it or not — and everyone from the extras crowded around the hospitality table to Louis B. Mayer himself answers to somebody. This is why I, as well as every screen writer and cinematographer in the world, chuckle at author-theory people. Frankie Fane, the rotten protagonist of The Oscar, learns this too.

What’s Capra got to do with it though?

Here’s an oft-told Oscar tale: in 1934 the race for Best Director was contested among three nominees: Capra for Lady for a Day, George Cukor for Little Women, and Frank Lloyd for Best Picture winner Cavalcade. The presenter that year was humorist and film comedian Will Rogers — probably the sharpest, make that wickedest, man in the room. He declared the winner by jovially announcing, “Well, well, well. What do you know. I’ve watched this young man for a long time. Saw him come up from the bottom, and I mean the bottom. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Come on up and get it, Frank!” At this, Capra stood and wound his way through the tables toward the stage. He looked over and saw a jubilant Frank Lloyd, — the real winner — also coming up from his left. After a moment’s confusion Capra returned to his seat, humiliated, in what he would later describe as the “longest walk of his life.”

Capra was a filmmaker who greatly valued the creative aspects of his work and desperately wanted to win an Academy Award. He felt the accompanying recognition would give him enough juice to exert more and more control over his pictures. The irony here is that although he would shortly become one of the most recognized directors in film history, capturing the Oscar the following year for his own Best Picture, It Happened One Night, and winning it an astonishing two more times before the decade was out; he would never get the control he wanted — nobody ever does. Following his return from the war he even formed his own independent production company, Liberty Films, in an effort to gain more authority over his work. (Though it certainly fair to suggest that he had another reason: to pay less in taxes.) Liberty produced only two pictures — one of which was It’s a Wonderful Life.

Irony: Although Capra finally had a measure of the control he desired, It’s a Wonderful Life was a flop with post-war audiences — meaning that for their part the studio people were right. It failed to recoup its production costs and consequently drove Liberty into foreclosure and Capra back to the studio shuck-and-jive. More irony: in the decades since its release It’s a Wonderful Life has become one of the most adored films in history — a bona fide American classic — proving that for his part Capra was right. Even more irony: Lovers of this film often cite the source of their affection as the movie’s sweet Christmas message, though this shocks me. I believe what they are actually drawn to is the nostalgia of the film’s Americana, combined with its proliferation on television. My friends, It’s a Wonderful Life is a dark, forbidding, and troubling film.

Why the story? I was aware of the 1934 Oscar debacle’s connection to The Oscar and Capra was constantly in my thoughts as I watched. When one considers all the possibilities of a movie bearing this most lofty of titles it’s surprising — and something of a let-down — to witness the results — though Harlan Ellison was probably thinking of Capra when he had the “What if?” moment that probably got the this screenplay off the ground. The film itself has nothing to do with Capra and everything to do with an actor learning that old Hollywood lesson.

The Oscar stars Irishman Stephen Boyd (who most viewers will remember as Charlton Heston’s rival in 1959 Best Picture Ben-Hur) as Frankie Fane, a opportunistic heel who grinds his way through Hollywood, stepping on or over everyone who gets in his path. Fane is gifted with good looks and talent, but he’s so pathologically despicable that even shallow Hollywood types can’t stand him. The desperate and terrified actor’s career has finally hit the skids when he receives what amounts to a gift from the heavens: an Academy Award nomination for best actor. Yet the revivification certain to accompany the nod isn’t enough for Fane, he’s looking to hedge his bets — and in the end he pays a terrible price.

The supporting cast of The Oscar is noteworthy for being … noteworthy. This is one of those pictures about pictures that was able to recruit a boatload of high profile guest stars: Milton Berle plays Boyd’s agent while Joe Cotten is his studio boss. The film’s women are played by Elke Sommer, Eleanor Parker, Edie Adams, and Jill St. John. Ernest Borgnine is featured as a sleazy private eye; Brod Crawford, Walter Brennan, Peter Lawford, and Ed Begley do bits; and crooner Tony Bennett turns in his one and only (not too bad either) performance as a dramatic actor in the second lead. Bennett plays Hymie, Frank’s right hand man, conscience, and stooge. There are cameos galore, with Edith Head, Hedda Hopper, Frank Sinatra, Merle Oberon, and Bob Hope showing up as themselves.

The Oscar is both a morality story about the high cost of low morals and a trashy melodrama about life in the picture business. Whether it succeeds or fails on either count is up to the individual viewer, but the movie is stylish as can be (Oscar nods for Art Direction and Costume Design) and one hell of a ride — in a Jacqueline Susann kind of way.

The Oscar (1966)

Grade: C-

Directed by Russell Rouse

Starring Stephen Boyd, Elke Sommer, Tony Bennett, Milton Berle, and many more.

Released by Embassy Pictures

Running time: 119 minutes

Availability: Airs on TCM, rarely.

Oscar and Lucinda (1997)

Certainly one of the more original films I’ve viewed in some time, Gillian Armstrong’s 1997 film Oscar and Lucinda tells the story of two lost souls who find each other through a shared obsession with gambling. Although in the decade-plus since this was released, gambling, specifically poker, has enjoyed a colossal resurgence in popular culture, this film is highly character driven and gambling plays no role beyond establishing character distinctions. Besides, this is particularly unusual in that it’s a period piece—taking place in mid-nineteenth-century England and Australia.

Although one could argue that at the time of this writing Oscar winner Cate Blanchett’s star is brighter than that of Ralph Fiennes, that certainly wasn’t the case in 1997 when Oscar and Lucinda was in theaters. The pair shared a similar amount of feature film experience and years in front of the camera, but by 1997 Fiennes had already headlined two Best Picture winners (Schindler's List and The English Patient) and had achieved household name status in the United States via other Hollywood films such as Quiz Show and Strange Days. Blanchett was an unknown at the time, with her breakout performance in Elizabeth a year away. Consequently, and in spite of the pair of first names in the title, this treatment of Peter Carey’s novel focuses on Fienne’s character Oscar, with Blanchett’s Lucinda in a featured supporting role. In a nutshell, the movie concentrates much more of its running time on what Oscar does and thinks and shares much less about Lucinda, beyond how her actions serve to inspire Oscar’s.

I began with the originality of the film and it’s worth discussing. Although this is a character study the circumstances of the plot are quite novel and do much to keep moving forward. I want to be careful to not give anything away, because even though gambling is a significant element of the narrative, one wager in particular defines the second half of the movie and it shouldn’t be spoiled. Suffice it to say that the movie goes places (as literary adaptations often do) that are atypical of Hollywood narratives—and then some. It’s occasionally tender, often unsettling, and in at least one instance abhorrent—all played out within constructs of love: platonic, religious, and obsessive.

Perhaps what’s most astonishing about Oscar and Lucinda is that all of its drama is brought to life through Fienne’s performance, which may be his best—he’s sublime in a role so difficult most actors wouldn’t go near it. Oscar and Lucinda was released with the Academy Awards in mind: it hit theaters on December 31, 1997, the last day of eligibility. This was the year defined by the competition between Titanic, As Good as it Gets, and L.A. Confidential, with the comedy film The Full Monty also garnering a Best Picture nomination. I certainly would have argued for this instead. Yet in spite of broad critical acclaim this garnered only a single nomination in the Best Costume category. Get your hands on a copy and decide for yourself.

Oscar and Lucinda (1997)

Grade: B+

Directed by Gillian Armstrong

Starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett

Released by Fox Searchlight

Running time: 132 minutes

Availability: DVD, Netflix, Fox Movie Channel

The Actress (1953)

In MGM’s 1953 film The Actress, Jean Simmons plays the star-struck daughter of old salt Spencer Tracy. Simmons is enamored of a Bostonian stage actress and decides she wants to follow in the woman's footsteps. She writes a fan letter and receives an encouraging response, which convinces her she's destined to be a star. The arc of the film is concerned with the relationship of the father and daughter, as each tries to come to grips with the other’s dreams. Simmons’ youthful idealism runs smack into Tracy’s New England practicality and fatherly hopes. Of course money is an important part of the story, as there’s little to go around and Simmons needs to move to New York in order to take her shot. Things are complicated by Harvard nice-guy Anthony Perkins (in his screen debut) who is ready, willing and more than able to take Simmons off Tracy's hands.

Set in the early 1910s (which isn't an era that I'm typically drawn to), I still found this to be an enjoyable film, primarily owing to the performances. Once acclimated to his somewhat affected characterization — feisty, talkative, irascible — Tracy dominates the film. Yet he somehow manages not to overshadow the other actors, and Simmons wisely downplays her performance in order to create functional screen chemistry between the two. Tracy's character softens over the course of the film — or rather becomes more human — so that by the end we see him less as a blowhard and more as a father who truly cares about his daughter’s dreams. One of the reasons Tracy's persona here is so unusual is that he had to find a way to differentiate his character from that of the warm and fuzzy dad in the Father of the Bride / Father’s Little Dividend films, which were his most recent hits at the time.

The film primarily exists in the realm of drama, but there are a few funny moments, and one particularly comedic scene — in which Tracy and his pals put on a “gymnastics display.” It’s worth tracking The Actress down for this scene alone.

As mentioned above, Anthony Perkins plays the fur-coat college boy who wants to marry Simmons, while her mother is played (surprisingly) by 34-year-old Teresa Wright, only a decade older than Simmons. Wright shines, as usual, but is almost unrecognizable as a middle-aged Massachusetts housewife. Look fast for Mary Wickes juggling bowling pins!

The Actress (1953)

Grade: B

Directed by George Cukor
Starring Specer Tracy, Jean Simmons and Teresa Wright.
Released by: MGM
Running time: 90 minutes.
Availability: Warner Archive DVD here.