Bitesize Best Actress Oscar Profiles: Fay Bainter

Fay Bainter in “White Banners”

Lost the 1938 Best Actress Oscar to Bette Davis in “Jezebel”

Grade: ***


Perhaps the greatest comment on behalf of Edmund Goulding's understated “White Banners” is that it makes a great advertisement for small-town America: a place where issues can be presented and overcome with grace and solidarity. It must be conceded that, after the initial cosiness of the home is established, there’s a heavy dose of earnestness to this accessible melodrama. What makes the film in many ways superior to similarly moral-driven pictures is in the performances – of and either side of Fay Bainter – who help to shape it into a worthwhile model of family life.

Of the ensemble Bainter’s Hannah remains most noticeably intriguing, predominantly because her character is less receptive to, or dependent upon, the influence of others, and her role as the film's insistent maid intentionally places her as the figurehead of the household. There are elements of self-righteousness to Hannah, which Bainter uses to allude to back-story – both within her half-hidden arc and outside of it. She finds ways to show how this woman has grown from her experiences, developed into a makeshift matriarch, turned dedication and presence into a valuable commodity to suit her needs. Long before the sympathies of the character are revealed, Bainter manipulates without offending – partly because she encounters little to no resistance, but also because she’s very difficult to distrust.

But for all of these minor successes this method also works against her, and the nature of the film’s narrative in the first hour essentially limits the amount of impact that she can achieve. The dedication to a storyline involving Claude Rains’ inventor character consigns the performance to flashes of matronly self-lionisation which ultimately inhibit her greatly, and there isn’t enough teeth-sinking opportunity in the prolonged middle portion. “White Banners” takes until the hour mark to endeavour to really upset the apple cart, this coming in the form of an incrementally hinted-at revelation from Hannah’s past, which colours our view of her considerably, and allows this actress to finally furrow grief into a guarded pillar of efficiency.

Bainter admittedly furnishes guilt and regret with a degree of plaintive mechanism in the final segment, but she does extricate emotion through revealing the character’s outlook to be more malleable and ambiguous than previously suggested. Her performance crystallises when the moment she has anticipated for most of the film eventually arises, and her concession of weakness when others force her to confront these issues from a different plain of thought brings added depth to Hannah. She’s given inklings of this before, but there’s mild surprise to the way in which she deals with the fraught collision of events that threatens to destruct. It can’t quite boost the resounding impact of her performance from congenial warmth to serviceable excellence, but it’s nontheless befitting of this emotionally intelligent, unendingly modest feature.

"Dead End," and William Wyler's Way with Actors

This past weekend I sat down to watch William Wyler's "Dead End" knowing little more than it was one of Oscar's 1937 Best Picture nominees, and therefore required viewing. The film, which takes place over the course of one night, concerns the struggle between the upper and lower classes encased within an inner-city neighbourhood. Gangsters, prostitutes, and teenage delinquents prop up bureaucrats in healthily-detached luxurious apartments, as the two social factions clash, instigating the intervention of local police.

The charms of "Dead End" largely counter its wan misadventures: the rabble of streetwise teenagers and their guardian-of-sorts (a delectable Sylvia Sidney) furrowing a way-of-life for themselves amidst a society that's clearly neglecting them; the way Humphrey Bogart's gangster-character roams around the tenements staking his claim for the place, knowing that he's bigger, better, and worthy of bigger enemies than he entertains. These people are a small-scale impression of how civilisation works, and an undoubted part of the social commentary Wyler et. al are aiming to voice.

I'm not convinced that the film really commits enough to dramatising the social impact (an open-ended resolution for one of the characters emerges as neither here nor there), and it doesn't seem particularly concerned with delving into the motivations of the upper classes in this period either. From many of the films in the Thirties (including "Dead End") you can sense a tangible contempt of high society, but when you stack this project up against more comedic enterprises like "My Man Godfrey" and "Holiday" it doesn't quite cut it. Satire most likely gleaned better results because of the production code: it's harder to get around taboo issues when you're working harder to make a point?

Regardless of the merits and faults of the film I was surprised to learn that, as well as a Best Picture nomination, Claire Trevor managed to get a mention in the Best Supporting Actress category. It was the first of three for Trevor: she followed it up with a winning performance as an alcoholic in "Key Largo" (which also starred Humphrey Bogart), and a final nod in 1954 for William Wellman's "The High and the Mighty." The reward in "Dead End" came for playing a hooker and former love interest of Bogie's, who manages to coax some money from him in her extremely short amount of screen time. Suffice to say, I'm not really on board with this Academy pick, but her flailing dramatics in "Key Largo" - as well as the film itself - are definitely worth a look.

All of this talk of nominations led me to an informative article about William Wyler's penchant for getting Actors nominated for Oscars. Between 1936 and 1968 this happened 36 times, which is the most accumulated by any director by a comfortable margin (Elia Kazan takes runner-up with 25). He has also directed the most acting winners with 13. 


Those are:

Walter Brennan (for "Come and Get It" (1936) (co-directed with Howard Hawks)
Bette Davis (for "Jezebel" (1938))
Faye Bainter (for "Jezebel" (1938))
Walter Brennan (for "The Westerner" (1940))
Greer Garson (for "Mrs. Miniver" (1942))
Teresa Wright (for "Mrs. Miniver" (1942))
Fredric March (for "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946))
Harold Russell (for The Best Years of Our Lives (1946))
Olivia de Havilland (for "The Heiress" (1949))
Audrey Hepburn (for "Roman Holiday" (1953))
Burl Ives (for "The Big Country" (1958))
Charlton Heston (for "Ben-Hur" (1959))
Hugh Griffith (for "Ben-Hur" (1959))
Barbra Streisand (for "Funny Girl" (1968))

I've seen all but 5 of the 36 (Brennan x2, Ives, Granville, Perkins). Save for Davis, Garson, and Streisand I'm not particularly impressed with many of these, but if you look at the 36 overall, it's a pretty good bunch. Egregious omissions would have to include Ruth Chatterton in "Dodsworth" (who I wrote about a while back) and Terrence Stamp in "The Collector". Both can feel aggrieved considering their co-stars were also nominated. 

How many have you seen, and which are the best?

Bitesize Best Actress Oscar Profiles: Jeanne Eagels

Jeanne Eagels in "The Letter" (1929)

Lost the 1928-29 Best Actress Oscar to Mary Pickford in "Coquette"

Grade: ****

Jeanne Eagels made just two talking pictures before her early death from a drugs overdose at the age of thirty-nine. Her most famous quote, "I'm the greatest actress in the world and the greatest failure. And nobody gives a damn." is a bold statement in itself, and though this film is my opening foray into the work of Ms. Eagels, I can certainly subscribe to the "great" if not the "greatest" tag. While William Wyler's remake would market itself with the tagline, "With all my heart, I still love the man I killed!", De Limur's original version of Somerset Maugham's "The Letter" was content to rest on that line, as if the mere confession of its tainted anti-hero Leslie Crosbie is itself enough to underline her treachery and put an end to any pretense.

Eagels' pretense had reached a height upon a courtroom stand, as an examining barrister asks her if she can recall the events of her and boyfriend Geoffrey's final, murderous encounter. Her response, "I'll try..." is trying, but so forlorn, resolute, and demanding of the court's attention without feeling at all threatening, and as she feathers her calculated lies with fragile affectations and insistent glances, she does so with such a mechanical ease that the entire scene is uproariously funny. Eagels makes Leslie impulsive in her answers, as if she's eager to get a rehearsed story across, but isn't cracking under the pressure and, quite to the contrary, appears to be adapting and eventually revelling in the attention she so keenly craves. She finds it difficult to hold back on the romantic dialogue of the story, heightening her well-to-do voice at just the right places so as to seem acceptably prudish but still thoroughly identifiable as a housewife.

While I consider Bette Davis' 1940 reprisal to be probably the most deserving Best Actress nomination of the entire decade, Eagels doesn't have as much of the feigned grace that Davis brought to Leslie. She plays her as more of a bitter, shameless shrew, if anything conjuring up images of Bette's lauded 1934 turn in "Of Human Bondage". In the famous scene in which Leslie retrieves the letter that would incriminate her, from the woman that her victim really loved, Eagels shuts Leslie off from any sort of empathy with the woman. In part, this can be attributed to "The Letter" and its lack of concern for this strand of the story, turning the exchange into a bit of theatre geared by racial oneupmanship. Still, Eagels doesn't capitalise on what should be Leslie's real lesson and shame in the film, a realisation of those haunting final words.

The waspish demeanour of Eagels imprints the film with a veracity that fits acutely into the modest brand of cinema that marks De Limur's film, more reflective of the stage or television in its quickfire, bare-bones approach to issues of the heart. So much could go wrong with playing somebody with little-to-no redeeming features about their personality, who lies through 90% of her film, but Eagels is aware of the pitfalls of being overzealous and romantic with Leslie, who one can imagine being oblivious to passion unless it were thrust in front of her face. We're used to seeing women in films of this era receive comeuppance for their errors, or at least appear to act out of downtrodden, desperate hysteria. After her crime Eagels' Leslie acts assuredly, through contempt for a life she never really had, and if the film doesn't want to punish her for that, I'm certainly not going to complain. There are few opportunities to see someone be this conceited.