Bitesize Best Actress Oscar Profiles: Jeanne Crain

Jeanne Crain in “Pinky”

Lost the 1949 Best Actress Oscar to Olivia De Havilland in “The Heiress”

Grade: *

Jeanne Crain’s ivory complexion lends itself to “Pinky” about as well as Neville Chamberlain’s trusting nature lended itself to foreign policy – which is to say that even though bombs don’t fall and millions don’t die, “Pinky” and Crain are – on some level – a sorry tragedy of their own. Even if you can sidestep the cosmetic issues of a pale-faced ‘classic’ actress adopting the role of a Negro woman grappling with the implications of her race, Crain’s approach to Pinky doesn’t afford her much shade between resentment and allegiance.

I’m often excusing performers for the ineptness of their film’s production values – be that direction, script, or otherwise – but the blame here can be placed on Crain as much as it can on anyone else involved. “Pinky” isn’t a good film (it’s probably Kazan’s worst), but she badly gauges the arc of the character and struggles with the film’s insistence on offering degrees and variations on prejudice and discrimination. It’s depending on her to carve something linear and concrete out of the roundabout politics but instead she finds the bitter, wronged defaults in Pinky and rolls with them for most of the way. She’s rigid and standoffish in the way that she sleepwalks through the film, acting within the confines of her own ability and neatly – but blandly - delivering the piteous quips she’s given.

So one-track is Crain’s approach that she fails to strike a bond with any of her fellow actors, and is fatefully unable to generate empathy for the troubled heroine. Pinky’s blooming relationship with neighbour Miss Em, for instance, is supposed to represent a transitory period of enlightenment towards her view on racial relations, but all the work in these scenes is done by the ailing Ethel Barrymore. Crain is a stingy performer here, to the extent where you wonder what Miss Em has seen in Pinky beyond diligence and efficiency to warrant penning a last minute will-rewrite in her honour.  When engaging in conversation with her heritage-loving Grandmother (played by Ethel Waters) and understanding love interest William Lundigan, the same colourless surface of acrimony comes out to play, as Crain consigns Pinky to a fixed position of intellectual superiority and mild disappointment.

It isn’t necessarily a question of being amiable; Crain is attempting to embody a woman difficult to like, who is hostile towards threats to her standing and ungrateful in many aspects of her life. Although she is keen to access the sense of injustice in this girl, the snappish, quicksmart ‘qualities’ in her manner are not suited to distilling the gritty social commentary, and even less inclined to richen the would-be-tense dichotomy of this community. Crain’s reward of an Oscar nomination probably derived from her dual work in this and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “A Letter to Three Wives” the same year, but collectively it really doesn’t amount to much. If 1949 had looked like a pale Best Actress year Crain hasn’t altered that impression, tossing her own strain of tedious inertia onto an already dispiriting roster.

What say you? Was I too harsh on Jeanne Crain's abilities here? Is she merely scuppered by the film's other elements; or is she so at fault that one star reads as generous?  Speak up!

Volpi Cup Winners: Vivien Leigh

Vivien Leigh in "A Streetcar Named Desire"

(Won Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival in 1951 over Pier Angeli in "Teresa", Judy Holliday in "Born Yesterday", Nora Swinburne in "The River", and Simone Valère in "The Night Is My Kingdom".)

Grade: *****

In an awards haul that would eventually net her a second Oscar, Vivien Leigh brings to life -- from the pen of Tennessee Williams -- surely one of the most introspectively challenging characters ever depicted on screen. Her Blanche Dubois is rather like what a 48 year-old Scarlett O'Hara might have amounted to, had she developed a feminine strain of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and forgot that the American Civil War even happened.

Arriving by streetcar Blanche at first appears to be one of those annoying relatives, who come to stay with low expectations of the life that you have made for yourself, and leave with an even sourer opinion. Upon her arrival she flounces around, primly studying Stella's bowling alley surroundings as one would a herd of cattle, and immediately addresses the issue of her sister's downward class-convergence. She coos, Miss Jean Brodie-esque in her Estuary version of Southern drawl, "Oh Stella, do you really live in this place?", continuing to spout from meaningless subject to meaningless subject. It's obvious that Blanche is a narcissistic conversationalist, content to talk through you if she thinks she's constructing a positive image of herself, hiding from the implications of her presence at the Kowalski residence.

Leigh's chatter, with its kooky erratic pitch, and its focusless shifting intonation, makes her so opaquely inaccessible that it's no wonder that Stella's husband Stanley finds her presence a maddening bother. As she flirts with a hapless, lovestruck Karl Malden like a sixteen year-old awake past her curfew it suddenly dawns on you that this woman is never going to face up to her age or her past. Leigh addresses Blanche's complete loss of identity, telegraphing the fluid literary majesty of a Jane Austen heroine into an ageing spinster, playing up to multiple facets and ideals of respectability to attain a marriage that she isn't sure that she wants anyway. Is Blanche just bored with existence? Destined to live a life more ordinary than the ones she teaches in her English class?

When you get two people that are either unwilling or unable to back down from their ideals, things are bound to end messily, and Blanche's inability to curb her worldly outlook eventually makes her the victim of the piece. The permanent state of self-imposed, disillusioned fragility etched on Leigh's face in Blanche's never-ending soliloquies, distort her playful artistry into such an artificially condescending tool. In the scene where Blanche and Stanley have their final showdown she flirts as Kay Francis would in the Thirties, attempting to mould Stanley into the fellow that he just ain't. Leigh lets Blanche revel and strain in gathering control of their exchange, fretfully backtracking as Stanley's infuriation grows. Blanche isn't sure whether she wants to be the sister that everyone loves, the "older" temptress, or the virgin bride, but whichever it is she wants it on her terms. Leigh does an incredible job in making each sly remark, each flippantly false self-diminishment, a clamouring attempt at affection, painfully exposing Blanche's motives when we least expect her to crack.

Leigh's own well-documented precarious mental state has often been cited as a reason behind the ambiguity in her "Streetcar" turn. However accurate an assessment that is, her work here is a complete physical embodiment of identity crises, and a gauntlet-throwing emotional immersion into the pressures of repressed female sexuality.

1952, Year in Review: Viva Zapata!

Viva Zapata!

Directed by Elia Kazan

Starring: Marlon Brando, Jean Peters, Anthony Quinn

Grade: B -

Despite the film's exclamatory title I have to confess that I was more curious than excitable about the prospect of "Viva Zapata!". Marlon Brando as a Mexican bandit hardly suggests savvy casting direction for a start, and the titular-championed Emiliano Zapata, an Indian revolutionary in turn-of-the-century Mexico, is someone I'm very unfamiliar with. It's to the film's credit that it manages to sustain interest in both Zapata and his compact political struggle against the smear campaign of a power-hungry President.

Upon reflection, as a self-made pariah Brando suits the part of such a dissident, but I'm not convinced that his presence is beneficial to "Viva Zapata!". Kazan is trying to portray Zapata as a lone wolf, a macho revolutionary, and a smouldering seductor (sometimes all at once) which in turn makes Brando's task rather difficult. Either way, his performance is a little too constrained and methodical for the often frenetic, celebratory lack of substance that filters through the picture. Method acting often works for Brando when he's in a serious piece, but "Viva Zapata!" is so wildly shifting from an historical drama to a flimsy romance to a booze-fuelled union of social outcasts that his character work can feel pedantic and fussy, as if he's approaching the material rather too seriously, or at least more so than Kazan.

While not uncommon for historical dramas to be diluted with romance and comedy, "Viva Zapata!" ploughs on with a flawed sense of generosity, badly setting up Emiliano's relationship with Josefa, a pallid-looking Jean Peters. Their strangely-played first scene together (in a church no less) exemplifies the token necessity of the film's romance. Emiliano and Josefa engage in a conversation where she berates him for being a tearaway fiend while he salivates over her like a wide-eyed puppy. As a local woman hung up on manners, protocol, and empty words, she's placed at the politically-opposing polar of Zapata's world, and surely represents everything he's eager to shun. Throughout this scene Peters and Brando unsurprisingly appear thoroughly disinterested in each other and the odd direction of their written interplay. After Zapata departs, Josefa's friend remarks that she likes the man (why we do not know), before Josefa herself makes the most unfathomable about-turn and agrees. As a way of constructing their predicament as a "couple" this immediately asserted to me that "Viva Zapata!" is made to be observed and not understood, which is a little unfair considering how adept it is at generating action and intrigue.

The presence of the effortlessly light and amiable Anthony Quinn does little to distill the aroma of frivolity in "Viva Zapata!", his trademark crowing an aide to the film's lively tone, and a nice parallel to the rumbunctious score from Alex North. Kazan manages to create a believeable core in Zapata's revolutionary community, who are all reverent of a man that never appears to be as emotionally involved as they. There is a history of portraying activism as passive escape, a stern look here, a swig of rum there, organisation as a secondary, trivial afterthought. Rather like my last 1952 foray into John Ford's The Quiet Man tradition is given higher status than mobility, since Zapata feels to be trying to resurrect a time that's since passed, resisting social and cultural transition. It can be argued then that Kazan's style is a trusty colleague to his subject's shun of infrastructure as a means of control, but to me unlikely, given that "Viva Zapata!" tends to project a single-minded view of the period. Carpetbagging and capitalism had saddled the small-town world with a choice between a seemingly permanent state of regression and a change in ideals and expectations. Nobody in "Viva Zapata!" has a great sense of nationalism, and the hypocrisy of Zapata's politics is demonstrated through overblown, carnivalesque drama and Shakespearian levels of tomfoolery. This is a story about people doing what they want, when they want, because they can.

"Viva Zapata!" is a film I'm more comfortable being a fan of than an advocate of, considering it doesn't really say an awful lot about either the man or the political situation of the moment. There appears to be an unimposed cap on what can be said, given the resounding view of its characters as a cavalcade of lost souls. It's ultimately apt that this film has its heralded title since it's a redundant championing of an utterly free-spirited disciple of life, so blithely unconcerned with reciting turning points in history, a carefree permanent struggle. To all intents and purposes "Viva Zapata!" really isn't an historical drama at all, but rather a daringly positive view of life in a mournful time for Mexico. It's just as well; the show must go on, and all that jazz.

Academy Awards

Wins:
Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Anthony Quinn

Nominations:
Best Actor in a Leading Role: Marlon Brando
Best Writing, Story and Screenplay
Best Art Direction
Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture