Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/07/18

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, December 7, 2018

Sudden Fear (David Miller, 1952)

Jack Palance and Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear

Myra Hudson: Joan Crawford
Lester Blaine: Jack Palance
Irene Neves: Gloria Grahame
Steve Kearney: Bruce Bennett
Ann Taylor: Virginia Huston
Junior Kearney: Mike Connors

Director: David Miller
Screenplay: Lenore J. Coffee, Robert Smith
Based on a story by Edna Sherry
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Art direction: Boris Leven
Film editing: Leon Barsha
Music: Elmer Bernstein

Joan Crawford could play almost anything but soft, but then she never had to -- I suspect she saw to that. What she could do instead was play vulnerable, though you often felt a twinge of sympathy for the person who was attacking her, knowing that she had ways of getting more than even. David Miller's Sudden Fear is a revenge drama, and one of the best. Crawford's Myra Hudson is a playwright who uses her skills at contriving a plot to get even with her cheating, murderous husband, Lester Blaine. Her plot goes awry, but fate gives her a hand anyway. What Crawford knew how to do better than almost anyone was to play off her two most notable facial features, her enormous eyes and her strong mouth and jaw, in alternation. So when Myra is falling in love with Lester, the eyes tell us everything we need to know; when the truth about her husband is revealed, the eyes grow moist and anguished and the mouth and jaw tremble; and when she sets out to take her revenge, the mouth grows hard and the jaw firm. Crawford learned this kind of control in silent movies, of course, and used it effectively throughout her long career. Changing tastes in acting, abetted by parodies of Crawford's performances, have made recent generations see her performing style as mannered, though critics have begun to re-evaluate and praise her real acting gifts. Crawford and her costar, Jack Palance, received Oscar nominations. Palance, with his knobby, death's-head face and carnivorous grin, initially seems like an odd choice for a leading man -- as Myra Hudson herself acknowledges when she fires him from her play -- but he's hugely effective in the role of faux swain and greedy menace.