She was wonderful in many things, to speak merely of her professional technique. But she was miraculous with Brandon de Wilde and Paul Newman and Melvyn Douglas - all in one movie, no less, and with all for the same reason: femininity of exact scale for each contingency, beyond the call of the screenplay. This was not a great movie (Martin Ritt's "Hud") but it was a great education to the boy viewer.
"Hud" was associated with such human dignity in its provenance - the central issue of its script, which the producers had the genius to cast Paul Newman to denounce, against every molecule of himself - that those layers, alone, shield it (I shouldn't doubt) even from Nicholas' complaint. Culminating a career forever identified with the immortal boulevardier to Greta Garbo's "Ninotchka," Douglas (also the AW) plays a rancher more yeomanly than lordly in his bearing, but who, as Newman's character insinuates, rather stinks of the unyielding seigneur. At the other end of the actuarial spectrum, we have the boy who cried for Shane to come back, more or less embodying unambiguous adorability still, but of an age of discretion he discovers in the film. In Newman, however, the Stanislavskian tradition furnishes everything he lacked as a "Sweet Bird of Youth," a performance which must be seen as the archetype for Warren Beatty's Clyde Barrow. The difficulty of his work is visible, and wholly to its credit. Finally, of course, apart from the glory of her triumph over medical setbacks, the emergence of this vestal of the vanities of Ayn Rand (in the clip shown here) into playing the fulcrum of credible, timelessly Oedipal drama, is simply not going to be forgotten for as long as films are screened.
But there's another woman in the backdrop, who remained Mrs Melvyn Douglas all her life, but who stood also once on a public stage, to exhibit to the American people absolutely everything that would befall them in her personal, transitory ordeal at the hands of the future 37th President of the United States. I don't think this picture can be seen without recalling how its script responds to the systematic destruction of virtue, at any cost. The provenance of this film is embedded in its texture, and it is an American classic.
She was wonderful in many things, to speak merely of her professional technique. But she was miraculous with Brandon de Wilde and Paul Newman and Melvyn Douglas - all in one movie, no less, and with all for the same reason: femininity of exact scale for each contingency, beyond the call of the screenplay. This was not a great movie (Martin Ritt's "Hud") but it was a great education to the boy viewer.
ReplyDeleteCarter, She won the A W for HUD- my second choice. That voice must have been enough alone to educate the boy viewer.
ReplyDeleteMy sympathies to her family and friends.
ReplyDeleteI will never get that coffee commercial as a child with her deep sultry voice.
pve
Patricia, I forgot about that-it was all about the sultry voice.
ReplyDelete"Hud" was associated with such human dignity in its provenance - the central issue of its script, which the producers had the genius to cast Paul Newman to denounce, against every molecule of himself - that those layers, alone, shield it (I shouldn't doubt) even from Nicholas' complaint. Culminating a career forever identified with the immortal boulevardier to Greta Garbo's "Ninotchka," Douglas (also the AW) plays a rancher more yeomanly than lordly in his bearing, but who, as Newman's character insinuates, rather stinks of the unyielding seigneur. At the other end of the actuarial spectrum, we have the boy who cried for Shane to come back, more or less embodying unambiguous adorability still, but of an age of discretion he discovers in the film. In Newman, however, the Stanislavskian tradition furnishes everything he lacked as a "Sweet Bird of Youth," a performance which must be seen as the archetype for Warren Beatty's Clyde Barrow. The difficulty of his work is visible, and wholly to its credit. Finally, of course, apart from the glory of her triumph over medical setbacks, the emergence of this vestal of the vanities of Ayn Rand (in the clip shown here) into playing the fulcrum of credible, timelessly Oedipal drama, is simply not going to be forgotten for as long as films are screened.
ReplyDeleteBut there's another woman in the backdrop, who remained Mrs Melvyn Douglas all her life, but who stood also once on a public stage, to exhibit to the American people absolutely everything that would befall them in her personal, transitory ordeal at the hands of the future 37th President of the United States. I don't think this picture can be seen without recalling how its script responds to the systematic destruction of virtue, at any cost. The provenance of this film is embedded in its texture, and it is an American classic.
But I stray. Thank you for this posting.
L. there are far fields for straying here. & I learn-
ReplyDeleteto wit "the Pink Lady"Helen Gahagan Douglas.
that is why I am here