Best of the Rest: Rosalind Russell in 'Mourning Becomes Electra' (1947)

 

Plot Intro

After the end of the Civil War, the wealthy Mannon family await the return of their army patriarch, Ezra (Raymond Massey) and his son Orin (Michael Redgrave). But all is not well - Ezra’s wife, Christine (Katina Paxinou), has been caught snogging sea captain Adam Brant (Leo Genn) by her daughter Lavinia (Rosalind Russell). Eager to save face, Christine plots to murder Ezra upon his return, and Lavinia plots to expose and avenge herself on Christine. It all sounds very Greek tragedy, doesn’t it?

Doug says...

Rosalind Russell is probably best remembered now for her comedic roles - her turn in The Women is exceptional with her using extraordinarily honed physical comedy to outshine most of her co-stars (there’s one bit where you just see her eyes flitting around the room from behind a perfume counter, and it is pure pantomime and cackle-inducing). 

But Russell was - in her time - also known for her dramatic roles too. She never won an Oscar but was nominated multiple times and this was considered her closest moment at nabbing it. Indeed she was so sure of winning that she stood up ready to receive it at the ceremony, only for it to go to her friend Loretta Young for The Farmer’s Daughter. 

So we set out to watch it with great interest. Eugene O’Neill is considered one of the Great American Playwrights - with his magnum opus A Long Day’s Journey Into Night frequently seen in ‘best plays ever’ lists. Mourning Becomes Electra is a pretty notable feat - as an attempt at redoing Aeschylus’ Oresteia  - three ancient Greek tragedies around Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, Electra and Orestes. It’s a well known and bloody trilogy, and O’Neill’s intentions in rewriting and setting it in the time of the American Civil War aren’t particularly apparent. 

A quick look at Wikipedia reveals that the original Mourning Becomes Electra is actually a set of three plays - each comprised of four or five acts. When staged fully, it’s horrendously long and so usually directors cut it down ruthlessly so it can be done in one performance. In fact - the original cut of this film (which we saw) is just under three hours. After it won no Oscars, they cut it down to just over ninety minutes. 

And boy, can you tell why. It is overlong, overacted and frankly a bit too pleased with itself. It’s my first encounter with O’Neill’s writing but he clearly likes to use fifty words instead of one, and it means by the end you are just willing the film to end. I didn’t care about any of the characters particularly - and as someone who is familiar with the original Greek plays - that’s quite a feat. 

Russell as a murderous daughter doesn’t particularly shine for me. She does well in the role but there’s nothing to suggest that she would win an Oscar for it, other than it’s so bloody long. The one actor who does emerge well is Greek actress Katina Paxinou who plays Christine (the Clytemnestra role) with a real drive, especially in the first half of the film. 

While Russell is still very highly regarded, I think this may be because of the comedic roles in which her performances are timeless. Here, it’s very overacted and of its time - which results in it feeling dated. If you finish a Greek tragedy and aren’t brimming with catharsis - something’s gone wrong.   

Highlight

Katina Paxinou’s first scene with her returned husband is brilliant - the one great scene of the whole film. She sits motionless as he implores and bullies her by turn for her love and attention, but you can see her brain whirring as she tries to out-dodge his attacks.

Lowlight

The script was apparently several hours long on the first draft. Despite being edited down to two hours and forty minutes - it should have lost at least another hour.

Mark

4/10

Paul says...

Mourning Becomes Electra is relatively fun to watch if, like me, you’ve read the various ancient Greek tragedies (particularly The Oresteia by Aeschylus) and studied them at some point in school or university. Matching up the modern characters with their mythical counterparts and noticing the Ancient Greek theatrical touches such as starting and ending the film outside the doors of the gargantuan Mannon family home, replacing the Trojan War with the American Civil War and even incorporating interested visitors and “working” characters to provide a Greek Chorus and ways in which the main characters can reveal their schemes to the audience without monologuing. 

I’m a sucker for modern reworkings of old tales, especially if it makes them more relevant to modern day. But as satisfying as it was revisiting these myths under an updated veneer, I agree with Doug that O’Neill’s style is turgid, overwritten and pretentious. I can’t even begin to imagine an uncut theatrical version of this in a dark environment where you can’t pass the time looking at Instagram or nipping out for a wee. Unless you’ve written something of the calibre of Angels in American, keep your play under two hours please, some of us have stuff to do. 

I found Rosalind better than Doug did. I liked her husky voice and the gusto with which she embraced the histrionic source material. But whilst it’s certainly a more “Oscar-y” performance that Loretta Young, Loretta’s charm, nuance and comic timing makes her the more worthy winner for me. 

It’s a shame comedy is not rewarded as much at the Oscars because Rosalind may well have got the recognition she deserved. Born in 1907, she snuck off to acting school and told her parents she was training to be a teacher. She was initially signed to Universal (back when studios owned actors’ very souls) but was ignored and mistreated so she managed to get out of that contract and got one with the (at the time) more prestigious MGM. Her fame increased quickly and she was almost typecast as a refined, upper class lady, something she expressed discontent with. To combat this, she gained comedic roles in The Women and His Girl Friday which are easily the best examples of her acting. As Doug says, her physicality in The Women is hilarious and she gets a lot of the funniest moments (of which there are many even if the film is outmoded and sexist). 

Her performances in these films also led to her meeting her husband, producer Frederick Brisson. Apparently Frederick was on a ship where The Women was being played. After watching it, he declared “I’m either gonna kill that girl, or I’m gonna marry her”. Thankfully, he only did the latter. Frederick’s good friend was actor Cary Grant, who became Rosalind’s co-star in His Girl Friday the following year. Cary was Frederick’s best man at the wedding and the two remained married for the rest of their lives and had one son together. 

Details of Rosalind’s personal life are hard to come by. She appears to have led a pretty modest and quiet life (in comparison to the more rambunctious and gossip-laden private lives of Swanson, Crawford and Davis), but the foreword of her autobiography suggests she had a mental breakdown in the mid-40s following the deaths of two of her six siblings. There doesn’t appear to be much more information than that. 

Her career continued in both comedies and dramas and she later originated the title role in the hit Broadway musical Auntie Mame and gained her fourth and last Best Actress Oscar nomination for this in 1958 (she was defeated by Susan Hayward). She also played the lead in the movie version of the musical Gypsy, but Doug and I agree that Imelda Staunton did it better in the more recent West End production. 

Rosalind eventually succumbed to breast cancer in 1976, aged 69, and was survived by her husband and son. 

Highlight

Like Doug, I thought Katina Paxinou’s performance was great and hits all the right notes. A popular actress in her day, Katina was Greek and garnered a Best Supporting Actress award in her Hollywood debut. Perhaps we will add her to our Best of the Rest list.

Lowlight

The sheer length of Mourning Becomes Electra is completely unnecessary. If a film or theatre production supersedes two hours, it has to really, really, REALLY need it. And this story does not. 

Mark

6/10

24. Vivien Leigh in 'A Streetcar Named Desire' (1951)

 

Plot Intro

New Orleans, the late '40s. Southern Belle, Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) arrives in New Orleans looking to stay with her sister Stella (Kim Hunter) and Stella’s husband Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando). Stella and Stanley quickly realise that all is not well with Blanche, as she reveals that their grand childhood home, Belle Reve, has been lost amidst financial ruin, and Blanche is spiralling into a nervous breakdown. Meanwhile Blanche’s high-born snobbery and Stanley’s macho bullying put them into intense conflict with each other, leading to some pretty intense shouty scenes. 

Paul says...

13 women have won two Best Actress Oscars but a vast majority won both awards within a 10 year gap. Only four winners had gaps between Oscar wins of more than a decade so 12 years between her win for Gone With the Wind and Streetcar is quite substantial for Vivien. Ingrid Bergman also had a 12 year gap between her two Oscars, Frances McDormand has a 21 year gap, while Her Royal Majesty Meryl Streep herself holds the record for the longest gap between Best Actress wins with a whopping 29 years.

Unlike many Oscar winners, Vivien won her Oscars for what are, arguably, her best known roles. They are also immensely similar in that both Scarlet O’Hara and Blanche DuBois are “Southern Belles” of wealthy and high-born ancestry who encounter poverty and the loss of their livelihoods. But they are also very different. Blanche is, for starters, older but, more significantly, she is much less resourceful, survivalist and has nowhere near Scarlet’s tenacity. She is broken, delusional, helpless and unstable. 

The fact that Vivien displays all of these facets to Blanche, along with glimmers of the “Old Blanche” who was evidently kind, forthcoming and convivial, proves that this is not just a repeat of her success as Scarlet. This is evidence that she truly deserves her place in the Hollywood Hall of Fame, and whether you enjoy the film or not, you will see an example of some of the most tremendous acting in the history of cinema. She starts off as nervous and jumpy but with a desire to please and ingratiate herself, but ends the movie in an almost animalistic state of terror and I felt for her all the way through, even if she is understandably exhausting. 

Streetcar isn’t a story for everyone, I must admit. It doesn’t have the excitement of Gaslight, the fun of The Farmer’s Daughter or the nuance of The Heiress (these three films are rapidly becoming the standard by which I measure all future films from this era). The original play can drag and feel overly dramatic. But I think it works better as a film and this is probably the best adaptation you will see. Elia Kazan’s direction conveys the overwhelming heat and claustrophobia of Stanley and Stella’s dirty little apartment, as well as the surrounding noise and bustle of New Orlean’s French Quarter which a big, spacious stage will struggle to show. Camera angles and haunting sound effects can be used to effectively create an air of mystery around Blanche’s ethereal past life at Belle Reve. And the changes to the script ensures the film is shorter and pacier (although I’d argue that further cuts could have been made), and the alternative ending in which Stella leaves the abusive Stanley rather than returns to him may be less tragic but it’s much more satisfying. 

A huge hit, Streetcar is one of 15 films to garner Oscar nominations in all four acting categories and won three (Kim Hunter won Best Supporting Actress and Karl Malden won Best Supporting Actor as the hapless Mitch). It was nominated for 12 Oscars in total, and won four, and it made a star and sex symbol out of Marlon Brando who is also outstanding. This became his first of four consecutive Best Actor nominations and by the end of his life he had gained eight Oscar nominations and two wins overall - an incredible feat. 

But back to our gal Vivien. We last left her in 1940 when she married the king of all egotistical luvvies, Laurence Olivier. Both of their careers throughout the '40s were met with highs (such as Olivier’s success in his cinematic adaptation of Hamlet) and lows (such as joint Broadway production of Romeo and Juliet in which they invested $40,000 only for it to be critically panned). Vivien was the first person to play Blanche DuBois on stage in the West End in 1949 and, of course, Laurence Olivier directed the production. Fun fact: the very first person to play Blanche on Broadway was future Best Actress winner Jessica Tandy, while Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden all originated their movie adaptation roles on Broadway too. 

Vivien’s performance on stage was so well received that she got the part in the movie two years later and her success and popularity continued both on screen and on stage. However, her struggles with Bipolar Disorder understandably made life hard. Miscarriages in the mid '40s and mid '50s, an extramarital relationship with actor Peter Finch, as well as any bad reviews or criticism could often lead to periods of hyperactivity, depression and eventually a breakdown. This put an enormous strain on her and Olivier’s marriage and they divorced after 20 years in 1960. He would go on to marry actress Joan Plowright. 

Meanwhile, Vivien maintained a cordial relationship with her first husband, and a romantic one with her actor Jack Merivale, both of whom were a stabilising force for her but she remained ill throughout the last few years of her life. She died at her 54 Eaton Square flat (there is a blue plaque outside it) from tuberculosis in July 1967 at the age of 53. She left behind a legacy of being one of the most sought-after, glamorous and talked about actresses of all time and, for me at least, her Oscar-winning performances remain masterclasses in acting even after 80 years. 

Highlight

The scenes between Vivien and Marlon Brando are superbly acted. Brando exudes a bullying, intimidating energy whilst also emphasising Stanley’s boyish immaturity and insecurity. He’s also immensely attractive which helps us understand why the hell Stella married him in the first place.

Lowlight

Even at two hours, I think extra cuts to the script could have been made here and there to keep the pace up.

Mark

8/10

Doug says...

Here’s a moment of iconic film history. A Streetcar Named Desire is probably the best known Tennessee Williams play - in part because of this extraordinarily famous film version. And while I would argue other play in Williams’ repertoire are stronger (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; The Glass Menagerie), it’s of no question that the part of Blanche DuBois is one of the great roles for an actress, and has been deeply influential on culture as a whole. 

This is a film of phenomenal performances. Vivien Leigh deserves every award she got for this, where she shows the nervous cracks beneath a hastily assembled glamorous surface, and delves right in when showing the decline and eventual destruction of DuBois’ sanity. It’s worth noting that this film softens the rape scene of the play, with Stanley hitting her - and anything else is assumed by the viewer, whereas the play makes it explicit that he rapes her. (This plot point is a weaker point of the play in my view, as Williams doesn’t write Stanley in a way that would necessarily result in such a brutal attack - Stanley feels more bored of Blanche than attracted to her, but I’m sure academics have pulled that particular discussion apart better than I). 

Most importantly though, how fit was Marlon Brando? I swear to god, he may be the most gorgeous actor to have ever existed - right up to the modern day. Elaine Stritch talks about going to drama school with him in her one woman show Elaine Stritch At Liberty (watch it and thank me later), and he seems to have slept with pretty much everyone at the drama school (Stritch excepted, she says morosely) - a raw sexuality and beauty that he uses in his performance as Stanley to devastating effect - we understand how the plainer Stella is desperate to stay with him - he’s just so goddam sexy.

The film is beautifully shot - angles are thought about, most notably at the end as Blanche lies on the floor, as a nurse attempts to straitjacket her - the camera hovers upside down, unforgivingly on Leigh’s face as she struggles, broken. It’s heart-rending and makes the doctor’s kind offer of politeness and manners very moving - we are grateful (as is Blanche) for the kindness of this stranger. 

Leigh is one of those lucky and rare actresses who had two incredible and iconic performances under her belt by the end of her career. Most don’t get one - she had both Gone With The Wind and A Streetcar Named Desire. I can’t think of many other actresses who are known for more than one iconic role in an iconic film (Bette Davis certainly, perhaps Elizabeth Taylor? Answers on a postcard). This, coming later in her life, was a great chance for her to roll up her proverbial sleeves and show them how to do it. And sometimes there’s nothing more satisfying than someone who is a great talent, proving it once again. 

Highlight

 Leigh’s central performance lifts this film to legendary status - her slow, relentless descent into madness is truthful and at times agonising to watch. Remarkable acting. 

Lowlight

Not a fault of the actors or production team, but Tennessee Williams’ main fault (in my opinion) is his refusal to ever weave lightness into his plays. They are uniformly dark, heavy and without the boost or energy of a comedic or hopeful scene. This is a remarkable and faithful interpretation of his play, but the core writing would benefit from some lighter moments. Life is never entirely depressing - and his insistence on denying this means that the film can drag at times. 

Mark

8/10

23. Judy Holliday in 'Born Yesterday' (1950)

Featuring Bette Davis and Anne Baxter (All About Eve); Eleanor Parker (Caged) and Gloria Swanson (Sunset Boulevard).

Plot Intro

Corrupt, uncouth businessman and political influencer Harry Brock (Broderick Crawford) and his uneducated, young wife Billie Dawn (Judy Holliday) come to Washington DC to do corrupt political businessy things. Harry is embarrassed by Billie and often disparages her as a result, so he employs a journalist, Paul Verrall (William Holden) to educate

Paul says...

The Best Actress nominees at the 23rd Academy Awards contain some of the most lauded performances in movie history, and is probably one of the most hotly debated results (at least in this household!). Bette Davis garnered her eighth nomination for her career-defining role as Margot in All About Eve, but she was also up against her co-star, Anne Baxter, who is also transcendent as the mysterious and calculating Eve. Into the mix is thrown Gloria Swanson’s seismic comeback as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (a film that follows very similar themes as All About Eve but with added touches of surrealism and gothicness), plus a young Eleanor Parker (most will know her as the Baroness in The Sound of Music) in a gritty and surprisingly explicit prison drama. 

And none of them won. Instead, they were defeated by Judy Holliday in her breakthrough role in Born Yesterday. So we have what is probably the Hunger Games of Best Actress contests, with a result that remains surprising 70 years on. We decided to watch all the nominees to try and answer the age-old question: Just WHY didn’t Bette Davis win?! 

First I must say that out of all five nominees, I think Judy is the least deserving. She was certainly hot stuff at the time and had originated the role of Billie Dawn on Broadway. Even Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy had lobbied for her to get the role and her popularity based on this role was explosive. 

But this is a film, and a performance, that have not stood the test of time. Judy is meant to be playing a very working class woman thrown into wealth. She’s tacky, abrasive and insecure. Her husband is the 1950s equivalent of Trump (and Broderick Crawford is absolutely brilliant), and her evolution into a more astute, tenacious and comfortable human being is meant to have us cheering and laughing. But jokes fall dramatically flat. Recurring jokes that could have built up either fade out or come in too late. William Holden is an immensely boring love interest and, worst of all, Judy is very stiff. She has the voice down pat, but her body movements and facial expressions don’t vary in the slightest. Rosalind Russell would have nailed it. 

The result is a pretty flat and outdated comedy. The themes of education, wealth, political power and corruption resonate strongly today especially in a soon-to-be post-Trump world. But the characters aren’t relatable or grounded or well acted enough for us to get involved.

Judy’s fellow nominees range from stronger to the absolute strongest. We’ve touched on Bette and Anne in our Best Pictures blog project as All About Eve nabbed the most coveted award that night. Bette has also had two blog posts about her previous Best Actress wins in Dangerous and Jezebel, and we’ve done a “Best of the Rest” feature on Gloria too so feel free to have a gander at those. But Eleanor Parker’s performance is also a strong one and I’d recommend her film Caged particularly if you’ve seen other prison dramas such as Shawshank or Orange is the New Black. I was struck by how gritty it was (there are fights, abuse, a suicide, a murder) and it addresses similar themes of prison corruption and abuses of power that Orange tackles especially in its fourth and fifth seasons, albeit without the bittersweet humour and sexual references. It also boasts some excellent supporting performances from the ever-reliable Agnes Moorhead (who we saw in Johnny Belinda) as the kind hearted but exhausted prison warden and Hope Emerson as the nefarious bullying matron (who got a Best Supporting Actress nomination), and it’s one of the few movies of the era to have an almost entirely female cast.

But if there were any justice in the world, Bette or Gloria would have walked away with the Oscar. I’m convinced that having Bette’s co-star, Anne, in the same category split the vote too much. Plus, Bette and Gloria were playing very similar roles (older actresses struggling with the idea that their career is ending in a youth-obsessed industry) which probably split the vote even further. Add to that Judy’s brewing popularity and her fame from the stage version, and it’s no wonder that she walked away with the prize. 

Judy’s career and life were, sadly, short-lived. Although she had done a handful of movies before 1950, Born Yesterday was her big break, and she maintained a strong (if now somewhat forgotten) career in comedies and musicals in Hollywood and on Broadway throughout the '50s. But like several stars she became a victim of McCarthyism, and was investigated for alleged links to communism in the early '50s. She was advised to play dumb by her legal counsel (in fact, she basically imitated her own character in Born Yesterday). This worked and she was acquitted, which just shows how insanely superficial and idiotic these investigations were.

Her career continued but her life was cut short by breast cancer. She died in 1965 aged just 43. She was survived by her son Jonathan who became a film producer, but he died in July this year. 

Highlight

Broderick Crawford’s performance outshines, well, basically everyone else in this. We saw him in Best Picture winner All the King’s Men for which he also won Best Actor. A lively and unpredictable character actor, he was very much the John Goodman of his day.

Lowlight

I think this is the first time that I’m going to say the Best Actress winner didn’t deserve it (GASP!), and not just because she defeated the scene-stealing performances of Davis, Swanson and Baxter. Perhaps acting styles have changed but even within the context of the era her performance feels rigid, unfunny and blank.

Mark

2/10

Doug says...

This is an absolute travesty. Judy Holliday is unfunny and uninventive, and yet somehow beat both Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson at their very best. 

The film is thin, with a sort of Pygmalion vibe - but there’s still a part for Holliday to shine in, and yet she absolutely doesn’t. It’s a stiff, one note performance with a ‘comic’ high pitched voice and no serious thought given to how the role develops over time. It’s also utterly unbelievable - a scene at the beginning when Billie Dawn is incredibly rude to visitors is, I imagine, meant to be funny. Actually you just dislike her. It’s also an annoying repeat of ‘glamorous silly woman’ tropes that frankly have no business existing at a time when Holliday’s peers are creating layered, fascinating character portrayals. 

She didn’t deserve it, and unless there is some contextual reason why she got this, this must go down as one of the Academy’s utter failures. 

Concentrating instead on her fellow nominees, all of whom are significantly better, this year boasted a superb array of performances. Bette Davis in All About Eve delivers cinematic history - a performance that is so layered and unashamedly powerful that it continues to feature in memes and references seventy years later. Perhaps the reason Davis didn’t get the Oscar was that - rather stupidly - her co-star Anne Baxter was put up for Best Actress too instead of Supporting, and the vote may have been split. Baxter is brilliant too, providing an insidious and malevolent counterbalance to Davis’s histrionics. These roles aren’t easy - as the rather dull stage adaptation in 2019 showed. Both Davis and Baxter are phenomenal. 

The lesser known one at the time was surely Eleanor Parker (later Baroness of All Switzerland, or whatever she was in The Sound of Music). Parker is fab, miles ahead of Holliday if not quite up to the other nominees’ standards. She shows a slow transformation from innocent, terrified girl to seasoned jailbird with commendable realism and believability. She essentially does what takes Harper several seasons of Orange is the New Black to do in under two hours. It’s a particularly good film too, never losing pace. Parker is highly watchable and may easily become one of our ‘Best of the Rest’ in time. 

And then there is Gloria Swanson - an old movie star from the ‘20s and ‘30s herself. As the destructive ageing star Norma Desmond, Swanson gives a masterclass in the subtleties of overacting. This may sound like an oxymoron but it’s really not. Norma - deranged and alone - still performs her daily life as if it were a silent film, and Swanson draws on all her knowledge of this style of performance so that it never quite tips over into full on camp. Her delivery of lines such as ‘I am big! It’s the pictures that got small!’ and ‘I’m ready for my close up Mr DeMille’ aren’t overdone, tinged with a real sadness for us, the audience that sees her delusion for what it is. These lines have since become camp classics - and in a recent production of Lloyd Webber’s musical version, the leading actress overdid both horrifically, practically winking at the audience as she said them. This is again a sign of how difficult it is to make this stuff actually powerful - and a testament to Swanson’s mastery. 

So in conclusion, this battle was between Swanson and Davis - and perhaps there was a splitting of these votes too, leaving Holliday to scrabble to an unjust win. Whatever happened, this remains the most upsetting win of the project to date. 

Highlight

There was a better film here somewhere - a stronger script and a better leading actress (as Paul says - where was Rosalind Russell?) could have been actually Oscar-worthy.

Lowlight

This? This beat Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson? I’ve had it.

Mark

0.5/10