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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This? This beat Bette Davis and Gloria Swanson? I’ve had it.
Mark
0.5/10
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