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<TR><TD width=60% valign=center><Font Face=Garamond Color="#003399" Size=+3><b>Best Actress 1944</b></Font><br>
<b><Font Color="#660066">Oscar Winner:</Font> <Font Face=Garamond>Ingrid Bergman, <Font Color="#003399" Face=Times><i>Gaslight</i></Font></Font></b><br>
<Font Color="#660066">Nominees:</Font> Claudette Colbert, <Font Face=Times Color="#003399"><i>Since You Went Away</i></Font><br>
<Font Color="#FFFFCC">Nominees:</Font> Bette Davis, <Font Face=Times Color="#003399"><i>Mr. Skeffington</i></Font><br>
<Font Color="#FFFFCC">Nominees:</Font> Greer Garson, <Font Color="#003399"><i>Mrs. Parkington</i></Font><br>
<Font Color="#FFFFCC">Nominees:</Font> Barbara Stanwyck, <Font Color="#003399"><i>Double Indemnity</i></Font></Font><br>
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<Font Color="#660066">The Field:</Font> <Font Color=Red Size=-1>★ ★</Font> <Font Color=Gray Size=-1>★ ★ ★</Font><br>
1943-44 were the years when Ingrid Bergman went supernova, and one suspects that a year after losing to best friend Jennifer Jones, she would have won the Oscar for
any half-decent performance in any well-heeled studio vehicle. If one were forcing analogies, it wouldn't take too much strain to liken Bergman's <i>Gaslight</i> win
to Nicole Kidman's <a href=actres02.html>victory</a> for <i>The Hours</i>, one year after racing to the head of the Hollywood pack, commercially, glamorously, and
artistically. (I'll have more to say about Bergman/Kidman connections later.) Like Kidman's Virginia Woolf, Bergman's Paula Alquist is a polished, frequently
fascinating creation that nevertheless isn't quite confusable with the actress's best work; in yet another parallel, this voting
outcome, a perfect storm of Oscar logic and public adulation, came at the expense of a superior performance by a frustratingly statue-less genius giving
one of her most iconic performances. Colbert holds down the Zellweger/<i>Chicago</i> position of capably anchoring a Best Picture heavyweight (though <i>Chicago</i> obviously
entranced the Academy more than <i>Since You Went Away</i> did, despite all of Selznick's special pleading). And that leaves the other two nominees. If Diane Lane
is a divisive case in '02, where some people discern a peak-level performance and I see nothing special, and if Salma Hayek is generally acknowledged as reaping a nom
more for her heroic acts of producing and nurturing <i>Frida</i> than for her actual thesping, then it bears mentioning that Garson and Davis are even more dispiriting
in their homonymous prestige pictures, the silly <i>Mrs. Parkington</i> and the ghastly, vegetative <i>Mr. Skeffington</i>. They exemplify the age-old habit of AMPAS
voters genuflecting to their darlings. Particularly with a quintessentially peachy but moonish Judy Garland, an exquisitely enigmatic Gene Tierney, and an ideally cast,
exuberantly garish Betty Hutton waiting in the wings, it's a damn shame—and makes for a serious dilution of the '44 vintage—that the Academy couldn't wean itself
of inveterate preferences: that is, Davis's sixth nomination in seven years, Garson's fourth in five, and possibly the least justifiable that either woman ever garnered.
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<img src=acspck44.jpg align=right width=200 height=75 hspace=10 vspace=5><Font Face=Garamond Color="#003399" Size=+2><b>Ranking Oscar's Ballot</b></Font><br>
<Font Size=-2> <br></Font>
<Font Color="#660066"><b>My Pick:</b></Font><br>
<b><Font Face=Garamond>Barbara Stanwyck, <a href=doubindm.html><Font Face=Times><i>Double Indemnity</i></Font></a></b> <Font Color=Red Size=-1>★ ★ ★ ★</Font> <Font Color=Gray Size=-1>★</Font></Font><br>
Undoubtedly like a lot of people of my generation, I came to know who Barbara Stanwyck was through her iconic femme-fatale role as Phyllis Dietrichson.
As inevitable as this feels from the standpoint of Hollywood lore, it's more surprising and, if I may admit it, a bit disappointing that this should be
so given the generic breadth of Stanwyck's body of work. Stanwyck is in no way a dated presence within <i>Double Indemnity</i>, but from an idiomatic
standpoint, her particular brand of toughness resonates more in the fierce, compact, and erotically freer world of pre-Code Hollywood than in the heavier,
more psychologically abstracted world of noir, especially as filtered through Wilder's filters of irony. There are times in <i>Double Indemnity</i>
where Stanwyck feels a bit hemmed-in by Phyllis's pre-structured presence as an embodiment of venality, or when Wilder's fetishization of certain holistic
attitudes or physical impressions (that awful hairdo, those angular postures and about-face conversations in the grocery store). But that's enough of
against-the-grain qualification of a tough, sexy, deservedly iconic performance. Phyllis's casually undomestic remark that "I never know what's in the
icebox" is even more inimitably Stanwyck than her drowsy-cobra slumps in her generously stuffed chaises and armchairs, but she pretty much nails those,
too. She enters hungrily and smartly into scenarios of emergency (caught behind the door) or of carnality (everything that happens once she gets inside).
I appreciate that Stanwyck seems unpersuaded to the script's conviction that Phyllis is "rotten to the heart," a line she under-sells more than many
actresses would have. She plays her first sequence of coaxing Walter Neff into her murderous stratagems not as the first, purposefully amateur stage of
a larger plot but as an imperfectly managed ploy; she doesn't harden or elevate Phyllis into a diabolical genius, but a woman who unmistakably dislikes
her husband and dislikes her step-daughter (frankly, I do too), though as the plans intensify and the killing gets closer, Phyllis sure takes to it. But
she's never <i>completely</i> comfortable. "But we've been through all that so many times!" she exclaims to Walter as he forces a final run-through for
how they will off the doomed Mr. Dietrichson. Many a <i>femme fatale</i> would take cold, cruel, bored pity on Walter's incessant repetition of
well-choreographed plans. Stanwyck instead summons a bit of frightened panic, along with the self-assurance. Phyllis and <i>Double Indemnity</i> are more
interesting because, no matter how she's remembered, Phyllis is not an implacable villain but a woman who's having to work at becoming a monster. She's not
a pro, though she sure is getting there fast. Or, she <i>was</i>.<br>
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<Font Color="#660066">From There:</Font><br>
<b><Font Face=Garamond>Ingrid Bergman, <a href=gaslight.html><Font Face=Times><i>Gaslight</i></Font></a></b> <Font Color=Red Size=-1>★ ★ ★</Font> <Font Color=Gray Size=-1>★ ★</Font></Font><br>
Remembering that today's movie stars would be nothing and nowhere without the classic ones who paved their way, I imagine Ingrid
Bergman in the early 40s as the key pretext for Nicole Kidman in the early 00s: the sudden fluorescence of glamour and skill; the blend of remoteness and
warmth; the aspirations toward top-level artistry with world-class directors (Rossellini, Hitchcock, Cukor) despite the evident affection for popular
entertainment; the sense of being quickly at home in America but never completely <i>of</i> it. Most importantly in relation to her trophy-winning work
in <i>Gaslight</i>, I often see Bergman working at her performances a bit more than she might want us to, even though the sense of total, self-critical
commitment to her work is part of what's so fascinating about her, as are the undeniable facility and charge she brings to her most impassioned turns.
<i>Gaslight</i> catches Bergman in just this mode of giving a strong performance, as a naïve and haunted singer turned terrorized wife, that nonetheless doubles
as a game audition for the same performance. Bergman doesn't quite convince of her blushing youth or her fine musicianship in her lip-synching opener, but you
don't have to watch her for long to feel the sincere attachment to the character, to the scenario, and to the audience. How does she do this so fast? How
does she transmit the sense of a spectacular performance at almost all times, even when it's a bit stiff or stuck on its own surface? This role, as
guided by Cukor, bears strong technical demands: Bergman keeps bobbing and listing uneasily at the waist and joints—literalizing, perhaps too much, the puppeteering dynamics
of the conjugal suspense plot. Her Paula also has to seem smart enough to piece together what <i>might</i> be happening to her, but credulous enough that we
aren't too hard on her for deducing the specifics a lot more slowly than we do, and she has to negotiate some awfully quick vacillations among romantic fancy
(spontaneously dancing in the living room!) to the outer extremes of anguish and self-doubt. What Bergman uncorks to those ends is often quite astonishing,
especially in the context of 40s studio acting. One scene, where she admits an animal howl and then hurls herself into the stairwell, distills the character's
plight so powerfully that it might have saved the movie a few gratuitous scenes of Bergman emoting in more or less uniform ways. She certainly nails the
finale, when she carries the script's fixation on operatic madness to a table-turning extreme. And yet, the studiedness of the performance often comes
across as though Bergman is trying strenuously to please the director, rather than Paula Alquist trying to please her tyrannical, censorious husband. Bergman
has a great expression for brooding thought, but it's basically one expression that gets a whole lot of working out, and she captures the <i>degree</i> to
which Paula suffers a bit more handily than the <i>fineness</i> by which Paula receives, absorbs, and emits her distress. In other words, in a psychological
thriller, Bergman handles the feeling more ably than the psychology, and her characteristically diligent approach to acting sits ever so slightly at odds with the
poignant guilelessness of the woman she's playing. Later Bergman performances would improve in marked ways on some of these very templates, but she's still a
wonder in <i>Gaslight</i>, entrancing on a first viewing and holding up sturdily through several more. And when she's "on," which is admirably often, you really can see the immortal career
that's coming.<br>
<br>
<b><Font Face=Garamond>Claudette Colbert, <a href=sincywen.html><Font Face=Times><i>Since You Went Away</i></Font></a></b> <Font Color=Red Size=-1>★ ★ ★</Font> <Font Color=Gray Size=-1>★ ★</Font></Font><br>
I've never made a secret of my susceptibility to the gorgeously direct, saucer-faced, sexily smart Claudette Colbert. I'm pleased as punch that when Selznick decided to
construct an explicit American answer to <i>Mrs. Miniver</i>, if a bit more self-consciously Big, he alighted on Colbert, ten years after <i>It Happened One Night</i>,
as its polestar; from my perspective, she has all the vivacity and charm of a Greer Garson, but she was certainly less of a fresh property to the public. It's a treat,
then, how both the actress and the film draw on Colbert's standing persona of gleaming, mellifluous groundedness and transparency as a credential for this role, rather
than the kind of grinning, flower-sniffing, ginger-haired adorability that ballasts so much of Garson's work as Kay Miniver. After all, tis is the gal who, faced with
poverty and solo motherhood <a href=imitat34.html>once before</a>, parlayed flapjackery into a Midas scheme of familial protection and fiscal profit... so if anyone's up
to the challenge of riding out food rations, domestic economies, and maternal stewardship, it's gotta be Claudette. This residue of star persona is a big help to Colbert
since the script (written by Selznick) keeps presenting her a paragon to embody more than a character to fill out. Like Meryl Streep in the recent <a href=itscompl.html><i>It's
Complicated</i></a>, she's got little but her subtly glammed-up spunk and her years' accumulation of audience good will to get her through the faux-suspense of this mostly
by-the-numbers homefront melodrama. She gets more of a citrus tang into her forestalling of amorous Joseph Cotten than a Jane Wyman or, based on the evidence of <i>I
Remember Mama</i>, an Irene Dunne would have done; when she says, "I like you best when you're not thinking," she doesn't sound like a prude or a sanctified cold fish so
much as an easygoing woman who's both happy to be found attractive and a bit weary of repeated advances. Nonetheless, she has to do an awful lot of beatific gazing and wise, furrowed
worrying in the movie, which is perhaps a bit overfond of the device of Colbert gamely holding herself together through some anxious goodbyes and then letting her fears pour out
in quick, halting breaks or breaths, before or after closing a door. She can't do much to smooth out the abruptness of her character's transition into a zealous, sleeve-rolling
shipyard laborer. And though it's a credit to her generosity to other cast members, especially the younger ones, that Colbert doesn't appear pressured to "win" all of her
scenes, I wish she were slightly less content with fading to the background as the narrative and the photography start falling palpably in love with Jennifer Jones, playing
her daughter. Basically, the performance has the easygoing, persuasive unaffectedness but also the concise, professional dispatch that you expect from Colbert. It's a bit
stock that the movie ends with one of those scenes that's rigged out as a Big Emotional Release for a woman who has scrupulously managed her emotions and expectations for
the previous three hours, but Colbert's such a practiced champ that she makes the moment ring.<br>
<br>
<b><Font Face=Garamond>Greer Garson, <a href=mrsparkg.html><Font Face=Times><i>Mrs. Parkington</i></Font></a></b> <Font Color=Red Size=-1>★</Font> <Font Color=Gray Size=-1>★ ★ ★ ★</Font></Font><br>
Greer Garson is such a good-natured, vivacious presence that it's difficult to come down too hard even on her least substantial performances. And as far
as bad movies go, <i>Mrs. Parkington</i> has the considerable virtue of being a total fruit salad of silly performances and amusingly strained plots and
character arcs, which is more than you can say for stuff like <i>Dragon Seed</i> or, uh, <i>Mr. Skeffington</i>. <i>Mrs. Parkington</i> is erratically structured around a 1938 story
where Garson is wearing so much old-age makeup she is playing the mother of Gladys Cooper (who, by the way, is an absolute stitch as a filthy-rich, alcoholic snipe
perpetually describing herself as "nervous").
I appreciate that Garson doesn't neutralize all the oxygen by pretending to act in a more serious movie than this one is, but all the mugging and face-pulling
and head-cocking and elbow-throwing she throws into the transparent conceit of impersonating an 84-year-old still falls well short of what you'd want to
nominate for an Oscar. Of course, if it's discomfiting to see actors trying to play an age that's too old for them, we surely know it's worse when they
try to play too young, which is what the second and I suppose the "main" track of <i>Mrs. Parkington</i> quickly requires of our Greer, her voice flying
higher than the Red Baron ever flew in an attempt to play a disingenuous hotelkeeper's daughter in a silver-mining town. Her performance is repeatedly
pushed to unbecoming extremes, even if you always root for someone as pretty and bubbly as Greer: her frozen-faced grief at the calamitous death of her
mother is only slightly less underwhelming than her ecstatic acceptance of an outlandishly bullying marriage proposal from the inevitable Walter Pidgeon,
giving a grossly distasteful turn as the prospector-tycoon whose money-mindedness has cost Garson her mother and her home. Over the rest of <i>Mrs.
Parkington</i>'s two sudsy hours, she'll look freakishly discombobulated at the very thought of champagne, then hilariously bile-suppressing at the revelation
of a family misdeed, and she'll rely on the disappointingly desperate tic of blowing impetuously on a single curl of her famous ginger locks in order to
express charm and resolve. Garson is always best when her natural effervescence comes through in the simplest ways and is most slowly and generously
tempered for the story. <i>Mrs. Parkington</i> invites a few moments like that, and she obviously relishes a nasty, barely concealed catfight in polite
company with a chafing husband-thief played by Tala Birell. Still, there's no way the nod for <i>Mrs. Parkington</i> represents anything more than Hollywood bussing her
cheek by reflex, at the height of her <i>Photoplay</i>-poll popularity and in the fourth of five consecutive years of finding herself on Oscar's short list.
Love you, Greer, but not for this.<br>
<br>
<b><Font Face=Garamond>Bette Davis, <Font Color="#003399" Face=Times><i>Mr. Skeffington</i></Font></b> <Font Color=Red Size=-1>★</Font> <Font Color=Gray Size=-1>★ ★ ★ ★</Font></Font><br>
Fanny Trellis was the last of Bette Davis's Oscar-nominated parts I encountered, and as astonishing as it seems that she could get short-listed for a
performance that's worse than the one in <i>The Star</i>, she at best borders on the unendurable throughout <i>Mr. Skeffington</i>. At worst she
actively accedes to utter intolerability. The catch with Davis is that you still see the fascinating persona and the ambitious technician underneath
this garish presentation of a stupid part in a bad movie derived at exhausting length from one of the worst scripts ever furnished to a top-budget 1940s
Hollywood superproduction. Davis had a well-known éclat for allowing herself to look ugly in character, but if it's lamely embarrassing
to watch Greer Garson play too young and then too old in a featherweight saga like <i>Mrs. Parkington</i>, it's solemnly excruciating to watch Davis strain
to such kabuki excess as a vain, callow, but universally lusted-after society belle at the beginning of <i>Mr. Skeffington</i>, and then to render her
austere and impenetrably nasty take on a 1920s flapper who cheats and swills and smokes her way through a speakeasy, and then to vandalize her image, her talent, and
her character more thoroughly than ever as the shrill, balding, decrepit monstrosity that Fanny ultimately becomes. Whatever interest inheres in <i>Mr.
Skeffington</i> abides in the titular character played by Claude Rains, so as the movie reveals itself more and more as a benighted vehicle for
Davis—who is either seizing a chance to feed her appetite for the grotesque or hoping against hope that the only way out of this farrago is to play
it <i>really</i> big—the grating atonality of her performance gets braided tighter and tighter to an impression that she's prolonging her own debasement,
pulling focus in a bulbous, 146-minute movie that she should be trying to work her way out of. <i>The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex</i> proves that
Davis can make odd, almost insectile physical mannerism quite interesting. Film after film of the late 30s and early 40s proves how much neurosis, gutsy emotional candor,
and sinful predisposition she could evoke with a clean, quick slice of her swordlike gifts. There is no reason or benefit to her heavy, fussy, inconsistent
approach to Fanny, even allowing for the misbegotten story and direction. Where her ugly-duck scenes in <i>Now, Voyager</i> or her lip-smacking grotesquerie
in <i>Baby Jane</i> reveal a risky, hard-driving artist having fun and finding meaning with harsh tones and with all manner of deceptively controlled excess,
<i>Mr. Skeffington</i> just
plays like an exercise in contemptuousness of her character, of her vehicle, and maybe of herself. It's like watching Mary Pickford's terrible part in
<i>Coquette</i> played by Edith Piaf or Maria Callas at their most stridently masochistic and unrestrained. I hope this constitutes no one's first exposure to this
legendary artist.<br>
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<Font Size=+1><Font Color="#660066">Who gets your vote in this field, and on my dream ballot below?</Font> <a href=actres44polls.html style="text-decoration:none"><Font Color="#003399">VOTE HERE!</Font></a></Font><br>
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<img src=acsfav44.jpg align=right hspace=10 vspace=5><Font Face=Garamond Color="#003399" Size=+2><b>My Favorites from 1944:</b></Font><br>
<Font Size=-1 Face=Garamond><b>(As determined by years of Oscar eligibility)</b></Font><br>
<br>
<b><Font Color="#660066">My Pick:</Font> <Font Face=Garamond>Barbara Stanwyck, <a href=doubindm.html><i>Double Indemnity</i></a></Font></b><br>
<Font Color="#660066">Nominees:</Font> Ingrid Bergman, <a href=gaslight.html><i>Gaslight</i></a><br>
<Font Color="#FFFFCC">Nominees:</Font> Judy Garland, <a href=meetmest.html><i>Meet Me in St. Louis</i></a><br>
<Font Color="#FFFFCC">Nominees:</Font> Betty Hutton, <a href=mircmorg.html><i>The Miracle of Morgan's Creek</i></a><br>
<Font Color="#FFFFCC">Nominees:</Font> Gene Tierney, <a href=laura.html><i>Laura</i></a><br>
<br>
<Font Face=Garamond Color="#660066"><b>Honorable Mentions:</b></Font>
Claudette Colbert, <a href=sincywen.html><i>Since You Went Away</i></a>;
Joan Fontaine, <a href=janeyr44.html><i>Jane Eyre</i></a>
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<br>
<Font Face=Garamond Color="#660066"><b>Also-Rans (alpha):</b></Font>
Ann Carter, <a href=curscatp.html><i>The Curse of the Cat People</i></a>;
Bette Davis, <a href=mrskeffg.html><i>Mr. Skeffington</i></a>;
Greer Garson, <a href=mrsparkg.html><i>Mrs. Parkington</i></a>;
Susan Hayward, <a href=hairyape.html><i>The Hairy Ape</i></a>;
Katharine Hepburn, <a href=dragseed.html><i>Dragon Seed</i></a>;
Ruth Hussey, <a href=uninvitd.html><i>The Uninvited</i></a>;
Ella Raines, <a href=hailconq.html><i>Hail the Conquering Hero</i></a>;
Gail Russell, <a href=uninvitd.html><i>The Uninvited</i></a><br>
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<Font Face=Garamond Color="#660066"><b>Gourmet Prospects:</b></Font>
Tallulah Bankhead, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Lifeboat</i></Font>;
Claire Trevor, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Murder, My Sweet</i></Font><br>
<br>
<Font Face=Garamond Color="#660066"><b>Further Research:</b></Font>
Marlene Dietrich, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Kismet</i></Font>;
Irene Dunne, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The White Cliffs of Dover</i></Font>;
Rita Hayworth, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Cover Girl</i></Font>;
Virginia Mayo, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The Princess and the Pirate</i></Font>;
Michèle Morgan, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Passage to Marseille</i></Font>;
Merle Oberon, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The Lodger</i></Font>;
Maria Palmer, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Days of Glory</i></Font>;
Eleanor Parker, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Between Two Worlds</i></Font>;
Ella Raines, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Phantom Lady</i></Font>;
Ella Raines, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The Suspect</i></Font>;
Marjorie Reynolds, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Ministry of Fear</i></Font><br>
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