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<TR><TD width=60% valign=center><Font Face=Garamond Color="#003399" Size=+3><b>Best Actress 1966</b></Font><br>
<b><Font Color="#660066">Oscar Winner:</Font> <Font Face=Garamond>Elizabeth Taylor, <a href=whosva.html><i>Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?</i></a></Font></b><br>
<Font Color="#660066">Nominees:</Font> Anouk Aimée, <a href=manwoman.html><i>A Man and a Woman</i></a><br>
<Font Color="#FFFFCC">Nominees:</Font> Ida Kaminská, <Font Color="#3333FF"><i>The Shop on Main Street</i></Font><br>
<Font Color="#FFFFCC">Nominees:</Font> Lynn Redgrave, <Font Color="#3333FF"><i>Georgy Girl</i></Font><br>
<Font Color="#FFFFCC">Nominees:</Font> Vanessa Redgrave, <Font Color="#3333FF"><i>Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment</i></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>
How to imagine what 67-year-old Ukrainian-born theater actress Kaminská must have thought about being short-listed side by side with three young things,
lending their faces and personalities to the tangential, kaleidoscopic styles of swinger-set cinema? I wish I loved the performances by Aimée or the
Redgraves just a little more. None of them crack the three-star ceiling for me, and none of them would likely be on the list (Vanessa least of all, given
her weird vehicle) if more hometown heavyweights had had vehicles in contention; there's a sense of the Academy looking to coronote a second consecutive
Julie Christie. But it's a fetching trio of calling-cards, somehow more ingratiating as a collectivity than on their individual bases, and limited more by
scripts and directorial aims than by talent and aplomb. That's the hardest case to make for Lynn Redgrave, which is why she's lowest on this list, despite
giving Taylor her only real competition for awards that year. Which wasn't <i>much</i> competition, least of all with Oscar...and who, besides Kaminská,
can blame him?
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<img src=acspck66.jpg align=right hspace=10 vspace=5><Font Face=Garamond Color="#003399" Size=+2><b>Ranking Oscar's Ballot</b></Font><br>
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<Font Color="#660066"><b>My Pick:</b></Font><br>
<b><Font Face=Garamond>Elizabeth Taylor, <Font Color="#3333FF"><i>Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?</i></Font></Font></b> <Font Color=Red Size=-1>★ ★ ★ ★</Font> <Font Color=Gray Size=-1>★</Font><br>
It probably takes an even stronger and more confident actress than Taylor, and a less understandably self-conscious star, to marshal that opening sequence
of <i>Woolf</i> ("What's it <i>from</i>, George, what's it <i>from</i>??") as more than an initiation ritual for the audience, a full-dress preview of the
completely unTaylorized moods, cadences, and look of this performance. This is what it's like to watch Taylor waddle across a campus quad and gnaw on cold
fried chicken. This is how it sounds when a Taylor hen pecks. She is already compelling in this prologue, physically loose (though not uncontrolled) and
temperamentally engaging (though not exactly laying out the welcome mat). But the performance really fertilizes when she follows her ulcerated hubby upstairs
for a quick roll on the mattress, and then it explodes into vibrant, shifting, richly suggestive life once the whole quartet of players is in place. Without
ever letting go of her blowzy theatricality, and keeping it just this side of schtick (basically the same groove where Martha lives her life), Taylor still
makes specific decisions about what Martha feels and how she sounds and moves when she thinks about her father, her son, her husband, her libido, her femininity,
her drinking, her jealousies, her disappointments. She solves one of <i>Woolf</i>'s huge hurdles by convincing us a hostess who simply doesn't allow her guests
to leave—and as a hostess, period. She actually seems interested in these people she helps to decimate. If Taylor hasn't quite cracked her big monologue
outside the roadhouse or the dizzying opacity of the notorious climax and conclusion, it's a testament to the extraordinary difficulty and, some would say,
the unevenness of the play as much as to her own thesping. She's vivid, she's committed, she changes mood on a dime, sometimes in the middle of a line, without
scrawling her way arbitrarily through the script. I would say that only three times has Oscar so fully and rightly rewarded an actress for hitting a career-defining
pinnacle of a performance by teasing our own awareness of her stardom, <i>and</i> hauling out the subliminal undercurrents and dirty laundry just underneath
that familiar persona, <i>and</i> deploying all of this in the service of the character pre-eminently, but also of making herself about three times more interesting
than ever before, just as audiences wondered if the best was in the past. I'm thinking of Crawford in '45, Roberts in <a href=actres00.html>'00</a>, and
Taylor right here.
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<Font Color="#660066">From There:</Font><br>
<b><Font Face=Garamond>Ida Kaminská, <Font Color="#3333FF"><i>The Shop on Main Street</i></Font></Font></b> <Font Color=Red Size=-1>★ ★ ★ ★</Font> <Font Color=Gray Size=-1>★</Font><br>
Ida Kaminská's performance won't be for everybody, at least not right away. If you're an Emil Jannings fan, or an enthusiast of Eastern European theatrical
style in general, you're likely to be hooked by her determined, suggestive, but slightly parodic delineation of the old, hunched, hard-of-hearing Jewish
proprietress of a buttons-and-notions store, right on the main plaza of a Czech village that has just been absorbed into Third Reich overrule. If, though, your
hackles tend to rise when confronted with long, mugging expressions and large, expressionist gestures, it might just seem like Kaminská is sentimentally
rolling through the part, with too much Jewish-mama stereotyping and merry-widow sentimentality, while the heavy lifting is relegated to the carefully judged
images and edits and the lead performance by Josef Króner as Tony Brtko (arrogant and hypocritical, but not quite insensitive). Even with a dim but potent memory
stored away of the film's and Kaminská's excellence, I got a little impatient with her during the first hour of my second viewing. But as the nightmare of the town's occupation
and, worse, the psychological colonizations and, worst, the ominous deportations begins to encroach, Kaminská not only deepens our connection to her character,
and plays her fear and despair more directly, she also reveals an impressive scheme behind the earlier movements in the performance. "I know you're only
pretending! You knew what was happening!" Tony shouts, in a long-escalating and grotesquely self-serving context: he's drunk, exorcising his own guilt, and
desperate to save his own ass. But, in his reprehensible way, which could never be "right," is he onto <i>something</i>? Kaminská's elaborate mimesis of
deafness and ignorance starts to crack, such that we grasp it in retrospect as the character's own semi-willful mimesis. What <i>did</i> she know? What
did she understand, and what does she <i>now</i> understand? Without violating the tact or the formal lightness of touch that characterize this film (and
many other touchstones of the mid-1960s Czech New Wave), Kaminská constructs a performance that seems, occasionally, too heavy or stagebound or
old-fashioned but reveals itself as an inspired, deeply affecting, and ethically courageous decision to speculate about a victim's own denials—this
isn't the first time this widow has refused a truth—and about the moments when disavowal is forced to give way to—something else. Her line-reading
of the single word "pogrom" raises more ghosts and asks more cutting questions than do most Holocaust-themed films, even those with direct representations
of the kind this film refuses.<br>
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<b><Font Face=Garamond>Vanessa Redgrave, <Font Color="#3333FF"><i>Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment</i></Font></Font></b> <Font Color=Red Size=-1>★ ★</Font> <Font Color=Gray Size=-1>★ ★ ★</Font><br>
The "swinging" pictures of the British New Wave rank among my least favorite subgenre of film, as I've probably lamented before. However energized by <i>nouvelle
vague</i> experiments in framing and montage and by the "kitchen sink" politics of then-contemporary English films, <i>Morgan</i> and <i>The Knack</i> and
<i>Darling</i> and so many of them seem to struggle with making the cultural critique or the human interest remotely sincere, much less compatible. Thank
goodness that Vanessa Redgrave in <i>Morgan</i>, giving by far the most comfortable of her 1966 performances—she's as natural here as she is self-consciously
"mysterious" in <a href=favfilmsblowup.html target="_new"><i>Blow-Up</i></a> and merely decorative in <i>A Man for All Seasons</i>—actually commits to
being reflective about the demented neediness and insufferable pranksterism of her recently ex- husband (David Warner, unnerving in the title role). She
also allows the character to be truly excited by Morgan's unrepentant outlandishness, and then saddened by his outright inability (or refusal) to rein it in.
Not only does Redgrave avoid giving the same baffled/fuming/adoring reaction shot throughout the whole picture, as anyone might well have done—as I certainly
did, the first time I saw <i>Morgan</i>—but she's able to use her reactions to Morgan as a credible way to characterize what she wants from or lacks in
her new relationship with Robert Stephens' Charlie. All well and good, and she's perfeclty lovely to boot. But, almost inevitably, it's still a limited
performance: what to do when the script asks you to play a woman who's supposed to hear the line, "Did you know it is generally agreed that there can be no
such thing as rape between man and wife," and find it a charmingly uncouth expression of jealousy? Vanessa's not as "groovy" as these films sometimes want
to make her (<i>Blow-Up</i> did it, too, in that unbearable moment where she rocks out to some music while smoking a joint), and the scene where she stands
up in Stephens' convertible for a spontaneous, "madcap" bout of singing just looks uncomfortable. It's a miracle, given the role and the film, that this
isn't a one-star performance, and that it's in fact quite close to a three-star performance. But there's an incomplete woman on the page and in Karel Reisz's
mind, or at least in his priorities; Redgrave fills her in as far as she's able, which is real work, but she's too green as yet in 1966 to go further, and
rest easier.<br>
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<b><Font Face=Garamond>Anouk Aimée, <a href=manwoman.html><i>A Man and a Woman</i></a></Font></b> <Font Color=Red Size=-1>★ ★</Font> <Font Color=Gray Size=-1>★ ★ ★</Font><br>
Next in the <i>nouvelle</i> trio is Aimée, working in a French film that looks like British New Wave, instead of the other way around. Talk about beautiful
blanks: as I wrote in my <a href=manwoman.html>full review</a>, the movie never gets past its crushingly over-simplified ideas about thrill-seeking Men
and beautiful, mysterious Women. And while my partner has often made the point, quite correctly, that in my ideal video store, the biggest section would be
called "A Woman's Heart Is an Ocean of Secrets," I can't get behind a film that doesn't flesh out or complicate those secrets. Lelouch's driving thesis in
the film links mystery and conflict not so much to personality as to risk and grief, and Aimée is stuck playing less someone who is interesting on her
own terms than someone to whom dramatically convenient things have happened. Seizing what narrow opportunity inheres here, Aimée allows herself to "act"
as little as possible and to show Lelouch, and the world, how a regular gal looks as she grieves a stuntman husband (blown to bits in the line of duty!), as she
gads about with her young daughter on weekend trips to her boarding school, as she starts opening up to another visiting parent (Jean-Louis Trintignant, of
<i>The Conformist</i> and <i>Red</i>), as she makes up her mind what to say or not say about exactly how dead her husband is (I'll leave this for you to
discover). Her playing is sensitive and allows for remarkable identification; she is so especially good at playing a kind of self-effacement that is not
exaggerated, as it often is in movies, all the way to chronic bashfulness—the dinner scene with Trintignant and their kids is the selling-point here—that
you can almost, almost, momentarily forget that she is one of the world's most extraordinarily beautiful women. And almost forget how little else she has
to play. Fans of acting that "looks easy" or is really "just being" will find a lot to love here, and there's nothing to dislike, except how Anne Gauthier's
big shift, deciding that she <i>loves</i> this two-time acquaintance, exuberantly, instead of just being turned on by him, gets fatally overdrawn by the
script—and, inevitably, unrecuperated by the actress, who's had to key the rest of her performance to how <i>under</i>drawn the character is elsewhere.
Aimée has to get by quite often on how eminently, alluringly photographable her face is, and how charismatic and casual she's able to look in (incessant)
montage sequences, not on any particular technique or firm, specific handle on character.<br>
<br>
<b><Font Face=Garamond>Lynn Redgrave, <Font Color="#3333FF"><i>Georgy Girl</i></Font></Font></b> <Font Color=Red Size=-1>★ ★</Font> <Font Color=Gray Size=-1>★ ★ ★</Font><br>
Same family, same genre, slightly different set of problems. Rather than flaunt its schizoid allegiances to youth-culture rebellion and to same-old-same-old
comic melodrama the way <i>Morgan</i> does, <i>Georgy Girl</i> presents itself as a more integrated, character-driven narrative, with unmistakable Swinger accents. The vehicle
thus gives Lynn a lot more to work with than Vanessa enjoys: Georgy has got a vicious and pretty "best friend" (a very young Charlotte Rampling), a wacky chum
who's also the best friend's steady (Alan Bates), two-working class parents who can't figure out what she's up to (including the Redgraves' own mum, Rachel
Kempson), and a wealthy aristocrat, also her parents' employer and a surrogate father since the cradle, who now (!) wants to recruit
her as his mistress (James Mason, Oscar-nominated). Plus, we've got dance classes and dancehalls and musical numbers and wigs and babies and boats and face-in-the-crowd
wide shots and straight-to-camera close-ups and dialogue along the lines of "No matter what I try, God's got a custard pie up his sleeve." Georgy is basically
Shirley Valentine in her younger years (and in fact, I wonder why Willy Russell didn't just write <i>Shirley Valentine</i> that way, since Redgrave and Pauline
Collins even look alike). Lynn is more than game with all the tenuously braided subplots and schematic character relationships, and she shows energy and
commitment throughout. It certainly helps that, in Bates and Mason, she's got two of the best and spryest British film actors of the century helping to raise
her game; their presence in a scene, especially Mason's, always raises the probability that Redgrave will etch the part carefully instead of driving it home
on gales of personality. Not that there's anything wrong with that; <i>Muriel's Wedding</i> and <i>Circle of Friends</i> fans will love this, and love Lynn.
It's just that she doesn't have the technique to bring Georgy or her story into focus
amid some hair-trigger twists of fortune near the end. She's a good sport, willing to react to "Fat Face" as a term of endearment, but rough and unsophisticated
whenever she tries to raise the lid on her buried self-contempt, and a little too blank in her bounciness. Yet again, not far from three stars, but I still
can't quite go there.<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=actres66polls.html style="text-decoration:none"><Font Color="#003399">VOTE HERE!</Font></a></Font><br>
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<img src=acspck66.jpg align=right hspace=10 vspace=5><Font Face=Garamond Color="#003399" Size=+2><b>My Favorites from 1966:</b></Font><br>
<br>
<b><Font Color="#660066">My Pick:</Font> <Font Face=Garamond>Elizabeth Taylor, <a href=whosva.html><i>Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?</i></a></Font></b><br>
<Font Color="#660066">Nominees:</Font> Anne Bancroft, <Font Color="#3333FF"><i>7 Women</i></Font><br>
<Font Color="#FFFFCC">Nominees:</Font> Françoise Dorléac, <Font Color="#3333FF"><i>Cul-de-sac</i></Font><br>
<Font Color="#FFFFCC">Nominees:</Font> Ida Kaminská, <Font Color="#3333FF"><i>The Shop on Main Street</i></Font><br>
<Font Color="#FFFFCC">Nominees:</Font> Margaret Leighton, <Font Color="#3333FF"><i>7 Women</i></Font><br>
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<Font Face=Garamond Color="#660066"><b>Honorable Mentions:</b></Font>
None<br>
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<Font Face=Garamond Color="#660066"><b>Gourmet Prospects:</b></Font>
Stéphane Audran, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Les Bonnes femmes</i></Font>;
Hana Brejchová, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Loves of a Blonde</i></Font>;
Claudia Cardinale, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The Professionals</i></Font>;
Jane Fonda, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The Chase</i></Font>;
Elizabeth Hartman, <Font Color="#660066"><i>You're a Big Boy Now</i></Font>;
Salome Jens, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Seconds</i></Font>;
Anna Karina, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Bande à part</i></Font>;
Bernadette Lafont, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Les Bonnes femmes</i></Font>;
Giulietta Masina, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Juliet of the Spirits</i></Font>;
Jeanne Moreau, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Mademoiselle</i></Font>;
Nina Pens Rode, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Gertrud</i></Font>;
Tuesday Weld, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Lord Love a Duck</i></Font>;
Shelley Winters, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Alfie</i></Font><br>
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<Font Face=Garamond Color="#660066"><b>Further Research:</b></Font>
Bibi Andersson, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Duel at Diablo</i></Font>;
Julie Andrews, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Hawaii</i></Font>;
Ann-Margret, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The Swinger</i></Font>;
Lauren Bacall, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Harper</i></Font>;
Candice Bergen, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The Group</i></Font>;
Leslie Caron, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Is Paris Burning?</i></Font>;
Leslie Caron, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Promise Her Anything</i></Font>;
Doris Day, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The Glass Bottom Boat</i></Font>;
Samantha Eggar, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Walk Don't Run</i></Font>;
Jane Fonda, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Any Wednesday</i></Font>;
Chantal Goya, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Masculin féminin</i></Font>;
Joan Hackett, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The Group</i></Font>;
Elizabeth Hartman, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The Group</i></Font>;
Audrey Hepburn, <Font Color="#660066"><i>How to Steal a Million</i></Font>;
Madhur Jaffrey, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Shakespeare Wallah</i></Font>;
Felicity Kendal, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Shakespeare Wallah</i></Font>;
Shirley Knight, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The Group</i></Font>;
Sophia Loren, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Arabesque</i></Font>;
Shirley MacLaine, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Gambit</i></Font>;
Jayne Mansfield, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Dog Eat Dog</i></Font>;
Millicent Martin, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Stop the World: I Want to Get Off!</i></Font>;
Virginia McKenna, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Born Free</i></Font>;
Melina Mercouri, <Font Color="#660066"><i>A Man Could Get Killed</i></Font>;
Sarah Miles, <Font Color="#660066"><i>I Was Happy Here</i></Font>;
Maureen O'Hara, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The Rare Breed</i></Font>;
Rosalind Russell, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The Trouble with Angels</i></Font>;
Eva Marie Saint, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Grand Prix</i></Font>;
Eva Marie Saint, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming!</i></Font>;
Jean Seberg, <Font Color="#660066"><i>A Fine Madness</i></Font>;
Léna Skerla, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The Fire Within</i></Font>;
Elke Sommer, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The Oscar</i></Font>;
Lana Turner, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Madame X</i></Font>;
Monica Vitti, <Font Color="#660066"><i>Modesty Blaise</i></Font>;
Jessica Walter, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The Group</i></Font>;
Kathleen Widdoes, <Font Color="#660066"><i>The Group</i></Font>;
Natalie Wood, <Font Color="#660066"><i>This Property Is Condemned</i></Font>;
Joanne Woodward, <Font Color="#660066"><i>A Fine Madness</i></Font><br>
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