Two appreciations by Dan Callahan, who is such a marvelous writer.
Here is his piece on Shearer – a measured and detailed examination of this controversial star. People hate her, people stick up for her, the gays love her … Callahan looks at her filmography piece by piece, and attempts an evaluation of her faults and strengths. Wonderfully done.
As a twelve year-old, I vividly remember seeing A Free Soul on Ted Turner’s TNT channel and being impressed, for the first time, with the idea of sex for its own sake, which Shearer expresses with total abandon, lounging around Wilfong’s passion pit apartment in a half-open robe, sinking back on pillows and commanding, “C’mon . . . put ’em around me,” to beckon her dangerous lover. There’s a class basis to the hot tensions in A Free Soul, a sense that a well-bred upper-class girl is dying to experience the rougher, more animalistic side of sex. Gable shoves her down on a couch when she starts to high-hat him, growling, “Sit down and take it and like it!”
The daring thing about A Free Soul is that it presents a life of nothing but constant, mean sex as an option, and it’s the thought of that option that gives the film its unusual charge, even when Shearer-isms begin to rear their ever-tilted head in the last half hour, including a not-to-be-believed “astonished” reaction, complete with popping eyes and hand to mouth, when she finds her father (Lionel Barrymore) stone drunk on the ground; it’s as if Shearer is waiting for a silent film title to come on, so she keeps holding and holding and holding this completely ridiculous face. When her hands go to her head here, they become fists, which lets us know that there are actually gradations to her bad-acting spasms.
And:
Shearer’s whole life is in Marie Antoinette, and it’s the film that meant the most to her. It contains some of her fakest acting, but it also contains the best acting she ever did.
Don’t miss it.
And then there’s his fantastic piece on the exquisite George Sanders. So good!!
Lewin made use of this ice-cold figure in his version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), where Sanders leaps on all the Wilde epigrams, chews them up, and spits them out at will, speeding up his usual languorous way of talking, which results in a technically dazzling performance. Sanders plays evil mentor to Hurd Hatfield’s Dorian, looking down at the floor in excitement and shame as he speaks of temptations and how we must yield to them. As the film goes on, it’s clear that Sanders’ Sir Henry is all talk and no action; the faster he speaks, the more we feel his frantic heartlessness, his “wit” signaling nothing but emptiness and contempt. Again, there was no other actor of the time who would have had the equipment and the anti-heroic quality for a part like this. Sanders’ mysterious and quintessentially Russian despair gave him the guts to play such men full out; paradoxically, it was also his oft-stated indifference to his craft as an actor that gave him untrammeled, unashamed access to the less seemly sides of human character.
Wonderful stuff. I highly recommend both pieces.
