Grace Kelly was seemingly born to become a member of the
aristocracy, either through the prism of Hollywood legendry or actual royal
marriage. She eventually became both. First, she was briefly Hollywood’s “It”
girl of the 1950s, a porcelain beauty favored by Alfred Hitchcock, making
eleven feature films in a five year span. Then she left it all behind to become
the princess of Monaco.
She was born into wealth and privilege, using her family’s
connections, and her own mercenary affairs with powerful older men in the industry,
to gain access into acting opportunities. Grace Kelly was a luminous, serene
movie star, but the bulk of her legend and admiration rests in her
transformation into a real-life fairy tale princess by marrying incredibly well. Her three
efforts for Hitchcock are well-remembered, as they should be, but a vast
majority of her work is forgotten, eaten up by her placement in the pop culture
heavens for her chic wardrobe, humanitarian efforts, tragic death, and delicate
beauty.
This doesn’t mean her brief career was without merit.
Movie stars need simply enthrall us with their very existence on the big
screen, and Kelly does that with her sophisticated charisma. In the right
roles, typically as Hitchcock’s cool, intelligent blondes and light-weight
romances, she was positively electrifying. But her quick ascension from
bit-player in television, where she logged hours and hours in various shows
like Actors Studio, Studio One, Lux Video Theatre, and The
Philco Television Playhouse, to major star was not squarely on any
preternatural talents or her charisma. Kelly was smart to charm influential and
powerful men in Hollywood in order to curry favor for better parts, more
close-ups, and the good press that make or break a career.
So it comes at a shock how humdrum her first appearance
in 1951’s Fourteen Hours is, as she
is completely secondary to all aspects of the major story. The film itself is a
sturdy minor gem, imperfect but compulsively watchable with two great lead
performances in Paul Douglas and Richard Basehart. Roughly 90% of the film is
about a man (Basehart) standing on a ledge threatening to jump, with Douglas as
the beat cop spending a majority of the film acting as therapist and
negotiator.
Fourteen Hours
stumbles as a film when it diverts attention away from this main plot with
needless side stories, like Jeffrey Hunter as one-half of a couple who meet in
the crowd waiting for Basehart to jump and fall in love. It fills in time that
would have been better spent with Douglas, Basehart, and
the characters pertinent to them. Kelly’s sub-plot, a young wife wanting to get
a divorce, is particularly useless, only of value to hear something
approximating Kelly’s natural speaking voice before she adopted that affected,
faintly British accent. She’s severely wooden here, which is no surprise, and
glamorous, again no shock, even in this embryonic form. Yet the removal of her
two scenes would have no repercussions to the story proper.
After the failure of Fourteen
Hours to create interest in Grace Kelly as a potential star, she returned
to gigging it on Broadway and television. A performance in an Off-Broadway play
eventually led to her attracting the attention of Stanley Kramer, currently
assembling the players for his next prestige project, 1952’s High Noon.
High Noon is
one of the greatest westerns, and general films, of all-time. It’s a lean, mean
85 minutes of slowly escalating tension and psychological character study, with
a healthy dose of political ideology and civics. One man’s crisis of conscience
transforms what is essentially a melodrama into a smart, brainy western with a
stellar lead performance by Gary Cooper.
Many of the typical pieces of a western are here, but
they’re deployed in fascinating ways. There’s the “exotic” former love
interest, but she never sacrifices herself for the love of the white lead, and
she develops a unique friendship and bond with another female character that
tips the film towards proto-feminism. There’s no large-scale panoramas or gang
of marauding Indians, and the film would be thrown off by their presence. This
is about the old frontier closing out, the passage of time slowly eroding that
life style, and nearly deconstructs the western and its stoic hero by the end.
There’s no fat anywhere to be found here, the characters
feel lived-in and authentic, and there’s starkness here that is most pleasing.
While the film definitively belongs to Cooper, there’s a strong ensemble
orbiting around that enliven things. Reliable supporting players like Thomas
Mitchell, Lloyd Bridges, and Otto Kruger bring a strong variety of voices,
colors, and faces to the sleepy hamlet-in-crisis. Lon Chaney Jr. is shockingly
soulful as a former marshal left bitter and arthritic in his old age, and Katy
Jurado plays a pragmatic saloon owner and Cooper’s former lover with steely
resolve and tough intelligence.
Honestly, the only major knock against High Noon that I have, and have always
had, is Grace Kelly’s stilted performance as the (much younger) Quaker wife of
Cooper’s retiring marshal. Alfred Hitchcock said it best when he dubbed her
performance here mousy, and distinctly lacking in her exact star quality. While
the film launched her in a major thanks to numerous close-ups of her lovely,
delicate face, her performance is awkward. That ridiculous faux-British accent
is in full effect and her line deliveries are overly mannered. It would be
Hitchcock’s guiding hand that would find a way to use these elements in a
positive manner.
Yet one bad performance cannot undo or hinder High Noon’s many strengths. In fact, the
script’s parable or morality play qualities, the score by Dimitri Tiomkin, the
title song (“Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’”) mournfully sung by Tex Ritter,
tightly controlled editing by Elmo Williams and Harry W. Gerstad are all exceptional. Then there’s Floyd Crosby’s austere cinematography, a master class
of stark images and tightly-confined spaces to reflect the emotional and mental
states of the various characters. I think that’s more than enough reasons to
declare High Noon a classic.
After High Noon’s
box office dominance, stellar awards show turnout, and those loving close-ups,
Kelly was considered a hot commodity. MGM snatched up her for a seven-year
contract, and her first film for them was 1953’s Mogambo, a remake of the Pre-Code masterpiece Red Dust. Mogambo was an
assignment she only agreed to on the basis of John Ford, Clark Gable, and being
filmed in Africa to hear her tell it. No wonder as the script is a creaky,
leaky thing, forsaking everything that made Red Dust work in favor of acting as
a monument to the cinematic aura of Clark Gable as romantic, masculine ideal.
Gable seems tired and exhausted here, indifferent to
committing much of a performance or generating any chemistry with his leading
ladies. He could play this role in his sleep, and that’s exactly how it appears
he played it. He only comes alive during the adventure story aspects. He’s
outgunned by his two co-stars here, as clearly the sisters are left to do it
for themselves.
There are few reasons to watch Mogambo, and most of them begin and end with Ava Gardner’s leading
work. She’s in the Jean Harlow hooker with a heart of gold role, although the
seedier aspects of her character are scrubbed to the point of anemia. MGM can’t
have its sex goddesses actually engage in it now, can they? They must sell the
fantasy and glamour, which Gardner does. She also lands all of her jokes, capably
handles her big dramatic moments, and promptly walks away with the movie.
Whenever Mogambo drifts away from
her, it becomes a frightful chore to get through.
Kelly takes over for Mary Astor as the brittle
high-society woman who engages in a cheap affair with Gable’s lower-class
brute. She’s uneven throughout, and that affected speech of hers is a hilarious
distraction. Frequently Kelly finds herself unsure of how to believably deliver
dialog or move in front of the camera, but one scene where she stares at Gable
with passion and yearning before running into her room is greatly played by
her. Hitchcock would soon massage these passions and neurosis lurking
underneath her frozen surface to great effect.
Mogambo was her
lone film in 1953, but it was enough to launch her into the full-blown
stratosphere. Not only did she score an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting
Actress, a dubious choice but others have been nominated and won for less
(including Kelly), but she attracted the attention of cinematic god Alfred
Hitchcock.
1954 was the year of Grace Kelly, as she appeared
in five films. For those keeping score at home, that’s half of her cinematic
output in one calendar year. It was her official anointing as Hollywood’s
newest prized starlet. Not only does she get above-title billing in every film
from here on out, but she’s frequently a star attraction in them. Not in the
sense that she’s a lead character, but that her character is frequently an
object of obsession for the others in the story. It is in this year that the
true cult of Grace Kelly comes to fruition.
First up, Dial M
for Murder. Widely considered “minor” Hitchcock only for the fact that it
was released right before a towering giant of cinematic art, Rear Window, Dial M for Murder is a claustrophobic tale of suspense. It’s also a
glimpse of a master meeting his favorite object of desire. A case of
director/actress pairing off in sublime synchronicity in the same way that
Vittorio de Sica brought out the best in Sophia Loren and Josef von Sternberg
with Marlene Dietrich is pure excess and visual poetry.
Hitchcock’s Hollywood years take some of his earlier
obsessions – the perfect murder, remote blondes, confined spaces, the charming
sociopath, the wrong (wo)man – and explored them more fully. Dial M for Murder lines up all five of
those for a tale of a cuckolding wife unjustly framed for killing a man hired
by her husband to kill her as revenge for cheating on him. It’s sophisticated
and sinister in equal measure, all expertly handled surfaces with a rotten
core.
There’s a strong element of theatrical artifice to Dial M for Murder, one that would more
obviously and artistically blossom in Rear
Window and Vertigo. Dial M features something of Hitchcock’s
first self-critique or expose, with the tightly cloistered apartment acting as
a stage for Hitchcock to puppeteer his actors around. The great genius’ hand is
felt throughout, but it never inhibits the film in any way. His surrogate
throughout is Tony (Ray Milland, giving one of the best performances of his
career), the jealous idle husband who wants his wife (Grace Kelly) dead so he
can take her inheritance. Tony spends a lot of time orchestrating other
characters, turning them into pawns in his tightly controlled game, but control
is an illusion in Hitchcock’s world. Don’t believe me? Look at what happens to
James Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo.
Perhaps all she needed was a director with a mordant
sense of humor to get her to perform like something resembling a human, but
Grace Kelly comes alive under Hitchcock’s direction. She’s never better than
she is in any of the three films she made with him, but there’s something extra
special about her work here. She successfully frumps it up while jailed, is
gliding elegance in her earliest scenes, and displays a wide range of subtly
shaded emotions, typically either barely concealed eroticism or suffering to
the point of hysteria. It’s the first time that Kelly’s “it” factor and a
character mesh completely successfully, where the artificial qualities of her
star persona feel more organic to the surrounding film.
Or maybe it’s just that Hitchcock’s love of cool blondes
met its perfect physical incarnation in Grace Kelly’s WASP-y carriage, fragile
constitution, and chic gamine qualities. She’s an immaculate clotheshorse, the
practical definition of movie star glamour, possessing a insulated sexuality
that springs out slowly. Not just here, but in many of her succeeding films.
Hitchcock and Kelly were made for each other, even the way he gets her
lady-like characters to engage in dark humor or become more proactive in their
plots seems to jolt her into actually performing instead of merely posing and
spouting out line readings.
Never let anyone tell you that Dial M for Murder is merely adequate Hitchcock or “minor.” It is
only dubbed so because it came out during his peak years, roughly between 1950
– 1963, a period that saw canonized greats like Strangers on a Train, Psycho,
and The Birds released alongside
lesser-known jewels like I Confess
and The Wrong Man. It’s a highly
fertile period for Hitchcock with an embarrassment of riches, and his other
1954 release is justifiably considered the superior film. Still doesn’t mean
this one isn’t wonderful on its own merits and achievements.
Rear Window is
something truly special from one of the greatest cinematic artists in a career
filled with masterpieces. Even by the high standards of this fertile period, Rear Window earns its reputation of
high-tension, slow building suspense, and great movie stars suffering
fabulously. Yet another detour into Hitchcock masking kinky ideals under
sophisticated imagery, Rear Window is
the most explicit of cinematic forays into voyeurism.
It makes a certain perverse kind of sense that our hero
is confined to a wheelchair in his apartment. Even before the accident that
broke his leg and left him immobilized in a cast, he was more of a passive
player in his own life. He preferred to view things through his camera lens,
and this is hinted at through the opening crawl through his apartment as the
camera lovingly caresses his broken camera and framed photograph of the
accident-in-progress.
Hitchcock traps us in this apartment, a hothouse of
paranoia and suspicion, and places us squarely in James Stewart’s
point-of-view. Over the course of two hours, we’re slowly transitioned from
mere passive audience member into his accomplice. We are this character, and
when his visiting nurse (Thelma Ritter, an ever reliable supporting player) chastises
him with “what people ought to do is get outside their own home and look in for
a change,” we are just as much the intended target for this diatribe as he is.
This was the second of the three films that Kelly and
Hitchcock made together, and Kelly gives one hell of a performance. Her
introduction, a hazy, sleepy close-up as she leans in to kiss Stewart is a knockout of a sublime movie star introduction. She’s elegance, a vision of wafting
sophistication through rooms and begging for this man to love her. Stewart’s
emotional indifference towards her in the earliest scenes is a near
unfathomable event, and Kelly reveals the fractures underneath the perfectly
coiffed exterior. His passivity in his life is a repeated act of cruelty to
Kelly, she merely begs him to love her and to pry himself away from the cameras
and peeping tom behavior. He only sparks an interest in her when she
transitions from a flesh-and-blood WASP-y goddess to player in the various
channels across the way.
There’s something self-reflective about that transition
in her character. Kelly was never believable as an actual flesh-and-blood
character. Her image was too artificially constructed to convince as a real
human being in several of her films, but Hitchcock knew how to give us the perfect
image first then go about revealing the emotions churning under the surface. She’s
most alive in roles that required a certain amount of posing and play-acting
from her, roles that could tap into a surprisingly dark humor.
After flirting with us for a large chunk of the film,
Hitchcock finally causes the players in Stewart’s apartment complex to strike
back. Well, one player in particular, the one that he (and we as the audience)
believe has killed his wife. The violent twist ending of that which is being
viewed passively turning into an active aggressor feels preordained, the
inevitable tragedy of a passive life spent looking into places and at things we
shouldn’t. So what saves our heroes? Why the flashbulb of a camera, of course,
yet another example of Hitchcock’s mordant humor adding an extra zing to the
ending of his films.
Creaky and outdated are the best terms to describe The Country Girl. Heavy with talk and
character, but very little of this backstage melodrama is believable or
interesting. It’s the story of a co-dependent marriage between an alcoholic
entertainer and his long-suffering wife, then an acid-tongue playwright gets
introduced into the mix and we’re squarely in a dull love triangle for the
remainder of the plot. The whole thing is bloated and stagey, overtly mannered
emotionally, and with a glamorously suffering alcoholic that knows nothing of
the true disease.
Naturally, this thing was nominated for a ton of Oscars
in 1954, even winning one for Kelly’s pedestrian performance. It’s not entirely
her fault that she’s so bad here, as she’s clearly too young and all wrong for
the role. She’s incapable of digging deep into the emotional storm of her
character, with several of her lines readings hampered by her affected accent
and posh body language. The forgoing of makeup and over-sized wardrobe is
supposed to age her, but she’s still dewy and glowing with youthful vitality
and too immaculate looking to convince as someone who’s lived hard and aged
before her time.
She won less for artistic merits and more for politics.
Ignoring that she beat out far more worthy competition (not just Judy Garland
and Dorothy Dandridge in career-defining, electrifying turns in A Star Is Born and Carmen Jones, but Audrey Hepburn’s aching gamine Sabrina and Jane Wyman’s glamorous
suffering in Magnificent Obsession),
she won based on politics. Kelly was the gorgeous new “It” girl, with Alfred
Hitchcock rooting her on, and three separate studios with an interest in her
win, it’s easy to see why Kelly walked away the winner despite being the least
deserving of the five.
But it’s not like the failures of The Country Girl rest
squarely on her shoulders. She’s not helped much by Bing Crosby in a sleepy
performance that only wakes up enough to overact, never coming close to a
realistic depiction of alcoholic desperation, neediness, and self-destruction.
The interior angst and deceits of these two characters is never fully explored,
and William Holden as the playwright is an ugly example of full-blown misogyny
on display. There’s just not much there to recommend in The Country Girl, and
time appears to have rightly sunk it to a bit of trivia and of interest only to
Kelly’s major fans.
Kelly’s final two films in 1954, Green Fire and The Bridges at
Toko-Ri, are hard to discuss in terms of her career as she’s a mere accessory
in both of them. Much like in Fourteen Hours, her character could easily be
removed from both of these films with little-to-no narrative disruption to the
major story being told.
Despite being her home studio, MGM rarely offered her
films that utilized her particular star persona effectively up to this point. Green Fire doesn’t do anything
wonderful, but it also doesn’t do anything terribly. It’s pure formulaic
product from the MGM movie factory – a little romance, a little adventure, exotic
locale, gorgeous stars, plot be damned! Who needs one anyway? None of the stars
are deployed effectively here, with Kelly as a plantation owner in Latin
America only further highlighting the artifice her persona. Worse yet, she’s
got close to zero chemistry with leading man Stewart Granger, who is attractive
enough here, but merely workman-like in the role. Paul Douglas gets the
character part, and easily steals the movie away from both of them. This isn’t
saying much, as Douglas was always better served in urban locales and light
comedies.
It’s the location scenery that really stars in this
movie, though. It gets the full roll-out in the opening scenes, with lovely
cinematography and lavish sets populated with thinly sketched characters. The
basics concern two miners looking for emeralds, a haughty heiress who runs a
coffee plantation, and some bandidos in the Colombian wilderness. Sticking
these three in the jungles of Colombia has obviously left them all adrift, and Green Fire is a glorified B-movie (maybe
even a C-list one).
The Bridges at
Toko-Ri is a much better film, with great work from William Holden and
Mickey Rooney. It hovers near greatness whenever we’re locked in on Holden’s
character, his deep questions about the Korean War, and the small group of men
that he serves with in the Navy. The film hammers home a message of the
futility of war, exemplified by the ending in which extreme violence and
Holden’s warrior fatigue tip it towards an anti-war screed. As a vehicle for
Holden or Rooney, it’s a definite recommendation as it’s a solid lesser-known
title in both of their bodies of work.
But we’re talking about Grace Kelly here, and her
sections are some of the worst in the film. The intrusion of this extended
sequence away from the naval carrier is where the problems begin. Kelly is
Holden’s wife, and gives what is clearly her soggiest performance in her brief
career. You’d think she’d serve a larger purpose in the story as the wife of
the main character, but all she does is cry, have a high-society freak-out over
having to share a communal bath with a Korean family, and then leaves the film
after two or three scenes. These scenes are supposed to, I suppose, show us
what is being fought for, but it breaks up the tension and needlessly leads us
away from the main thrust of the story.
She was much better served by 1955’s To Catch a Thief, her third and final pairing with Hitchcock. The
movie is a soufflé-light romantic thriller with Kelly and Cary Grant acting out
familiar Hitchcock tropes in the French Riviera. It’s entertaining, charming,
gorgeous, filled with equal amounts of glamour and danger.
For the light and buoyant romance on display here,
Hitchcock still brought along many of his favorite obsessions. There’s the
innocent man on the run, the glacial blonde with undercurrents of sexuality
yearning to break free, a daffy mother (Jessie Royce Landis, all but humping
Grant’s leg during their first scene), and Cary Grant’s suave elegance used to
explore darker impulses. I cannot argue against it’s placement as a minor
Hitchcock work, it deserves it for coasting so much on charm and gorgeous movie
stars, but I just really adore this movie.
It may not be an essential viewing experience for
Hitchcock or Grant, with either Notorious
or North by Northwest the clear
frontrunners for best-in-show in the four films they made together, but it is
essential Grace Kelly. Hitchcock’s description of her a “snow covered volcano”
is most apt in this film as her glacial visage and kinkier undercurrent
perfectly encapsulate the alluring schisms at play here.
She reveals a hitherto unseen penchant for naughtiness, a
clear glee in many of the more risqué gags and double entendres, of which they
are many. There’s a barely concealed carnality here, best exemplified by the
infamous fireworks scene. While the fireworks ejaculate outside their window,
Grant and Kelly engage in a slow-burning seduction. Her décolletage on full
display, she bends over to turn off a lamp telling Grant that he’s about to
witness one of the great sights on the French Riviera before quickly adding
that she’s talking about the fireworks. Yeah, right, the fireworks.
No other director worked quite as hard to carve into the
cinematic legacy the visages of Grant and Kelly, and here Hitchcock gives them
the flimsiest of pretenses to do what they do best. It doesn’t matter what
their characters are named, or even what their goals are, all that matters is
how Kelly slowly thaws while Grant is the embodiment of dreamy sophistication.
They play, they fight, and they flirt, all while the camera lovingly, drunkenly
consumes these images. There’s a blatant worship of the luxury on display here,
and To Catch a Thief can frequently
play as a high point of cinema-as-travelogue.
After To Catch a
Thief, Kelly’s final two films would continue her hot streak of
successfully chosen star vehicles that brought out the best in her limited
acting range and luminous screen presence. She projected serenity and an
aggressively perfect exterior, and these same positive attributes
made it damn near impossible to cast her in effective roles.
The Swan leans
hard into these artificial and affected constructs of her star persona to
excellent effect by casting Kelly as a princess trapped in a bittersweet love
triangle. She’s deeply in love with the royal tutor of her younger siblings
(played by incredibly quixotic Louis Jourdan), but she must give him up for an
arranged marriage (with Alec Guinness) that has more to do with monetary
concerns and transitions of power than anything close to resembling love.
The Swan asks
its actors to be able to deliver moments of comedy and drama in equal measure,
and each of them delivers a delicate performance. Alec Guinness could always be
counted on to deliver a great performance, so that his rapier wit wraps around aristocratic
airs is no surprise, but it’s the way he makes the prince so decent that’s
deeply moving. Louis Jourdan is pure charm as the tutor secretly pining away
and dreaming of rising above his class to live happily-ever-after with Kelly. Jourdan
and Kelly make an extremely handsome couple; both blessed with an aristocratic
beauty that makes the rest of us look like homeless slobs.
Yet it’s Kelly that shines the brightest here. Her home
studio finally gave her a worthy vehicle, and would do so again the next year
with her final film, High Society.
While she normally seems wooden or too reserved, these qualities work for a
princess that has been taught to suppress for the greater good all of her life.
That glacial exterior masks a quick intelligence and yearning for true romance,
both of which Kelly highlights with tremendous ease and strength. If her Oscar
had come about for this movie, I wouldn’t have complained so much as this is
quintessential Grace Kelly. The ending reveal of why the title is for that
particular avian creature, and the comparison to Kelly’s princess to a swan is
a metaphor too perfect for words.
The movie is not without its problems, but more films
like this would better explain how Kelly made only eleven films and still
endures as a cinematic legend. Much like its leading lady, The Swan is at times too stiff and emotionally withholding from its
audience, never quite turning up the heat on its central love triangle, and
parts of it never quite come together but instead rest upon an elegance and
sophistication, a sense of poetic and romantic language that cinema no longer speaks.
Kelly’s final film, 1956’s High Society, is a musical retread of The Philadelphia Story, and is a film plagued with problems but
Kelly’s central performance isn’t one of them. No, the problems lie squarely in
under-using several of its stronger supporting players, another sleepy Bing
Crosby performance, cute if unmemorable songs, and in-differently directed
scenes in-between the musical numbers.
Grafting on Louis Armstrong and his band as a sort of Greek
chorus who comment on the proceedings throughout, and introduce the central
conflict through a calypso-jazz opening number, High Society rests more on star charisma and a jazz-inflected score
than any other film Kelly ever made. It works for the most part, with Armstrong
getting one of the strongest scenes of Crosby’s career in “Now You Has Jazz.”
Just as memorable is a meeting of Crosby and Frank Sinatra drunkenly crooning “Well,
Did You Evah!” a riotous Cole Porter tune.
Sinatra is fun here, even if it is one of his lesser
musical performances, but he generates tremendous chemistry with Celeste Holm.
Holm is egregiously underused, but she delivers her acidic quips with élan, and
her duet with Sinatra (“Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”) radiates with a duo
operating in full vaudevillian comedic brio. Much like The Swan, High Society
really belongs to Kelly through and through. Casting her as a blue-blood New
England WASP is a sublime marriage of actress and part. She even gets a scene
where she summarizes her screen presence as she wistfully sighs out “I’m a cool
goddess” while leaning against her pool. That “cool goddess” line comes after
being dubbed one repeatedly throughout the film, and it is an accurate
description of her both in the film and as a movie star.
Her performance is funny, charming, funny, elegant, and
simply divine. There’s even a chance for her to show off a perfectly serviceable
singing voice with Crosby, think Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. It’s never going to rival Julie Andrews, but it fits
her on-screen character and personality like a glove. Lighter roles suited her
well, and these last three roles are variations of the Kelly type perfected in Dial M for Murder and Rear Window. Right after this, she married
the Prince of Monaco and gave up the Hollywood lifestyle for a different kind
of royalty.
So was Kelly a great actress or more of a cult of
personality? I think the answer is clear. She was a limited actress, even by
her own admission, but she was a great movie star. Perhaps her continued cult
resides in the fact that she’s eternally young and beautiful, eternally a
vision of a serene high society ingénue dressed in chic clothing and surrounded
by handsome leading men and luxury. For only making eleven films, she’s
strangely disposable in several of them, awkward in a few, but perfection in a
handful. Really, all you need to get screen immortality is just one classic, and
she managed to appear in a few of them.
TCM’s Leading
Ladies book picked High Noon, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief,
and High Society as her five “Essential
Viewing” picks. That’s fair, given that High
Noon is more well-known and all-around a better film than The Swan, but it doesn’t showcase her
effectively. I’ve decided to drop that one in favor of one that while imperfect
as a whole is a glorious showcase for the actress.
My Essential
Viewing recommendations:
Dial M for Murder
Dial M for Murder
Rear Window
To Catch a Thief
The Swan
High Society
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