MGM’s Great Lady of the Screen

 

I decided to try and challenge myself, to try and push my cinematic tastes towards a screen personality that I generally do not “get.” Previously, I used these ‘Star of the Month’ style long form essays and viewings to explore someone I was curious about and wanting to see everything I could find. More often than not, I already had a generally sense of positive or negative feelings towards their performance style and occasionally have been surprised to find myself gaining respect for their work.

Look back and you will discover my warming up to Kim Novak, a mixed reaction to Grace Kelly, a solidifying of my idea of Judy Garland as an underrated genius, and arguing that Doris Day was a greater talent than her scrubbed clean and shiny persona would suggest. Then what will watching Greer Garson’s films in quick succession turn up? Will I find greater admiration for her work? Will my general indifference and occasional outright bafflement at her stardom be underscored? Stay tuned.

The structure of this one will be slightly different than the typical longform where I try to find as many of their films as I can (both theatrical and made-for-TV) and track their evolution as a performer. Instead, I have decided to focus in on ten films. Here is how I decided on the ten: Greer Garson was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning once, so I decided to include all seven of those. The TCM book, Leading Ladies: The 50 Most Unforgettable Actresses of the Studio Era, included Garson and picked five films of hers to highlight. Three of them did not overlap with her Oscar nominations, so I decided to include those three as well.

Here are how those two lists of films broke down:

Academy Award nominations for Best Actress

• Goodbye, Mr. Chips
• Blossoms in the Dust
• Mrs. Miniver
• Madame Currie
• Mrs. Parkington
• The Valley of Decision
• Sunrise at Campobello

TCM’s Leading Ladies’ picks for her “Essential Films”

• Pride and Prejudice
• Mrs. Miniver
• Random Harvest
• Mrs. Parkington
• Julia Misbehaves

That is how I went about deciding what to watch to give myself a crash course on Greer Garson. Yes, I know I talk about that book quite often, but it is a good source and guide to get a quick primary education on some of the greatest stars of the era. It provides some suggestions for what the “greatest hits” would be to understand them. While I have disagreed with several choices that they have made (see: Lena Horne, and ask me about Louise Brooks and Clara Bow), I can understand the why behind those films being chosen.

Unlike many of her contemporaneous peers, Garson did not immediately start off as an actress. She studied French and 18-century literature in college, and became the head of the research library of LINTAS for the Lever Brothers marketing department. It was during this period that Garson’s acting aspirations developed. Fun and random tidbit: George Sanders was her co-worker at Lever Brothers, and she encouraged him to go into acting. Perhaps this accounts for their similarly purring and rounded vocal technique, a history of wrapping their syllables and consonants around classic poetic verse.

Her first professional acting appearances happened in January 1932 when she was 27. She was part of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and eventually made her way into the earliest BBC live transmissions. Perhaps most famously in a heavily truncated version of Twelfth Night, the first documented Shakespearean work performed live on television, which aired in May 1937.

Several months later, Louis B. Mayer scouted Garson while traveling in London scoping out new talent. Garson signed with MGM but sustained a back injury and refused all parts offered her for nearly 18 months. Between the injury and her pickiness, Garson threatened to get dropped before she even appeared before a single frame of celluloid.

It was not until the role of Kathy Ellis in 1939’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips that Garson made her film debut. Her introduction to American cinema is mildly bizarre. Robert Donat’s schoolteacher meets the suffragette while mountain climbing. She seemingly exists in this smoky atmosphere as an ethereal presence that manifests to shake up the schoolteacher from his stuffy, cloistered life. And in short order, they’re declaring their love, getting married, and she’s making him a better teacher by shaking loose his fuddy-daddy exterior.

But Garson’s part in the film is incredibly limited. In the nearly two-hour film, she only appears in roughly 30 minutes. Why this particular role? No clue, but maybe its very Englishness appealed to her while spending time in Hollywood. A loving, often saccharinely sweet, tribute to the English school system, it lays the groundwork for Garson’s reputation as a prestige actress in handsomely mounted productions about important subjects.

Her character essentially teaches Donat’s Mr. Chipping (affectionately dubbed Chips by her) to embrace life before dying tragically during childbirth. But Garson feels too refined and stiff for a part that required more zest. Her prim posture and body carriage and rounded tones mark her as more of a headmistress for a charm school than a freethinking suffragette. Which means a majority of the film relies upon your reaction to Donat as an actor.

I am largely agnostic towards him but find his performance here lacking in several ways. He must age and he leans into stereotypical old man voice and movements instead of taking the character when they were younger and thinking about how they would move through life. Naturally, Donat won an Oscar for his heavily made-up and showy performance because some things have always been true about that awards body no matter the era. Even more curious was Garson’s nomination as LEAD Actress that year.

1939 had no shortage of leading performances to pick from, but Garson winding up in the final five is a headscratcher. When stacked against her competition – Bette Davis (Dark Victory), Irene Dunne (Love Affair), Greta Garbo (Ninotchka), and Vivien Leigh (Gone with the Wind) – Garson’s work seems anemic in comparison. This was the same year that Judy Garland delivered her iconic work in The Wizard of Oz, Jean Arthur taught James Stewart the ins and outs in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Claire Trevor anchored Stagecoach.

So why did Garson wind up with the nomination? Well, MGM was a powerhouse in this era, Garson was being primed for leading lady status, and she is the lone female role of any note in Goodbye, Mr. Chips. It is easy to see in hindsight how Louis B. Mayer was pulling his muscle to make it happen and invest in her future career. But there is nothing here to really tether my emotional investment in, either in the film as a whole or in Garson’s work.

1940’s Pride and Prejudice is based less on Jane Austen’s beloved romantic comedy wellspring than it is on a Broadway adaptation that was popular during the film’s release era. As such, it plays fast and loose with the text, leaning heavier on the romance and the comedy than it does Austen’s class commentary and thornier punching bags. What emerges is a perfectly competent Hollywood varnish to the literary staple.

Also of note, this Pride and Prejudice seems to have been transplanted from the Regency period towards a more Victorian era milieu. Sources differ as to why, but the most common theory is that MGM did not want to spend large sums of money on the film, so they reused costumes from Gone with the Wind on background and featured players and moved the period to reflect the more flouncy and romantic style of the Victorian period. I guess it would be shocking to see the likes of Garson walking in ornate halls in what resembles a glamorous nightgown in an MGM film. The studio wanted to play up the love story so they reverse-engineered the costuming and sets to match their aims.

I mean, the studio has Lady Catherine (Edna May Oliver) functioning as matchmaker/fairy godmother for Lizzie and Darcy in this version. Where is the drama? Everything is so easily resolved here. We are a far cry from the typical Austen adaptation. I would rank this one in the middle of the class with the 1995 BBC miniseries and 2005 film adaptation outpacing it with ease. Yet there is still something to like about this version, as freewheeling as it is with the text.   

Chief among them are Laurence Olivier and Garson in the central roles. While Olivier was miscast, or simply unable to pull off Heathcliff given how unplayable a part it is, in Wuthering Heights, his brand of stoic and handsome leading man in this era slips much easier into Darcy. While this Darcy has less of an arc to play, Olivier is charming in the role nonetheless. I wonder how much of his frustration with wanting Vivien Leigh for Elizabeth and being denied appears in the earliest parts of the romance? It is impossible to know, but I’m sure that frustration aided scenes of their verbal sparring.

And Garson despite being too old for the role is still somehow captivating and wonderful here. She makes for a better and more interesting actress less when she is dignifiedly suffering through another “important” prestige film than when she is allowed to counterbalance her dramatic work with bits of joy and comedy. Garson makes the most sense to me as a leading lady in films like this and Random Harvest. I liked her Lizzie Bennett’s more playful fire than the sharp-tongued version of most adaptations by the end. She still gets to put down others, but hers is a gentler bite.

The film initially started, as so many films did during this period, as a vehicle for Norma Shearer with Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Robert Donat, and Robert Taylor thrown around as a possible Darcy, and it is impossible to picture her playing the part. Not only would she be all wrong for it, but her skillset as an actress was better deployed as high society women who learn to be less frivolous. It was for the best that it wound up with the studio’s very English rose. I can see why TCM chose this as one of her recommended films over her scores of Oscar nominations. I am actually more shocked given how beloved she was at the time that this one didn’t score her a nomination despite its huge box office and positive critical appraisals for her.

1941 started a five-year run of Best Actress nominations. This means she is tied with Bette Davis for the most consecutive nominations. Davis’ five-year run went from 1938 to 1942, which means the pair faced off against each other three times. They both lost in 1939 (Vivien Leigh, Gone with the Wind) and 1941 (Joan Fontaine, Suspicion). While Davis won in 1938 (Jezebel) and Garson won in 1942, but more on that one shortly.

We must first discuss Blossoms in the Dust, her second Oscar nominated role, and we begin Garson’s run of “great lady” biopics. These are uniformly heavy on the saccharine treatment of their subject matter and often co-star Walter Pidgeon as her romantic interest. Not only shameless in their tear-jerking machinations, these white elephant films are the worst impulses of MGM and Oscar season – bloated, middle-brow, serious films that vaguely gesture at important topics while offering nothing interesting to say about them.

Here Garson plays Edna Gladney who went about removing the word “illegitimate” from birth certificates in Texas to give kids in foster care a better chance at adoption.  Along the way, we get to see Garson in vivid Technicolor which reveals her red hair, two montages of anniversary gifts immediately after a relative’s death, and prolonged courtroom scenes where the saintly Garson fights against the cruelties of injustice. But why was this story chosen for the grandiose Technicolor treatment?

Neither a musical nor a sweeping epic, Blossoms in the Dust is a small-scale chamber drama where various characters talk about things in rooms. Frankly, Pride and Prejudice or a late-period film like Julius Caesar would have made more sense to be given the glossy, shiny, full-color treatment over this. This could have easily been a black-and-white drama and nothing of artistic value would have been lost.

I am also left completely underwhelmed by Garson here. She feels already entombed in her Proper-and-Good Great Lady mannerisms and sticks out like a sore thumb in a story set in Texas, of all places. I never once believed in this woman, Garson’s performance, or found anything truly transcendent about it all. It crams so much into its 100 minutes that nothing has any room to breath or grow. It all just zips by in a blur of a handsomely mounted production.

1942’s Mrs. Miniver is perhaps THE Greer Garson vehicle. Here is the story of a comfortably middle-class English family in the lead-up to the blitz and Kay Miniver’s steadfastness in keeping the home fires burning and muddling through the circumstances. It was a huge hit, and if Winston Churchill is to be believed, did more for wartime morale boosting than anything else during the period.

Garson is simply perfection in Mrs. Miniver, a role that asks her underplay and shake off the “Great Lady” affectations to play a simple woman who becomes extraordinary through her grace under pressure. We spend about first third of the film following her around her cozy lifestyle, raising her children, and meeting her future daughter-in-law before the specter of the Nazi threat rears its head. In these moments Garson feels breezy and carefree, a lady who lunches and buys extravagant hats while supporting her children and maintaining a healthy, sexually active relationship with her husband (Pidgeon, again). We come to like this woman. I am unsure if it is because of or in spite of her superficiality at moments.

Once Mrs. Miniver introduces the presence of the war, the propagandistic aspects ratchet up in fervor, but so does the sentimentality as Kay grapples with what is being disturbed and lost. Garson manages to make the stiff-backed resolve of this woman an engaging transformation and presence. She exemplifies the “Keep Calm and Carry On” motivational poster.

Whether it is an intense scene where she encounters a German solider in her kitchen or tries to maintain normalcy in the bunker while bombs drop down, Garson builds her character with careful emotional calibration and precision. It helps to have a director like William Wyler in charge, truly one of the consummate “actor’s directors” of his time. He often catches her in silent close-up projecting deep thought and contemplation that does more to show the trauma and tragedy of the era than the scenes of the Blitz.

If many aspects of Mrs. Miniver have dated, none of them are Garson’s central leading performance. By turns heavily sentimental, quietly resolved, and feel-good balm, it is Garson who stands at the heart of it making these transitions and flips between tones smoothed over and functional. It is within films like this that her movie star persona and period defining leading lady status makes the most sense.

 I could watch Garson’s pinched face and “stiff upper lip” in silent contemplation or observance for hours at a time. And Mrs. Miniver’s slightly bloated running time does offer plenty of chances to engage with that. A personal favorite scene is one in a car with Teresa Wright as they drive home, get stuck in a dogfight, and have to remain largely silent so as not to be noticed. Her combination of scared civilian and maternal instinct is a stunner to watch. Even better is it slowly dawning at her that her daughter-in-law is fatally injured.

A lot of Oscar watchers and obsessives like to point towards “the scene” that snatched them the win, or would be the clip that would play. Garson’s performance is one of those that does not have a specific scene so much as the strength of the performance starts with the first scene and ends with the credits. Unlike her deluge of “great lady biographies” that provided a majority of her Oscar nominations, Garson feels less like a mannered thespian than a thinking, feeling, emoting actress here. That Oscar, and its infamous 5 ½ minute acceptance speech, was damn well earned and deserved.

Continuing on her hot streak in 1942, Garson also appeared in Random Harvest. She would later state that of all the movies she made throughout her career, this one was her personal favorite. In many ways, Random Harvest is the kind of ridiculous, deliriously romantic film that was only made during the 1940s in the Hollywood studio system. It has all the hallmarks and ludicrous plot elements – amnesia, long-suffering lovers, suppressed memories, a random musical sequence, and a gauzy happily ever after.

I was thoroughly enraptured by its swoony romantic ache and yearning.

Ronald Colman is an amnesic WWI veteran who wanders into the London streets and meets Garson’s showgirl. A tentative romance blooms between the two, they eventually get married, have a child, and Colman gets struck down by a speeding car that somehow releases his repressed memories. On the flip side, his marriage and child are long forgotten. He returns to his original family and his old life is now long forgotten.

Will Garson and Colman reunite? Of course! How it all happens is silly when you think about it logically, but if you surrender to the poetry of it all it will enchant you. Random Harvest is filled with the kind of self-sacrificing and romantic melancholy that women’s pictures of the era were so well-known for and why they are fondly remembered.

Garson, for her part, seems less “great lady” and more loose-limbed and at ease here. “She’s Ma Daisy” offers a glimpse of Garson as music hall actress, and she seems to practically radiate with joy throughout the sequence. While her voice and dancing are a bit stiff, it seems clear that Garson wanted desperately to make at least one full blown musical, and lord knows she was at the right studio to do so. They gave actresses like Jean Harlow, who clearly had no musical chops, a crack at it, so why not Garson? But that is an issue for another day/a different essay.

 This does seem like a key Garson film, as for all its “deranged sincerity and integrity” (per Jonathan Rosenbaum), it does offer Garson a different kind of role in comparison to what she normally did and is best remembered for. She also slots so neatly and perfectly into the role that it is impossible to picture anyone else playing this material and making it work, especially Joan Crawford who lobbied hard for the part and was rejected. We shouldn’t believe a minute of this illogical premise and story, but Garson and Colman give it their best and make us buy into the sheer magic of the whole thing. Sometimes the mood strikes for the type of romantic story that bends all logic and reason and gently entertains us while sweeping us up in its offbeat poetry. 

Another year, another Garson/Pidgeon/LeRoy team-up. 1943’s Madame Curie continued Garson’s hot streak of consecutive Oscar nominations in staid biographical films. Even at this early point in the Academy Awards, the 16^th ceremony, their love affair with biopics was already establishing itself, if not firmly established. Regardless of actual merits, even in 1943, if a well-liked movie star played a notable historical figure, then they were probably going to get an Oscar nomination. If not a win.

Having already won the previous year, it was highly unlikely Garson would go back-to-back as the pool of talent who accomplished that feat is incredibly small. So, this nomination feels like a sort of afterglow. Or as if the Academy were encouraging and cementing an artistic legacy. Every decade has a handful of artists that they really, really like and routinely nominate, occasionally for simply showing up it seems. The 1940s was that period for Garson.

Madame Curie focuses less on her various scientific discoveries and breakthroughs and more on the love story with her husband, Pierre (Pidgeon). What we get is a slow-moving and largely dull love story punctuated by scenes of them working in the lab searching for radium. They sweat and get burns, but all of it is depicted in a gauzy halo that underscores MGM’s commitment to glamour at all costs. Even two of the 20^th centuries great researchers must look splendid when passing out in exhaustion or developing burns from the lack of protective equipment.

It culminates in a final scene where Garson wears old age makeup, and that does a majority of the work for her in that scene. Her clipped vocal tones and great lady delivery do not change. She simply wears a white wig and some wrinkle applications and that’s about it. Roll credits after she delivers an impassioned speech to a room of her peers. This was another role that Joan Crawford lobbied hard for before her departure from the studio, and the second time she lost out to Garson. This time around, Curie’s daughter, Eve, had a hand in production and demanded Garson be cast in the part.

1944’s Mrs. Parkington is by turns sluggish and preposterous. Another novel adaptation that reunites Garson with Pidgeon, this time with the duo playing very American roles in a sweeping romance that asks us to care about these nouveau riche characters building their social status through the ages. Frankly, Agnes Moorehead’s supporting work is the life-giving blood of the whole thing, along with a Gladys Cooper freed from playing the buttoned-up matriarchs.

Essentially the story of a boarding house maid who marries a coal baron before becoming one of the respectable members of high society, Mrs. Parkington lets Garson go from dewy youth to old age and back again. The whole film is presented as the elderly version’s memories of the supposed great love affair, but so often her character is sacked with lines being her husband’s property or dealing with her husband’s various temper tantrums that you long for the feisty, fun Garson of Random Harvest or Mrs. Miniver.

None of these people are terribly interesting dramatically or likeable, especially the cabal of venal children and grandchildren. One gets the sense that this was made purely to get Garson another Oscar nomination and nothing more. And Garson indulges in finding arbitrary business to spruce up scenes, especially the old age ones. Her playing a game of solitaire becomes an indulgent bit of facial reactions and fussy hand gestures. She is playing a one-woman concerto of reaction shots while her family bickers and stuffily gives recriminations.

She looks lovely in her various wigs and increasingly glamorous wardrobe, but the role is such a nothing that the success of it feels like the Academy liking the actress rather than anything she did in the role. She is The Wife who props up and supports a grudge-holding asshole for decades and enjoys the spoils of her marrying well. This is not my idea of escapist fluff, but I can see how it would prove distracting during the existential horrors of the war years. But compared to the tremulous, brittle, sensual performance that Ingrid Bergman gave in Gaslight, the winner that year, or the sexually confident, emotionally cool and domineering Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Garson feels anemic. 

And so, we end Garson’s five-year streak of consecutive Best Actress nominations with 1945’s The Valley of Decision. There would be a fifteen-year break between this and her next nomination in yet another “tasteful” literary adaptation. But first, we must discuss The Valley of Decision, an adaptation of a (then) popular novel in which Garson romantically suffers and there is an oddball labor strike subplot.

Here she is a family maid to the wealthy family that owns the steel mill. She meets and falls in love with the handsome son (Gregory Peck), a coupling objected to by both their parents. Their objections are completely obvious – her father (Lionel Barrymore) was injured in an accident at the steel mill and blames the family’s lack of safety standards; his (Donald Crisp) thinks that romancing someone from a different class reflects poorly on them and wants his son to marry the more respectable match they had in mind (Jessica Tandy).

The Valley of Decision is a bit of a slog to get through despite its stellar cast. Not only Garson, Barrymore, Crisp, Peck, and Tandy, but Gladys Cooper, Dan Duryea, and Reginald Owen all show up. Not even a cast this stacked can overcome the turgid direction and overall flavorless production. MGM poured money into the handsome looking sets and costumes but the nearly two-hour runtime feels at least twice as long and the central romance lacks heat.

Some of this is due to Garson so often being a Great Lady of the Screen and thus lacking sexual charisma and magnetism. She was pretty enough for a romantic lead, but feels too prim and proper to pass as a lower-class immigrant daughter in 19^th century Pittsburgh. Her Irish accent comes and goes, mainly goes as the film drags on, and her emotional textures in the part mainly involve noble suffering and glassy eyed staring. Her Oscar nomination for this feels less like the voters rewarding a good performance than it does them nominating a performer they liked a lot during the period. (See also: Bette Davis in Mr. Skeffington and The Star, and a majority of Meryl Streep’s nominations between 2011 – 2017.)

Even looking through the limited critical reviews from the time and the current reappraisals, this one did not exactly inspire reams of praise. But it was a massive commercial success, inexplicably to me, but I can see this creating a river of tears from wartime audiences as it emotional manipulated their tear ducts. This just made me think of the Miramax era films that took either a book with a lot of prestige or a popular paperback and stuck a dozen big marquee names and character actors into it in hopes of garnering awards consideration that aged faster than a Nazi glimpsing the Arc of the Covenant.

We close out her most fertile period with 1948’s Julia Misbehaves, a screwball comedy. That is right, you read that correctly. Garson made a comedy, and she is divine in it. This was actually a genre that agreed with her as an actress, and she made too few appearances in lighter, fizzier material.  

Garson plays a stage actress named Julia, who does indeed misbehave. But her misbehavior and screwball antics are all in the name of maternal love and trying to make good over not being in her daughter’s (Elizabeth Taylor) life. Julia still loves her estranged husband (Pidgeon, obviously), but was driven away by his wealthy family, including Lucile Watson as the domineering matriarch.

The basics of a pleasant little comedy are all right there, but the film gives Garson even more to do. Like a musical number where she climbs down a burning building on the shoulders of a group of acrobatic brothers, or lively retells an anecdote that has her imitating a barking seal. Or bits of physical comedy like falling in the mud during a rainstorm of sinking in a boat with Pidgeon on what was supposed to be a romantic excursion.

Julia Misbehaves offer Garson a plum role and a chance to stretch beyond her staid image and stiff impersonations of real-life figures. I knew I would enjoy her and this film during the opening scene where she threatens to turn the gas stove on only to be revealed as relaxing in a bubble bath. While her voice quivers with desperation, Julia is soaking in the bath while distractedly scrubbing her nails. The entire situation makes Garson blossom as an actress. The fieriness just below the surface that too many of her Oscar nominated roles suppressed is allowed to roar here.

One wishes she made more comedies like this, because she is quite simply delightful here. Her throaty, musical voice wraps around screwball’s zaniness perfectly, and Julia Misbehaves was smart enough to give her quieter, more dramatic moments to play. A touching reunion with her grown daughter finds Garson going on an entire emotional journey in a matter of minutes, from tentative nerves to open maternal love to requests for forgiveness and offering to remove herself from the situation if needed.

The only thing that would have made Julia Misbehaves even better is a stronger director. Jack Conway made some very entertaining and good films, but lacked distinct artistry in comparison to the best screwball directors. Someone like George Cukor, Mitchell Leisen, or Howard Hawks would have done wonders with the material. Conway is at times too timid, or boring, in his setups and camera direction to really make the material have that extra spark to go from “very good” to “great.”

The leading parts started to dry up as the decade ended and MGM imported the younger Deborah Kerr, another redheaded British leading lady. The two of them would costar in 1953’s Julius Caesar, which has a juicy performance from Garson. At times, her classical acting style could feel stuffy, but pluck her into Shakespearean verse or a Jane Austen novel and she illuminated the screen with vibrancy and life.

Twelve years separate our previous film and this one, 1960’s Sunrise at Campobello. This would be Garson’s final Oscar nomination and a performance that I can only describe as a precursor to Rami Malek’s teeth first work in Bohemian Rhapsody. Here the lifelong Republican plays Eleanor Roosevelt in a manner that feels more singsong and a forced theatrical quality that feels at odds with the changing acting style of the time.

Garson (and Ralph Bellamy as FDR) never quite shake off the stage manner of their performances in front of the camera. Both Garson and Bellamy were quite capable of performing in more muted and detailed ways for the movie camera, but here seem to overplay their hands. It is as if everyone involved in the film was more interested in hagiography than merely making a film about the Roosevelts and their private lives.

The whole thing feels more “dignified” and like it was made for the Academy to “consider” than anything of deep or memorable artistic value. Bellamy would go on to give further performances of note, including Rosemary’s Baby and Trading Places, but this would be it for Garson. She would do a few other appearances in films like The Singing Nun and a 1970s Little Women miniseries, but nothing that had her above the title or in a prominent part. Unless you count her vocal work in the Rankin-Bass The Little Drummer Boy specials.

Garson largely spent her final years on a ranch in New Mexico where she became a patron of the arts and involved in various charities. By the 1980s, Garson had retired from performing and largely from public life due to chronic heart troubles. She died in 1996 at age 91 having left behind a series of performances that helped define movie stardom in her era.   

So, what is my major takeaway from Garson as a leading star?  Well, I am just as confused and do not quite get her even after spending all this time with her. I found Garson engaging in deeply romantic parts, or in ones that operated a more theatrical/literary level than I did the myriad of noble roles she took on. This caused a lopsided feeling where when I really liked, I really liked her, and when I did not, I prayed the film would end quicker. 

We will always have Mrs. Miniver, Pride and Prejudice, Random Harvest, and Julia Misbehaves, though. But I do not think I will go out of my way to watch more of her work when it airs on TCM. I am still agnostic about the Great Lady of MGM in 1940s.