Lee Grant in Voyage of the Damned (1976) - Supporting Actress Sundays

I'm reminded this week that there's a certain stripe of legendary midcentury American actors who, quite simply, leave me nonplussed. I find them electrifying, fascinating, and occasionally quite moving yet, at the same time, I find them utterly confounding. To put it simply, I can always remember their performance but I can never remember their character. They're the kind of actors, often steeped in some version of "The Method," who forego chameleonic transformation in favor of vivid behaviorism. You sorta always know it's them and, implicitly, that the character is sorta secondary to the work of being "real" and "in the moment." It's not a persona thing, per se. The spectacle is not the performer herself but "the work" she's doing. The role, the story, the filmmaking is secondary to "the work" of the acting. I'm not sure this makes any sense, but it's my way of searching for an explanation of why I find myself so perplexed by "the work" done by...

...Lee Grant in Voyage of the Damned (1976)
approximately 12 minutes and 1 second
18 scenes
roughly 8% of film's total running time

Lee Grant plays Lili Rosen, one of the 960 or so Jewish refugees who, in 1939, fled an increasingly hostile Germany and boarded the S.S. St. Louis, a luxury liner destined for Havana. (The story is a fictionalized account of the tragic historical journey of the St. Louis. Basically, the St. Louis's whole journey was part of a cynical Nazi propaganda effort. When the ship and its passengers were refused entry both by Cuba and the United States, the St. Louis was then forced to return to Hamburg, where the passengers faced a grimly uncertain fate. After a sustained campaign by an international coalition of human rights activists brought attention to the plight of those on the ship, several European nations offered refugee status to the passengers. However, in a cruel twist that the film addresses only by concluding footnote, most of the countries granting the St. Louis passengers refugee status were ultimately occupied by Nazi forces. As a result, at least two thirds of the St. Louis's passengers were deported to concentration camps, where at least one third died.)
Grant's Lili Rosen is a tightly wired woman, apparently accustomed to some degree of privilege, whose existence to no small degree is defined through her relationships with her very pretty daughter, Anna (Lynne Frederick, in an unfortunately bland performance)...
...as well as her relationship to her husband, Carl (Sam Wanamaker, in a curiously obtuse performance).
Lil's husband has apparently borne the ignominy of Nazi persecution with a brittle, stubborn forbearance that manifests in a barely contained rage, a fury that blasts forth with little warning and occasionally catches Grant's Lili in the cross-fire. Nonetheless, Grant's Lili suffers her husband's thoughtless brutalities with instinctive empathy and attentive concern.
As her husband begins what seems to be an inexorable decline into paranoid psychosis, Grant's Lili -- skittish, tense and afraid already -- watches with a private desperation. Yet, at the same time, ostensibly for the sake of her young adult daughter, Grant's Lili tries to affirm the hope in her family's journey to the new world. In spite of her ministrations, however, Carl continues to slowly succumb to the overwhelming fear created by the situation.
In an effort to protect her daughter from seeing what's becoming of her father, Grant's Lili makes what turns out to be a fateful move: she commands her daughter to go up to the deck and make friends with some young people (which Anna does, meeting a cute deckhand with whom she begins an ill-fated romance).
Though neither Grant nor the film really make a point of it, the tragedies that chart the rest of Lili Rosen's character arc -- and, notably, the plot itself -- are scored in this scene, where Lili desperately seeks to give her husband and her daughter the confidence, the hope, to survive the ordeal.
Lili's character arc also scores the film's own tragic turns. First, the character is at the center of the film's emotional storm when, having been refused entry to Havana, the ship starts pulling back to sea. The sound of the ship's horns causes Carl -- the husband of Grant's Lili -- to experience a psychotic episode where, with straight razor in hand, he flails across the upper deck, slicing his arms bloody until he dives off the ship's deck. Cuban authorities take Carl away -- Lili doesn't know whether to hospital or to his death -- and Grant's Lili is left unmoored by one of her key coordinates of existence. The film's next tragic shift happens when, having been refused entry to the U.S., the St. Louis charts its return course to Hamburg. The terror of a return to Germany inspires Anna and her sailor boyfriend to make a suicide pact and, with Anna's death, Grant's Lili loses her sole other purpose for living.
Grant's Lili reacts to the loss of Carl and the death of Anna with a primitive, traditional grief instinct and begins to cut her hair as a gesture of atonement for her failings in allowing her daughter to die. Her private ritual of self-scarification is interrupted by an elegant fellow passenger (Faye Dunaway in a simplistic but effective performance as a proud woman attempting to maintain her strength in the face of successive humiliations).
Grant's Lili asserts the righteousness of her devastating grief, fighting against any attempts to stop her with a feral desperation, until she is stopped by the news that her husband has indeed survived his injuries. In this moment, Grant's Lili discovers a faint, grim, weary willingness to live again and surrenders somewhat to the support being offered her by a fellow survivor.
Grant's performance in the role of Lili Rosen is vivid. In every moment, Grant's Lili is alive with electric emotion and a palpable psychology. You can see Lili's mind working in flashes across Grant's face. Yet, as powerfully as Grant tunes me into what the character's thinking and feeling, I remain uncertain about who Lili Rosen is. Grant is so "in the moment" that my connection to Lili Rosen's backstory is tenuous. For example, when Carl inadvertently backhands Lili, I don't know if Grant's complicated reaction of fear, sadness and embarassment is something Lili's long accustomed to doing (as a cover for her bullying, possibly abusive husband) or whether it's a spontaneous coping mechanism (as a suggestion that Lili's as surprised as her daughter by Carl's sudden transformation). Likewise, I wonder if Grant's assiduously regal bearing doesn't get in the way of conveying the full force of Lili's desperation. (Indeed, I wonder if Lili and Carl are supposed to be a little nouveau riche, but one generation removed from the shtetl, and if that's not supposed to be part of what amplifies their crisis in the collapse of the new social order, and possibly explains the vague disdain with which the professor and his wife regard them.) Moreover, I'm a total sucker for a hair-shearing scene but, here, I found the action "stunty." I had no idea, from Grant's performance in the role, as to whether such an elemental gesture was in or out of character for Lili Rosen. In short, Lee Grant provides a vivid portrait of what the character is thinking and feeling in each moment even as she delivers only the most rudimentary sketch of who the character is.
I admire this performance with the same ambivalence I discover in most Lee Grant performances from the 1970s. In the character of Lili Rosen, I find myself searching Lee Grant's performance for a clue to who Lili Rosen was before this crisis, a search that seems frustrated by Grant's performance itself. Indeed, I find that Lee Grant's work illuminates the character's psychology with an often electrifying vivacity. Yet at the same time, I often feel I'm watching the actress perform the emotion instead of the character. It's too bad, too, because the stuff Grant does do is great. I only wish she had got around to doing the rest...

Lee Grant in Shampoo (1975) - Supporting Actress Sundays (Snow Delay Edition)

In 1974's Smackdown, Canadian Ken suggested that Bergman's preposterous win that year might have resulted from Hollwood's residual guilt for previous bad-deeds. Ken wrote, "Once the moral climate thawed out a bit, Hollywood never seemed to stop apologizing to Ingrid Bergman for the Rossellini era tar and feather treatment." (Indeed, few other explanations seem as plausible.) It seems quite possible that 1975 might have also been a year in which Best Supporting Actress became the platform upon which Hollywood made another amends, but this time Hollywood's previous mis-deed was the blacklist, and this apology went to...

...Lee Grant in Shampoo (1975).
approximately 18 minutes and 35 seconds on-screen
10 scenes
roughly 17% of film's total screen time

Grant's nomination for Shampoo came nearly a quarter century after her first nomination in 1951 (for Detective Story), the same year in which her refusal to testify against her husband before HUAC landed Grant on the blacklist, effectively ending her film career for most of the next two decades. (Grant, however, continued to work during this period, most notably on stage and in a handful of New York based anthology tv-series; further, Grant's work as a member of The Actor's Studio sustained her enduring legend/reputation as one of the "survivors" of the blacklist.) Perhaps as a result Grant's 1975 Oscar for Shampoo seems to implicitly carry extra meaning for many -- as the moment when Hollywood finally "did right" by Miss Lee Grant.

In Shampoo, Lee Grant plays Felicia, the wife of a power-wielding politico named Lester (Jack Warden in a fascinating performance) who's slumming only a little by sleeping with the town's most sought after hairdresser, George (Warren Beatty). Grant's Felicia is but one of the women -- which includes Lester's wife, daughter, and mistress -- "squired" by George during the 24-hours or so depicted in the film's narrative. (Shampoo's basically a comedy of reciprocal cuckoldry; it plays like a Restoration-era stage comedy reset amidst Hollywood's glamorous life circa 1968, with Beatty playing the swinging, pseudo-countercultural rake. Mix in a smidge of wolf-in-fairy's-clothing/3'sCompany-style homophobic gags and stir...)

Grant's Felicia is the kind of woman who wears a mink as a housecoat as she makes a big show of wilting under the weight of all her responsibilities (fittings, hair appointments, etcetera, etcetera). At first, Grant's Felicia seems to be at the center of the elaborate web of infidelity that the film mines for social comedy and, for much of the first half of the film, Felicia labors under the assumption that she's the engineer of an ingenious (if passive-aggressive) public-humiliation revenge stunt against her adulterous husband. Grant plays Felicia's scheming with a giddy girlishness, adorning it with an almost shocking naïvete. In Grant's performance, Felicia's petulance is that of an innocent girl so caught up in her own grandiosity that she has no idea what's about to befall her. By thus playing Felicia as Scarlett-before-the-Ball, Grant deploys the character's shrewd, selfish, nervous, cloying, calculating self-absorbtion effectively -- and almost endearingly -- to convey Felicia's underlying vulnerability and desperation.

It's almost a neat hat-trick.

But Grant's performance -- which works so well when the narrative's first half allows Felicia to exist entirely within the bubble of her own fantasy -- nearly evaporates when that bubble bursts in the second half of the film. Grant's Felicia, so intricately self-involved, seems to dissolve when she must encounter and (gasp) interact spontaneously with another character other than Beatty's cipher. This becomes a real problem in the film's more farcical sequences. While Grant does her damnedest to bring some gravitas to Felicia's discovery that both the men in her life are smitten with the same "other" woman (Julie Christie, in an often deliciously clever performance), Grant's characterization misfires almost completely. Instead of sustaining Felicia's tics and pouts and fussinesses, Grant drops them altogether and resorts to a curious assemblage to steely glares and shrill ranting asides. And sadly, Grant's iron-squint of fury proves no match for Christie's languid melancholy. (Notably, these same sequences provide Goldie Hawn necessary room to redeem the pathetic nagginess of her character, which Hawn does and does very well.) But with Felicia -- a character that might have wrought comic gold from every, and especially the final, gesture -- Grant delivers a curiously and righteously grim performance. It's strangely sad work, surprisingly off-pitch and short-sighted for a trophy snagging performance in what is said to be one of the smartest comedies of the 1970s.

Of course it helps no one that Warren Beatty delivers a nearly incomprehensible performance in the central role of George. Beatty plays George as an utter dimwit, a man so befuddled by his own occasional thoughts that he's stymied by the simple obligations of daily existence. (Of course, Jonathan of Bravo's reality-tv show Blow Out -- thirty years later -- invests shocking fact in Beatty's unlikely fiction, but that's neither here nor there.) George's ostensible "genius" derives from his singular focus on pleasing women, through hair-dos or horndogging, but Beatty misses something -- the rank competence required of a hustler perhaps -- and overplays George's dimwitted distraction into a kind of angst-hole. It's an undeservedly self-congratulatory performance and it nearly derails the film.

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