Ann-Margret in Carnal Knowledge (1971) - Supporting Actress Sundays

The category of Supporting Actress often provides a really "supportive" platform upon which performers can receive acknowledgment for branching out, for spreading their wings, for proving their versatility, for demonstrating that they really do have the chops. It's part of what I love about the category -- the opportunity to see performers at what are occasionally watershed moments in their careers. However, time is not always kind to these "breakthrough" moments. Sometimes when the contemporary shock wears off, the seams really show, as this week's actress at the edges...

...Ann-Margret in Carnal Knowledge(1971).

approximately 21 minutes and 32 seconds
11 scenes
roughly 22% of film's total running time

Ann-Margret plays Bobbie, a groovy goodtime gal with crazy curves who happens to be pushing thirty as she hooks up with Jonathan Fuerst (Jack Nicholson, in an implausibly sexy, incredibly loathsome turn as a ladykiller who seems entirely capable of one day living up to the title, literally).

Ann-Margret's Bobbie is (the script tells us) loads of fun...a perfect Playmate, if you will. An actress/model, Bobbie's neither too smart nor too dumb, she's not the marrying kind, and she's stacked with enough junk in the trunk to balance the funbags up top. (Forgive the crass parlance, but the previous statement is merely a contemporization of a speech Nicholson's Jonathan gives in the scene immediately prior to Bobbie's introduction.) Plus, she knows how to have a real good time.

Bobbie's babeness is just the beginning for, soon, Bobbie and Jonathan are enmeshed in a giddy erotic companionship that shifts from a one night stand to one of the one-year variety. And, of course, Bobbie's the one to start bringing up things like "shacking up" and the compromises of commitment (which Nicholson's Jonathan greets with surly, possessive resentment) begin to corrupt the freewheeling fun of their bond. Quickly, Jonathan's fantasy Playmate transforms -- at least in his eyes -- into a dumpy shrew, with Bobbie quickly drowning in the despair of a pathetic domesticity.

On some levels, the pairing (Bobbie and Jonathan; Ann-Margret and Nicholson) is formidable and fascinating. The characters are as equals -- sexual players who discover a kind of impossible compatibility -- and the performers are too -- intensely charismatic personas capable of indelible screen work. And to an extent, the pairing works. Ann-Margret is the ideal kind of actress to play opposite Nicholson (an actor known for playing "against" his co-stars), her tropical storm a formidable front against Hurricane Jack.

And on a couple scores, Ann-Margret nails it. The intensity of her Bobbie's vulnerability is palpable. Her sex appeal is inhabited not adorned. Her charisma is organic, inevitable, unstoppable.

But (and here I've finally figured out why Ann-Margret isn't more of a camp icon) Ann-Margret is no fun. Her Bobbie is utterly humorless, despite the fact that she's supposed to be all kinds of laughs (and despite the fast that she is mildy amusing in the one jokey scene the script gives her - a doctor/nurse shower sketch that plays like a Playboy cartoon come to life). Her Bobbie doesn't enjoy being Bobbie but, from the first scene, wants to be someone else. In a fundamental misunderstanding of the character, Ann-Margret's Bobbie emerges as a vixen of physical circumstance rather than personal choice. In and of itself, this would not be a problem, except that the script keeps talking about how much fun Bobbie is and, if we can't appreciate the fact that Bobbie wants to change while Jonathan does not, the story arc becomes an exhausting dead-end.

Without, then, even a whit of wit, Ann-Margret's performance is further hobbled by her inability to handle the language of Jules Feiffer's patter-dense script. Vocally, Ann-Margret seems incapable of nuance unless speaking in a whisper, and her diction devolves as volume and emotion rise. Yes, Ann-Margret can work a pause like a pro but, once she speaks, any mystery and intensity is garbled along with her consonants.

Sadly, Ann-Margret's goopy humorlessness makes no sense of Bobbie, and all that Ann-Margret can do is lapse to what has become her dramatic default -- feral despair -- thus missing Bobbie's character arc entirely. Nichols makes hay from Ann-Margret's intensity, but it doesn't serve either the character or the film.

Ann-Margret's Bobbie is stunt-casting at its most adept. The shock of Bobbie's curves are equal to the frankness of her despair. But in a film loaded with more skilled performances by actresses who can maneuver the dialog to reveal the nominal depths of Feiffer's shallowly misogynist archetypes (Rita Moreno just "blows" the roof off in an incredible, scary cameo), Ann-Margret's way out of her depth, adding another bold misfire to a career full of same.

"The Seat of Education" (Homo Heritage Fridays)

from MANDATE - The International Magazine about Men
November 1984, inside front cover.
For details, click the image; then click again to magnify

To Dos Day

___ Item 1: TRY TO CONTAIN YOUR EXCITEMENT...
...at StinkyLulu's brush with local independent media fame. (Hey. 'Sbetter than the blurb I got last year. Sharing's for suckers.)

___ Item 2: CONTEMPLATE...
...GayProf's sage advice. (For more context on what life in academentia is really like, see this comprehensively accurate post.) My back to school mantra? "Aim for kind, generous, professional detachment." And, then, when that only sorta works, I go read this site.

___ Item 3: ENJOY...

...23 homoerotic kisses (via The Angry Gay)

___ Item 4: PLAY...

...Scrabulous with StinkyLulu (Facebook account required). It's my new favoritest thing in the world; one game with Nathaniel and I'm completely obsessed...

___ Item 5: PICK YOUR MAKEOVER...
...from the wonders of hair architecture found atop the class of 1967 at Santa Fe (CA) High School. Shout for your 'do -- use the name of the gal/guy from the Class of '67 who's modeling your new look -- in comments...

___ Item 6: HELP...
...StinkyLulu come up with another scheme for selecting the month for Supporting Actress Sundays. Noting how the voting tends toward the more recent years, certain people have been nagging me for some time to just get autocratic and pick the years I want to watch. Which makes sense, but I do love the surprises and the randomness. To an extent. To the extent of Dances with Wolves. (This month's voting just hurt my feelings.) And hey, lovely reader, when you "force" Dances with Wolves on StinkyLulu, the consequences might just be severe. A bit of background: since the Smackdowns started, I've been using a crackpot "numerology for idiots" scheme to create each list of eligible years. ('71 combines to the number 8 and August is the 8th month, etcetera, etcetera.) I've also put a moratorium on the most recent 10 years. And while I'm not sure I'm ready to abandon the current system quite yet, I am interested if folks have any ideas for alternate mechanisms. So, lovely reader, any clever ideas? Do you like the voting? Do you agree that things are skewing too contemporary? Are there things the current system doesn't attend to? Any suggestions of themes or other coordinating principles for voting? Lu's all ears...

Have at it, lovelies...

It's That Time Again...

My conflicted feelings about the first day of school
are best expressed through these contrasting screenshots
of two Supporting Actress nominees as they appear
in the opening number of an early 1980s bomb,
now a cult favorite and an essential picture
in StinkyLulu's cinematic biography.

click image/s to be routed to video

Margaret Leighton in The Go-Between (1971) - Supporting Actress Sundays

Few things are more thrilling, in my passion for actressing at the edges, than those performances that at first seem negligible side characters but who quietly emerge as absolutely essential to the workings of a film. Of course, those theatre-trained actresses are the best at this, witness the work of...

...Margaret Leighton in The Go-Between(1971).

approximately 16 minutes and 37 seconds
15 scenes
roughly 14% of film's total running time

Margaret Leighton plays Mrs. Maudsley, the stiff matriarch of the aristocratic English family with whom the film's young protagonist, Leo (Dominic Guard, in a genuinely effective kid performance), spends one summer in this brutally tense "comedy" of manners (scripted by Harold Pinter, natch).

In the film, the summer's stifling heat layers atop the Maudsley's stultifying daily routines of upper class life, rituals over which Leighton's Mrs. Maudsley rules with a steely gaze and iron will.

The film tells the story of Leo's loss of innocence as he becomes the intermediary in the forbidden romance between Mrs. Maudsley's daughter, Marian (a miscast Julie Christie doing a perfunctory version of her blithe beauty schtick) and a neighboring farmer (Alan Bates at the height of his craggy British hotness). Leo first worships these charismatic adults who bestow upon him their especial attention. Before long, however, Leo becomes cynical to their crass manipulations and begins to toy with the limited power they have vested in him.

Through most of the film, Leighton's Mrs. Maudsley does most of her actressing from, literally, the edges, from the front of this procession or the back of that scene. But, as she does, her Mrs. Maudsley is ever a formidable presence, the actress's chameleonic features expressing an astonishing array of interior emotions.

Indeed, most of the time, Leighton's Mrs. Maudsley feels more like a casino pit boss than an aristocratic lady of leisure. Her presence is one of surveillance, watching everyone and everything with exacting scrutiny. It's not that Mrs. Maudsley seems to care all that much for her family -- indeed, she regards some with unapologetic disdain -- but that Leighton's Mrs. Maudsley wishes to maintain the respectability and tradition of her family, her class, in an era of social transformation and upheaval.

Leighton's glancing presence in these early scenes subtly conveys the fact that her Mrs. Maudsley clearly takes no pleasure in her social supervisory tasks. Leighton maximizes the clipped, oblique language of Pinter's screenplay to convey Mrs. Maudsley's grim determination in enforcing the social order. It's a thankless job, but Leighton's Mrs. Maudsley knows it's her job to do.

This grim, determined, measured, oblique self-control calibrates the tension in Leighton's performance, quietly preparing us for the seismic cataclysm wrought when Leighton's Lady Maudsley erupts with rage in the film's final act.

When Lady Maudsley uses the occasion of Leo's thirteenth birthday party to confirm her suspicions, two things become clear. First, that Leighton's Mrs. Maudsley has known all along that Marian was up to this particular something and, second, that Mrs. Maudsley is willing to sacrifice the boy, the farmer, her daughter and even her own pride to protect and preserve Britain's social order. Her husband and future son-in-law might lead battles throughout the crumbling British empire, but Lady Maudsley is the most formidable general on this homefront. (And you don't want to get in her way when she's on assault...)

Leighton's entire performance builds toward the plot's revelatory confrontation. Each flaring glance, each stifled gasp, is as scaffolding for this discovery -- the architecture for the character's concentrated climactic sequence of scenes. No wasted effort, no lapse in purpose -- Leighton's every gesture in service toward the display of Mrs. Maudsley's genteel rage (and devastating discovery) in her final scenes.

The film's brief denouement, from which the character of Mrs. Maudsley is entirely absent, illuminates just how instrumental Margaret Leighton's performance is to the film. You know that dull buzz of nearly intolerable anxiety that permeates this whole film? Well that's all the doing of Leighton's Mrs. Maudsley; she's the one that's been stoking the tension that impels the action of the entire film.

Leighton's incredibly potent performance is an elegant, understated example of just how much work some actresses accomplish at the edges...

"Make Plans With Daniel" (Homo Heritage Fridays)

from HONCHO - The Magazine For The Macho Male
December 1983, page 56.
For details, click the image; then click again to magnify

"People Who Are Not Talking About Jen" (PhotoQuote Thursday)

from Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. (via Reality Blurred)
click image to be routed to full post

To Dos Day

___ Item 1: TRY TO CONTAIN YOURSELF...
...after the inevitable surge of giddy awe caused by this bit of actress rebellion at the 1968 Oscars. (Via As Little As Possible).

___ Item 2: READ...
...this or that or this other essential commentary about the current crop of presidential wannabes.

___ Item 3: CONFIRM...

...your suspicions about the cause of all the world's problems. (via all sorts of folks)

___ Item 4: CONSIDER...

...joining Actressexuals Anonymous (Facebook account required). The first step is admitting that you share the obsession...

___ Item 5: VOTE...
...for the September roster of Supporting Actress Sundays in the column at top right...

___ Item 6: HELP...
...StinkyLulu build a list of Supporting Actress Slapstick in preparation for the upcoming Slapstick Blogathon over at Film Of The Year. What's your favorite slapstick performances by actresses at the edges? I've been thinking that Joan Cusack's pre-nomination performance in Broadcast News, which I suspect laid the groundwork for her Working Girl nomination, along with her nominated performance in In and Out might make Cusack the most nominated Supporting Slapsticktress. Do you agree? Is Whoopi's Ghost win the only slapstick performance to have taken the Supporting Actress tiara? And what are the best non-nominated, slapstick performances by actresses at the edges? I'm not sure what I'll post about on the day of the blogathon but your input in comments will be greatly helpful...

Have at it, lovelies...

VOTE: SEPTEMBER's Supporting Actress Sundays!

Oopsie doodle.
I posted the wrong options last night.
Doh. Sorry. Reboot. Start over...
It's that time again...

What year deserves the focus
for SEPTEMBER's month of
Supporting Actress Sundays?

Your nominees for SEPTEMBER are:

• 1945: Eve Arden in Mildred Pierce, Ann Blyth in Mildred Pierce, Angela Lansbury in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Joan Lorring in The Corn Is Green, Anne Revere in National Velvet.
• 1954: Nina Foch in Executive Suite, Katy Jurado in Broken Lance, Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront, Jan Sterling in The High and The Mighty, Clair Trevor in The High and The Mighty.
  
• 1963: Diane Cilento in Tom Jones, Edith Evans in Tom Jones, Joyce Redman in Tom Jones, Margaret Rutherford in The V.I.P.S., Lilia Skala in Lilies of the Field.
• 1972: Jeannie Berlin in The Heartbreak Kid, Eileen Heckart in Butterflies Are Free, Geraldine Page in Pete 'n' Tillie, Susan Tyrell in Fat City, Shelley Winters in The Poseidon Adventure.
• 1981: Melinda Dillon in Absence of Malice, Jane Fonda in On Golden Pond, Joan Hackett in Only When I Laugh, Elizabeth McGovern in Ragtime, Maureen Stapleton in Reds.
• 1990: Annette Bening in The Grifters, Lorraine Bracco in GoodFellas, Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost, Diane Ladd in Wild at Heart, Mary McDonnell in Dances With Wolves.

The choice is yours...

Let your voice be heard by voting in the column at right.

Barbara Harris in Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971) - Supporting Actress Sundays

One of the things I love most about the best actressing at the edges is how a certain kind of actress can sometimes just blaze into a movie that's, by most measures, an utter disaster and, in a handful of incredible scenes, seem to "right" the ship just before it sinks. Of course, sometimes the ship sinks anyway, but there's something truly awesome when an actress works that kind of wonder. It's stuff from which actressexuals are born. And just such a performance arrives this week courtesy of...

...Barbara Harris in Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971).

approximately 15 minutes and 16 seconds
5 scenes
roughly 14% of film's total running time

Barbara Harris plays Allison Densmore, an actress who stumbles into the life of Georgie Soloway (Dustin Hoffman) at an ill-fated audition.

Harris's Allison arrives to the existential, peripsychotic midlife swirl of Who Is Harry Kellerman... as an apparent naif. Allison has no idea that Hoffman's Georgie is a self-destructive, guilt-drenched narcissist prone to consuming people, especially attractive women, as a matter of course. Georgie is so accustomed to people bending, unasked, to his will that he's utterly perplexed, and transfixed, by Harris's Allison...who's singing the wrong song under an assumed name and a new expensive hairdo for a role she's not right for and knows she won't get...

Harris's Allison doesn't care what Georgie wants because she's got way too much going on in her own heart, in her own existential peripsychotic midlife swirl, to really keep track of anyone else. I mean, please, Harris's Allison can't even remove her hand from the lamp -- how can she be expected to accommodate other people's needs...like leave the audition when it's over.

Allison is the kind of self-obsessed neurotic disaster who's only charming in the movies, and Harris is especially gifted when playing this kind of "Elaine May" role. Harris plays Allison's inane neuroses (her echolalic tendencies, her propensity toward self-narration) with an adept lightness that, first, keeps her charming so that, second, her overweening kookiness seems authentic, mildly amusing proof that this complete loon of a woman is just being herself.

Harris's brand of tender clarity is absolutely essential to the character, and to the film. Because Allison's screentime comes one big chunk, Harris has a whole arc to accomplish in the space of a few concentrated scenes: hideous audition becomes crazy plane ride becomes one night stand.

In charting this sequence of actions, Harris does something just wonderful: she simplifies. At each stage, the fluttery crust of mannerisms dissolve ever so slightly to reveal a woman, just as depressed and neurotic and desperate as Georgie, who nonetheless possesses a clear, precise and accurate picture of who she is in the world. Where Georgie has no idea who he is because he's deluged by other people's fantasies of him, Allison's accustomed to not being noticed at all, except when -- of course -- someone tells her she's not what they were looking for. As she guides Georgie into their one night stand, giving him permission to abandon her once its over, her nonstop chatter lifts from Georgie the burden of expectation and offers him the kindness of honesty.

Harris handles Allison with masterful confidence. But amidst the film's grandiosity -- it seems to want to be simultaneously a show business satire AND a "bildungsroman of the creative soul" of the sort Fosse barely accomplished in All That Jazz almost a decade later -- Harris's performance can provide the film's emotional mooring only temporarily before the film once again dives down its own rabbit-hole/navel all over again. (Director Ulu Grosband returned to the dominant themes of Harry Kellerman -- the angst-istential tension between commercial success and creative authenticity in a pop music setting -- a decade or so later in 1995's Georgia, garnering a notable Supporting Actress nod for another formidably talented, iconoclastic actress accustomed to the edges.) But in the end, for Harry Kellerman, Harris's performance can only do so much.

Harris's performance is all by itself in the obdurate, self-obsessed, masculinist world of Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (see Ken's review for even more scathing detail), her performance becoming the single flash of humanity in Hoffman's/Georgie's suicidal spiral of self-loathing and despair.

But even as Hoffman's Georgie free falls from the heavens, something tells me that Harris's Allison is the sole survivor of this bunch...

StinkyLulu Answers 5 Questions from He Thinks He's A God

Lo some many many weeks ago StinkyLulu was just thrilled to receive an especially challenging set of 5 Questions from JS/Aerien of He Thinks He's A God. Took long enough though to work up worthy answers...so, with no further ado, here are the results...

He Thinks He's A God (L) asked StinkyLulu (R)...

1. Obviously you love the questions and EVERYONE in the INDUSTRY (whichever you choose) has sent your favorite person to interview you. Your interview couch is ready but the interviewer in not yet there plus they're still touching you up. You remember those youthful sessions of asking yourself those important, silly question you'd just love everyone to ask you. So, what is the most interesting question you'd love to be asked and what is the dullest question you'd love to be asked?

It can be challenging to meet such expectations (as the delay for this post indicates). But if Rosie called, or Meredith, or Anderson, or Olbermann, or Phil, or even the Chenbot, I'd get most ready for the following questions, as both the most interesting and the dullest questions are among the most obvious....

Why, StinkyLulu, have you made a blog's life work of "actressing at the edges"? (I could probably go on about this for days, weeks, months, years...)

What is your position, StinkyLulu, on the notorious "Supporting Actress Curse" that plagues the winners of your beloved category? (Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate this one...)

2: It seems that talking about food is becoming a requirement in order to get noticed and be granted an audience with the ruler of the realm of Lulu, so here it is: Who deserves to be pelted with a grilled cheese sandwich for having bad taste?

Being pelted with grilled cheese seems almost like manna from heaven. So, I'm agonna adjust the premise a smidge along the lines of an episode in the new Harry Potter. In The Deathly Hallows, there's a section where the gang is somewhere they're not supposed to be and, every time they touch something they're not supposed to, that object becomes searingly hot and multiplies. Before long, of course, the gang's swamped in sweltering objects.

Along those lines, I'd love to place StinkyLulu's special "FERVENS FROMAGIUS!" curse on a few folks' especially offensive behavior. See, StinkyLulu's Fervens Fromagius curse fills the offending one's underpants with hot cheese and greasy bread at any occurence of the accursed behavior. So, every time Donald Trump bullied someone just to get some more camera time, every time Bill O'Reilly lied, every time Ann Coulter did the idiot provocateur shtick, every time Alberto Gonzales deliberately dissembled the truth, every time Paris Hilton whined... their underpants would begin to fill with scalding cheese and greasy crust!

Good times.

3: Since we're getting violent, soooo many books listed, which book from your collection would you personally sacrifice so that it can spiritually carry your sentiments, travel and enter the sensibility of someone in order to help or destroy their career??

In my dreams, Michael Bay and Brett Ratner and Stephen Spielberg and Ron Howard and the like would be held individually hostage by John Waters who would force them to read The Complete Plays of Charles Ludlam. Aloud. Portraying all the roles with the appropriate fervor and zest. Committing entire speeches, scenes, plays to memory. Then, Waters would quiz them viciously. Their release would be contingent on their ability to recite a designated Ludlam scene from memory, their verifiable appreciation of the Ludlam ouevre, and their promise to use a Ludlam scenario as the basis for their next blockbuster. Dunno if this would solve all our cinematic problems, but 'twould definitely be a beginning...

4: We love you for instigating Supporting Actress Sundays. Any chance we can alternate each month between our girls and boys in the background?

Nope.

Such a project would be infinitely worthy. And I would love to collaborate with the brave blogging fangirl best suited for such an endeavor. But StinkyLulu's plate is full to brimming with the deliciousness of Supporting Actressness for some time. Indeed, at the current rate, we've got Supporting Actress Sundays booked through sometime in 2013...

5. Go on, go on, the reporter is here but they sent you the dullest one! Answer the least interesting question you listed as an answer for question one: What is your position, StinkyLulu, on the notorious "Supporting Actress Curse" that plagues the winners of your beloved category?

The so-called "Supporting Actress Curse" is an utter crock. Every Oscar category boasts winners who've lapsed nearly immediately into obscurity or irrelevance or career hell upon receiving a trophy, so why pick on the Supporting Actresses? In my considered opinion, the so-called "Supporting Actress Curse" is simply a lame journalistic template used by entertainment writers who are bored of award shows or who want to get a teensy bit edgy. It provides a perfect formula for a Oscar-season puff piece, loaded as it is with trivia for the gobbling pleasure of award fiends, while also providing a platform for banal critiques of whether the big night helps or hurts a career. What's most noxious to me, though, about the so-called "Supporting Actress Curse" specifically is how it conceptually depends on a tacit, unapologetic misogyny -- as if the spotty careers of some Supporting Actress winners had only to do with their trophy, and not the industry's hostility to formidable women (especially younger ones) and general unwillingness to create substantial female roles or create a comparable range of opportunities for women as the industry does for men. The so-called "Supporting Actress Curse" is BS, plain and simple, no matter what Marcia Gay says.

BONUS*** Obviously you are appreciated but a 0 comments for an entry can be dispiriting. How important are they for you?

Comments are great. One or two really dynamic comment threads recently have truly fortified my occasionally lagging confidence that Supporting Actress Sundays/Smackdowns are a worthwhile project. But, really, ya can't get too hung up on comments. 'Tis hard, because comments are really where you start to make blogfriends, but you're better writing about what you really care about than writing to instigate comments, I think. That said, few things on StinkyLulu brighten my end-of-week more than a comment or two on a "Homo Heritage" or "PhotoQuote" post. And, yes, I am going to try to keep developing interesting questions/topics for future To Dos Day posts...

Thanks, JS! 'Twas a delight - sorry 'took so long!

"Briefer Than The Briefest" (Homo Heritage Fridays)

from Popular Man ~ For The Connoiseur
April 1958, page 64.
For details, click the image; then click again to magnify

"Lazy Sh*ts" (PhotoQuote Thursday)

from Rate Your Students
click image to be routed to full post

I really don't mean to be Mister Crabbypants but...welcome to my world.

* * * edited to add * * *

While apt, posting the previous photoquote left me feeling a little evil. Said sense of evil abated slightly when, reading a local freebie rag, I encountered the following statement by a high school teacher (who recently got caught in the crosshairs of a lame media storm). Her zen clarity is one to which I aspire...

Albuquerque Public Schools' English Teacher Anita Forte
click image to be routed to full post

(Can you tell school starts in 11 days?)