But I’m happy she got some attention, regardless of the category. My firm conviction is that ensemble pieces like Lifeboat don’t have leading roles everyone is basically supporting everyone else. I’d award Bankhead Supporting Actress, personally. (Though Stanwyck, at 37, wasn’t exactly dewy either.) She’s even somehow sexy falling asleep in the middle of a sentence while talking to another woman. Furthermore, she gives Barbara Stanwyck (see below) a run for her money when it comes to embodying sex-on-a-stick, which is doubly impressive given that she’s trapped in a crowd on a lifeboat and was 42 years old at the time. Over the course of the film, Connie gradually comes down to earth, but Bankhead neither makes her a caricature at the outset nor softens her unduly later in a scene that sees Connie coaxing a fellow survivor into having his leg amputated, her entreaties are simultaneously baldly manipulative and achingly sincere. As ace newspaper columnist Connie Porter, she indulges her throaty voice and imperious manner to the hilt, representing in this societal microcosm what was then the American ideal: working-class aristocracy. Speaking of bewilderment-a more pleasant variety, this time-just how did the NYFCC come up with this fascinating choice? Bankhead wasn’t an Oscar nominee that year, and while she was top-billed in Hitchcock’s ensemble drama, her role isn’t significantly more prominent than anybody else’s, though she’s having more fun than anybody else. New York Film Critics Circle: Tallulah Bankhead, Lifeboat.This kind of mismatch happens all the time, but that doesn’t make it any less bewildering. Mostly, though, I’m just a bit gobsmacked to be reminded that Bergman’s three Oscars were for Gaslight, Anastasia, and Murder On The Orient Express, rather than for any of the canonical classics with which she’s most associated. ![]() This is a role that any number of actors could have fretted their way through equally well, and in some ways, Diana Wynyard plays it more adroitly in the British version of the film, made four years earlier-Bergman cranks every reaction up to 11, whereas Wynyard maintains a steady thrum of subterranean apprehension, which is frequently more effective. Compare this performance to her turn as a frustrated wife in 1950’s Stromboli, the first film she made with future husband Roberto Rossellini, and it’s clear she was capable of a great deal more complexity than Gaslight allows her, even in a circumscribed context involving marital torment. It’s solid work, but everything’s right on the surface, and director George Cukor tends to place Bergman at the center of the frame and have her react with exaggerated alarm to conversations behind her or noises above her. Gaslight, which came out a year after Casablanca, unquestionably provided her with a memorable showcase the movie is about a woman who’s being slowly, deliberately driven insane, and Bergman plays her with a range that encompasses every emotion on the spectrum from low-grade anxiety to full-scale panic. Ingrid Bergman was somehow not even nominated for her performances in Casablanca, Notorious, or Journey To Italy, yet she won three Oscars for work that’s much less fondly remembered today. Hollywood began its tradition of rewarding its greatest actors for the wrong roles early. Academy Award: Ingrid Bergman, Gaslight.
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