Daniel Mann (1952)
The missing Sheba is both a real and a symbolic dog. She disappeared a few months back but her owner, the Midwest, middle-aged housewife Lola Delaney, is pining for more than her pet: like Sheba, Lola’s youth, pretty face and figure have all vanished, along with hopes that she can be attractive to her husband Doc. His nickname is a misnomer – an unhappy reminder that, twenty years ago, Doc had to give up his medical studies, when he got Lola pregnant and her father’s stern disapproval meant a shotgun wedding. Lola lost Doc’s baby and couldn’t have another; the childless Delaneys now have little in common except regret. Doc, a recovering alcoholic, makes a living – not much of a living – as a chiropractor. Lola and he take in a boarder, a university student called Marie Buckholder. With her boyfriends and a life ahead of her, Marie is an increasingly troubling reminder to the older couple of what might have been. Come Back, Little Sheba, William Inge’s first stage play, was a major success on Broadway in 1950. Daniel Mann’s film, with a screenplay by Ketti Frings, exhibits the anxieties and results in weaknesses characteristic of contemporary adaptations of stage hits for the cinema screen.
First, the material is opened up – even though its power depends considerably on the claustrophobia of the Delaneys’ cluttered, shabby home. A scene in which Lola (Shirley Booth) and Doc (Burt Lancaster) go together to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, to mark Doc’s staying on the wagon for a whole year, is well done but eventually counterproductive. The audience knows the bottle of whisky that has remained untouched in the kitchen cupboard for the last twelve months will be consumed by Doc in due course. If, through the action staying indoors, we were made to feel more of his sense of imprisonment, we might also sympathise with him strongly enough to feel that we needed a drink – and a kind of unhappy relief when Doc finally yields to temptation. As it is, the moment arrives on cue, registers as mechanical.
Second, the film-makers’ eye on the box office causes them to give too much attention to the younger characters, in case the story of a frowzy forty-something like Lola isn’t sufficiently appealing. (Perhaps inspired by the success of The Lost Weekend a few years previously, Daniel Mann and Ketti Frings also exploit too much the melodramatic potential of drink problems.) The theatrical release poster for the film illustrates the attempt to sell Come Back, Little Sheba as a tale of youthful passion but the results are – inevitably in early 1950s Hollywood – paralysed by caution in the presentation of sexual behaviour. Marie (Terry Moore) is dated by Turk (Richard Jaeckel), a cocky, insensitive jock, but her heart belongs to a boy back home called Bruce (Walter Kelley), who eventually pays a visit to the Delaneys’. (This results in Marie and Bruce’s weirdly instant marriage.) One of the feeblest pieces of opening out comes when Marie and Turk go to a bar. It’s feeble because these two are interesting only in terms of the Delaneys’ – especially Lola’s – perception of them. An earlier scene – in which art student Marie draws Turk, posing in his athletics vest and shorts, in the Delaneys’ parlour – is visually bizarre. It’s effective, though, because Lola’s reactions are an integral part of it.
Third, there’s a key piece of miscasting in a lead role – also designed to improve the movie’s commercial prospects (and also reflected in the poster). At thirty-nine, Burt Lancaster wasn’t necessarily too young to play Doc, according to age references in the script. But he comes across as too young for a combination of reasons: he was fifteen years Shirley Booth’s junior; he’s very emphatically greyed up; and his physical presence is too powerful for the character – he suggests not a loss of energy but a willed suppression of it. (When Doc falls off the wagon and vents his feelings, abusing Lola verbally and threatening her with a knife, Lancaster seems relieved to let off steam.) We gather that Doc was socially a cut above Lola but the idea that he’s a generation younger too introduces another, unintended gap between them – and makes Lola’s frequent references to Doc as ‘Daddy’ more curious than they’re surely meant to be. (Sidney Blackmer, three years older than Booth, partnered her in Little Sheba on stage.) Lancaster is able to express something of Doc’s pain through his big, sad eyes but he isn’t vocally dexterous enough to give his lines the shadings needed to convey the depths of the husband’s ennui and frustration with his life and his wife. Lancaster’s unease muffles the dichotomy between Doc’s supposedly gentlemanly manner and underlying emotional turbulence, and he doesn’t connect much with Shirley Booth. It’s pretty clear this is the result of the actor’s shortcomings rather than part of his characterisation.
The film has fallen into relative obscurity. I don’t recall its being on television in recent years and the DVD Sally got me through Amazon – the only Region 2 one available – was evidently made in Korea. Shirley Booth’s performance as Lola is famous, nevertheless, and rightly so. She doesn’t just save Come Back, Little Sheba; she makes it thoroughly compelling – and the above-mentioned attempts to draw attention away from Lola to other elements only reinforce the dominance of what Booth does. In her strongly empathetic, admirably detailed portrait, the speech rhythms and the physicality of the unkempt, desperately ingratiating Lola are absorbed so completely that they seem perfectly natural. There’s an arresting contrast between Lola’s shuffling around in her old chenille robe and her odd spurts of physical dynamism. Unlike her self-approving houseproud neighbour Mrs Coffman (Lisa Golm), Lola doesn’t get many domestic chores done or meals cooked. She breaks off from preparing Doc’s lunch to lie on the sofa, moving to the comically slinky rhythms of the music on a favourite radio programme. Later on, she vividly expresses – in an impromptu, exuberant charleston – how good the twenty-year-old Lola might have looked doing the dance. (It’s a pity that Daniel Mann interrupts both these highlights in exactly the same way – with Marie and Turk entering unseen and Lola breaking off in flustered embarrassment.) Booth also has Lola do strange little runs in the small spaces of the house – for example, from the parlour to the kitchen and back to get the postman (Paul McVey) a glass of water and hold him in conversation for a while, even though he has no letters to deliver to the Delaneys. (This is an excellent scene.) In these moments, Lola’s body language says loud and clear that there’s lots to do and no time to waste; in fact, there’s not enough in her life to keep her busy and she can’t do even that. As with a later, similarly memorable woman in a dressing gown, in J Lee Thompson’s 1957 film, Lola’s chattering attempts to be positive make her all the more annoying to her husband. Booth’s radiant, exhausting eagerness to please and inability to know when to keep quiet anticipate major elements of Yvonne Mitchell’s fine performance in the Thompson movie.
Shirley Booth first appeared on Broadway in 1925; Come Back, Little Sheba was her cinema debut, at the age of fifty-four. She was in only four more films (the last of them The Matchmaker in 1958, in which she played Dolly Levi) but went on to much further success on stage and, subsequently, on television. (She died in 1992, at the age of ninety-four.) Booth won a Tony for Lola. It’s not unusual for an actor who has performed a role to acclaim in the theatre to bring an overly finished quality to their playing of the same role on screen – to give the impression of having worked out their performance on stage, of trying to repeat the trick but having nothing more to say. It’s therefore all the more remarkable that, as an inexperienced screen actress, Booth’s work in this movie was so successfully adapted to the medium and feels so fresh. Daniel Mann had also directed the play on Broadway and this was his first cinema feature too. In some respects, his inexperience does show: the actors sometimes mistime exits and exit lines or, at least, seem to time them as if they were on stage. But Mann deserves a good deal of credit for enabling Shirley Booth to deliver what is more than a record of a great theatre performance. Booth in Come Back, Little Sheba was the first of three actresses to win an Oscar for their role in a picture directed by Daniel Mann. Within the next eight years, Anna Magnani in The Rose Tattoo and Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8 had followed suit.
3 July 2016
