George Seaton (1954)

Casting against type is a perennially good way of winning an acting Oscar so Grace Kelly had a head start in the 1954 Best Actress race for her role in The Country Girl, in which she plays an apparently dowdy wife.  Even so, Kelly’s win – at the expense of Judy Garland in A Star is Born – remains one of the most controversial in Academy Awards history.  (Groucho Marx famously described the result, in a commiserative telegram to Garland, as ‘the biggest robbery since Brinks’.)  Bing Crosby as the husband – a washed-up, alcoholic theatre actor called Frank Elgin, who’s trying for a comeback – would probably have won too, and for similar reasons, if the Academy hadn’t already overlooked Marlon Brando in each of the three preceding years.  It was a scandal that he didn’t win for A Streetcar Named Desire but at least that meant Brando was seen as overdue for Best Actor by the time of On the Waterfront.    It’s something of a relief to see Bing Crosby trying to play an insecure, self-hating man – qualities you don’t naturally associate with him:  when Frank Elgin isn’t performing, Crosby sheds his trademark complacency.  But when he’s onstage the tension vanishes and you’re watching not Frank but Bing Crosby.   At the start of the picture, Elgin auditions for the lead in a new musical.  Crosby is so consummately professional that the ensuing argument between William Holden as director Bernie Dodd and the doubtful producer Philip Cook (‘Cookie’) about whether to give Frank the part makes little sense:  after this audition, any producer would be mad not to get him at all costs.  As for Kelly, she tries hard but the dowdiness is skin deep (and she gets to appear as the real Grace Kelly both in flashback and at the climax of the story).  The bitter, weary loyalty she tries to give Georgie Elgin is shallower still.

I assume that Frank Elgin isn’t a musical comedy performer and recording artist in the stage play by Clifford Odets on which The Country Girl is based and that this change came with casting Crosby in the role.   The songs, although they’re by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin, are undistinguished.  The musical in which Frank is to star is an amusingly static, sub-Oklahoma! venture called ‘The Land Around Us’.  Otherwise, I don’t know if George Seaton’s screenplay (which also won an Oscar) is a faithful adaptation of Odets’s Broadway success but the material now seems dated and generic – one of those pieces that sees the stage as allegorical and stage performers as the epitome of human selfishness and survival instincts.   (After ‘The Land Around Us’ has flopped in Boston, the falling-to-pieces Frank Elgin overhears a conversation between Bernie and Cook.  It’s at this moment, when Frank learns he’s about to be fired, that he pulls himself together, although we don’t see how he manages to:  Seaton immediately cuts to the show’s Broadway opening with Frank still in the lead.)  For much of The Country Girl there hardly seems to be a world outside the theatre.  The drama hinges on whether Frank can succeed again as a performer.  Then, of course, he and Bernie Dodd are both made to learn the lesson that there’s more to life than putting on a show.

I know the media were less intrusive in those days but if Frank Elgin was a big name, wouldn’t the fact that his and Georgie’s young son had been killed in a road accident have been in the papers?   The effect this had on Frank and his career – the boy’s death, for which Frank blames himself, drove him to drink and attempted suicide and seems to have turned him into a pathological liar – might been kept out of the press but wouldn’t it be common knowledge in show business circles?   These are rhetorical questions.  The trauma, needless to say, has to be prised out as part of the tortuous melodrama of The Country Girl.  Although I rather like this kind of stuff and the film is fairly entertaining, it isn’t gripping.   Whether Georgie Elgin will decide to stay with her husband or start a new life with Bernie is suspenseful only because there’s not much going on in either the Kelly-Crosby or the Kelly-Holden relationships – and so no sense of what outcome would feel emotionally right.

William Holden is a much better screen actor than either of the other principals but he seems weighed down from an early stage by the knowledge of the contortions the story will have to go through and the part he’ll have to play in them.   The script contains a number of in-jokes and topical references (probably more than I noticed), including an allusion to Odets’s Golden Boy, which provided Holden with his breakthrough role in the film version and to the producer who ‘took a chance’ on Laurette Taylor in the original Broadway production of The Glass Menagerie.  The part of the ‘Gentleman Caller’ in that production was played by Anthony Ross, who plays Cookie here and has a very convincing look of stressed unhealthiness.  Sad to say, Ross died of a heart attack in 1955, at the age of forty-six.

19 June 2010