SOMETHING died in the movies when TV, wide screen, and the New Wave film made the bit player expendable. Watching Rita Tushingham or Jeanne Moreau makes one think wistfully of Frank McHugh’s eyebrows, Eugene Pallette’s humpty-dumpty walk, Edgar Kennedy’s mad wounded-bull heavings, and all the others. Whatever happened to Eric Blore?
The great strength of the movies in the 1940’s was the subversive power of the bit player. Movies that have become classics, rightly (The Lady Eve) or wrongly (Casablank), are never more savage and uninhibited than in those moments when a whirring energy is created in back of the static mannered acting of some Great Star.
Casablanca shifts into high gear as soon as Bogart’s glum face hits the surrealistic Yiddish energy of Leonid Kinskey. The Lady Eve is charmingly acted by Stanwyck and Fonda, but that looney Dickensian spirit that was Sturges’s trademark came from brief moments with people like Blore, Pallette, and Demarest. Most of these subactors were short on range, but the explosiveness of their Brief Moments more than made up for it: Frank McHugh, using his hands, eyebrows as though they were wings; Edgar Kennedy, mixing drinks like a barker playing a shell game; the electric-fan velocity with which William Demarest counteracted the monotony of his voice.
As opposed to these midget giants, we find something more nearly the opposite today. Tushingham, Moreau, and especially Giulietta Masina—three tiny women—swell their proportions to giantism with gestures and decor. Moreau, for example, in Bay of Angels, piles herself with outsized boas, eyelashes, cigarette lighters, corsets, wigs. This is supposed to prove that she’s psychologically doomed.
There is good acting today, but it is very different from the Tushingham-Moreau approach, in that it stays within the modesty and infiltrating of good bit-playing: Oskar Werner’s precise melancholia in Ship of Fools; James Fox’s toughness immersed in a soft-sweet intellectualism in King Rat; Robert Shaw’s scene-stealing in From Russia with Love, which is done alongside Sean Connery, who is a master in his own right in the art of sifting into a scene, covertly inflicting a soft dramatic quality inside the external toughness.
Thus, the current movie, like the current cocktail party in which one or two cultural Big Shots take over, tries to get along with a few big actors doing star turns. Repulsion, a Mittel-Europa case history modeled on Hitchcock’s Psycho, is often convincing and horrific, but the star, Catherine Deneuve, is a too glamorous actress, incapable of blending herself into the street scenes, which lack bit players to make them credible. Just as the best thing in The Hill is the hill itself, so the best things here, substituting for the old bit performances, are background minutiae such as wall cracks, dripping faucets, distant views of a playground.
A good actor is usually one who has picked up the tricks that made Lee Tracy better than Spencer: a talent for (1) retreating into a scene, (2) creating an effect of space, and (3) becoming a combination of fantasy figure and the outside world, but always a fragmental blur. For the same reason, a good straight man is nearly always a better actor than the star comic: Dean Martin, George Burns.
A bad example of an actor who has nothing of Tracy’s sifting is Simone Signoret, Werner’s partner in the Fools film, a female Lionel Barrymore sullenly encased in a blocklike girth. She shows nothing but perspiration to pull herself into the scene. An even worse example of the megalomaniac star who can make the simplest action have as many syllables as her name is Rita Tushingham.
The myth that a director breaks or makes a film is regularly disproved by this actress who does a sort of Body Unpleasant act of turning herself into a Duck Bill Blabberpuss (The Leather Boys) and carrying on a war of nerves against the other actors. In a somewhat gentler vein (The Knack), she adds a gratuitous spookiness, which makes every gag seem to last forever. While this film has been accused of having too many jokes, the fact is that the actress smothers every joke with a goonish nasality and by peering overlong at the grown-ups.
Similarly, it is not the director’s fault if she Tushinghams everything up with her particular brand of pathology: being sullen when she should have been airy, simulating the fevers of lust with a wooden body. She injects a grotesquerie into her love scenes, which has more to do with dirty Puritanism than with real sex. In A Taste of Honey, Tony Richardson’s direction was unfairly blamed for this: he was accused of being too “moralistic” to bring out the “lyrical, childlike, gamine” qualities of his heroine. But Tushingham’s lyricism is always more gamey than gamine. For example, the scene with her unlovely aging mother in the bathtub is made unnecessarily cruel and embarrassing merely through the daughter’s appraising stare of distaste.
Actors, too, have been unjustly accused of a certain crudity when playing against Rita (and “against” is the word). Peter Finch has never looked more like a marooned dirigible than in The Girl with the Green Eyes when he either beds down or drinks tea with this hard-eyed adolescent. (Olivier, in a similar situation, was allowed by his fellow actress to gain sympathy for his Entertainer.) It’s not that Tushingham hogs the screen exactly, but she does chew her way through another actor’s scene with bulldog incisors.
The difference between good acting and the Tush treatment is evident in that Richardson film, The Entertainer, where Olivier and Alan Bates are working typical Tushingham material: ugly faces, a cesspool existence, meandering narrative, and a grainy Breathless-style photography. Here the tawdry beach resort picks up something of the wonder of Chaplin’s Gold Rush cabin or the dentist’s quarters in Greed.
There is no moralizing in Olivier’s low-comic treatment of a lower-depth character, as there always is in Tushingham’s overplaying. In other words, the actor is not always pinning placards on himself explaining: “This is a Bourgeois, this is a Proletarian, this is a Lovable Child.” Olivier avoids every stereotype of the tawdry show-biz has-been in order to give his Entertainer some of the magical complexity of a real-life Chaplin. In fact, Osborne’s “liberal” clichés that were thrown away by Olivier were overplayed by Tushingham in A Taste of Honey.
Like Richardson in Taste of Honey, Sidney Furie has never been a more luckless director than in The Leather Boys. The best thing about this film is the performance of Dudley Sutton, who plays the homosexual with real old-fashioned elegance, like a bit player. Compared to this, Tushingham plays her lower-class sex kitten with a wild inappropriateness which might look better in a comic strip than in a movie.
Tossing her head about like a basketball and nasally, toothily spewing scorn at her high school teacher, she seems a cross between an adolescent Maggie Jiggs and a delinquent Orphan Annie. A few shots later, abed with her teenage lover, there is the same wild improbability about her sexuality. No one, except possibly Anne Bancroft, can outdo her in a bed scene.
It may be unfair to expect a young and relatively inexperienced actress to exercise her own discretion on a bad script. But actors such as Olivier are flexible enough to improve on the author’s intention; others make a bad intention worse.
Furie, a Martin Ritt–type director, who works with submiddle-class people in overstrained wrangling situations, sets up one Tushless situation in an early winter boardwalk that serves as a chaser for Miss Tushingham’s presence. The scene involves a potential (Colin Campbell) and committed homosexual (Sutton) picking up a pair of unsentimentally sexy blondes, who have a rowdyism the movie needs and a convincing manner at Ski Ball.
The matter-of-fact presentation of these birds—who recall Howard Hawks’s birds of passage in The Big Sleep—gives the feeling of a 1940’s film made twenty years too late.
The scene moves about with a roughed-in, wind-blown looseness, fanning out into several corners of Coney Island. The comic-strip sexology of Miss Tushingham reappears, and the film veers back into didactic acting and working-class scenes shod or shoddy with leather.
There were moments in high 1940’s films—Elisha Cook in The Big Sleep—when a supporting player hit his peak and managed to dry out whatever juicy glamour and heroics were in the film so that it took on a slatelike hardness. The art in this Cook-type acting—played from left field—is miles beyond the studiously ill-mannered Reo Rita, who is not only old-fashioned, but who, with her special brand of pushing and ham, manages to rob the film of its space, background, and the effect of being made with a camera.
March 1966