Against The Hype

I’ve tried. I swear I’ve tried. But after numerous repeated viewings, I still look upon Vivien Leigh’s Blache DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire and wonder what gains the feisty, ever resourceful Scarlett O’Hara thinks she’ll get out of posturing so self-consciously and pitching her voice around the range of a twittery coo. It’s a testament to Leigh’s legendary performance as that other Southern belle in Gone with the Wind that it haunts this role too. Yet Leigh is so much more stiffly heightened here, even while keeping within a similar vein of theatricality, that we can’t quite say she’s approaching Blanche as an aged, more destitute remainder of who Scarlett once was either (though now that I would’ve liked to see).

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A Face in the Crowd asks Andy Griffith to embody Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, a sort of barnstorming hick that rouses the nation over the airwaves (first by radio, then by TV) with his lack of pretense. But it’s hard to know what’s more condescendingly offensive: that his schtick works as it does, with all these fawning reaction shots of “aw-shucks” Americans in their old-fashioned living rooms and kitchens, smitten with a voice that finally speaks for them; or that Lonesome finally succumbs to corruption, like all star-is-born types inevitably do (or at least the males, those power-starved horndogs!). Worse, in order to fell him, the movie resorts to the cheap trick of having him learn to despise the masses who love him, and spout his disdain just when he thinks they aren’t listening. One would think he, of all people, would know how they hang onto every word. (more…)