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DVD The Country Girl
In retrospect, George Seaton's adaptation of The Country Girl seems like the movie that was made to prove that both Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly could act. The tale of an alcoholic actor and singer (Crosby) and his long-suffering wife (Kelly) whose marriage is put to the test when he gets a second chance at stardom, Clifford Odets' drama is chock full of twists and turns designed to give actors a grueling workout, with its hidden secrets, tortured love story, and frank depiction of the horrors of alcohol abuse. Crosby and Kelly sank their teeth into the meaty roles with gusto (it helped that a rock-solid William Holden was there for each to spark off of), and both were showered with accolades that remained high points of their careers. Crosby was lauded with kudos for turning his charming persona inside-out, but it was Kelly who stole the show, possibly because at the time she was one of the hardest working women in show business. In 1954, the actress appeared in four films, including the Alfred Hitchcock classics Dial M for Murder and Rear Window, and finally ascended to leading-lady status after her stellar supporting turns in High Noon and Mogambo. In typical Hollywood fashion, though, it was only when Kelly shrouded her breathtaking beauty in plain clothes and a dowdy hairdo that she was taken seriously and awarded a Best Actress Oscar--one of the most highly contested ever, as she beat out comeback star Judy Garland's ferocious performance in A Star Is Born. --Mark Englehart
I watched "The Country Girl" last night for the first time and I confess that I have mixed feelings. Part of me wants to praise this movie and part of me wants to call it over-rated. The movie has most of the prerequisites for success; great writing, great acting, decent directing and a little song and dance mixed in for extra flavor. The story is a bit predictable although it is well told. It opens up with a view of a hard-driven Broadway director whose production is stalled for lack of a suitable leading man. We see the producer who is keeping a close watch on every penny. We hear that the director has in mind a big name from the past who has fallen on hard times due to personal problems. You can proabably figure out 60% of the rest of the movie on that much alone.
The focus of the movie is on the relationship between the old has-been and his still youthful wife. She married him on the way up and is stuck with him on the way down. You can now figure out another 20% of the movie. I'll leave the remaining 20% alone while reiterating that the predictibility does not diminish the impact of the movie.
My problem with the movie lies with the acting. My biggest problem is with Bing Crosby who plays the former star fallen on hard times: is he good or bad in this role? When your role is playing a washed up actor and you come across as unimpressive is that because that's how the role was meant to be played? Crosby seemed to be always standing with his arms dangling at his side and a look of absolute confusion. I kept wondering how much better the movie would have been with a real actor in the role. However, Bing brought the pathetic nature of his character to the forefront by allowing himself to look so inept. I'm still not sure whether to praise of criticize him. I'm a big fan of William Holden and his preformance was largely impressive. There were a few times, however, where his lines were too bad for anyone to look good in. Finally, there's Grace Kelly who got the Oscar for Best Actress in this role. There were times she was good and times she was mechanical. I couldn't make up my mind on her as well although I came away feeling that Dorothy Dandridge probably was cheated out of an Oscar in 1954.
The snippets of the play that was being produced reminded me of the amateur production of my town's centennial play. Come to think of it, ours was probably better.
OK, OK, why the 4 stars after all of this? Well, William Holden for one. He still controls every scene with his forceful presence. There's a truly poignant personal tragedy that touched us all and helped draw us into the story more. Finally, there's the feeling that some of the "bad" acting was really good acting in disguise. I'm glad I watched "The Country Girl" but it still puzzles me somewhat. Watch it and see what you think.
"For years no one has ever touched me"
The beautiful Grace Kelly was awarded with the Oscar for Best Actress for her role as the long-suffering, embittered wife Georgie Elgin in The Country Girl, and rightly so. It's a beautifully understated performance and an interesting departure for Kelly, who obviously had the guts to take up such an unglamorous role and make it her own.
But the Country Girl isn't just about Grace Kelly. Bing Crosby and William Holden also turn in absolutely knockout performances and manage to hold their own against the actress in this unashamedly theatrical melodrama.
Based on Clifford Odets' play, The Country Girl is all about lies and deceit, and disappointment and blame; it's the story of a washed up, alcoholic actor, and his wife, who has spent the last ten years of her life caring for him, even though she's gone to seed because of it.
Bing Crosby stars as Frank Elgin. Frank is desperate to get back onto the stage. A natural showman, and a once famous singer, Frank has sunk to an all time low after a terrible accident took the life of his young son. Wracked with guilt and blaming himself for his death, Frank had turned to the bottle, with his control freak wife Georgie (Kelly) left to pick up the pieces.
But Frank is also a liar and a schemer, and tells Bernie Dodd (William Holden), his childhood idol, that it was actually Georgie who took up drinking and tried to commit suicide. This leads Bernie to treat Georgie badly, even though, after all these years, she has been trying to help Frank to stand on his own two feet.
Frank is among the best-crafted passive-aggressive characters ever and his different sets of lies to Georgie and to Frank end up in a nasty confrontation over who has Frank's best interests at heart. Frank sets it up so that he's never the bad guy and always the victim.
Each character brings their own bitterness and guilt to the situation - Frank just can't go on and let go of the pain; Georgie feels trapped in a dependent marriage, increasingly embittered; and Bernie, badly burned by his own failed marriage, sees only animosity in a women like Georgie.
Although some of the onstage dancing and singing routines are a little long and overly dull, the movie certainly makes up for this by giving us a number of rapid fire exchanges between the three lead characters. Viewers have a chance to see how Hollywood stars used to transform and enlarge performances without having to rely on the distractions of much action.
Consequently, the showdown between Bernie and Georgie is spectacular, it's one of the best dramatic scenes ever seen on film, even if it involves little more than angst-ridden dialogue. But The Country Girl is mostly worth watching for the exquisite Grace Kelly who just shines as the character, who refers to herself as a simple "country girl" but who clearly contains far more wisdom, pent-up desires, and street smarts than she's willing to let on. Mike Leonard September 05.
An Oscar for a Future Princess
The year 1955 proved a memorable one for Grace Kelly in a number of respects, two of which involved winning an Oscar and meeting a prince who would ask her to marry him and share a kingdom with him. It sounds like the grist for a romance novel, but it all actually happened in the kingdom of Hollywood cinema.
It was the glamorous Grace Kelly that Prince Rainier of Monaco would meet on the French Riviera when she was playing a rich heiress in Alfred Hitchcock's "To Catch a Thief". The irony is that in her other film that was released that same year, "The Country Girl", she won a Best Actress Academy Award by playing the only role of her short but illustrious career that was decidedly against type.
Whereas Kelly, the Philadelphia girl who became a glamorous fashion model in New York, played her natural image in every respect in two Hitchcock classics, "Rear Window" and "To Catch a Thief", she was challenged in the film in between by director George Seaton, who adapted the play of hard-boiled Depression playwright Clifford Odets to the screen in "The Country Girl".
Kelly's character is the opposite of what she appears to be in the early stages of the film. She plays the wife of hard luck Broadway actor-singer Bing Crosby, who has never been able to assuage the guilt he felt over not being able to save their son and only child from death in a New York traffic accident.
Crosby takes to alcohol and becomes extremely depressed, using Kelly as a crutch. He implores her to make decisions, including some unpopular ones that make people angry with her, all the while seeking to portray himself as an all-purpose nice guy who is relaxed and at peace with himself.
When Broadway stage director William Holden seeks to case Crosby as his lead in an upcoming production he is fought tenaciously by the show's producer and prevails only after insisting he will walk out if not given an opportunity to at least see how well the veteran performer plays in a Boston run prior to coming to New York. If he does not pan out then Crosby will be replaced.
Holden, who is on the rebound from a tragic divorce, is immediately skeptical of Kelly. He believes her to be the problem behind her husband's lack of confidence and tough times after earlier Broadway successes. As he learns more and more he not only changes his mind about Kelly and apologizes; he falls in love with her.
This is a film about the trials and tribulations of Broadway theatrical people and their determination to rise above all obstacles. The trio of Kelly, Crosby and Holden walk on eggshells concerning the show and added complications resulting from the director's increasing admiration for the star's wife.
Kelly plays her role with great sensitivity. To present her in a more dour light famous costume designer Edith Head was instructed to create an appropriate wardrobe for her to tone down the glamour that made her world famous. Her hairstyles were also reflective of a sober woman unconcerned about glamour. Such a role understandably was a challenge for one of the most glamorous women ever to set foot on a Hollywood sound stage or grace the covers of fashion magazines.
This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The format on this DVD has been altered from the original wide screen version to one that fills a standard television screen. Thus, the image is squeezed into the middle, making the characters very tall and slender. This version is hard on the eyes after a few minutes. More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Bing Crosby - Grace Kelly - Frank Sinatra Director(s): Charles Walters DVD Release Date: Released the 22 April 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Leave Her to Heaven is one of the most unblinkingly perverse movies ever offered up as a prestige picture by a major studio in the golden age of Hollywood. Gene Tierney, whose lambent eyes, porcelain features, and sweep of healthy-American-girl hair customarily made her a 20th Century Fox icon of purity, scored an Oscar nomination playing a demonically obsessive daughter of privilege with her own monstrous notion of love. By the time she crosses eyebeams with popular novelist Cornel Wilde on a New Mexico-bound train, her jealous manipulations have driven her parents apart and her father to his grave. Well, no, not grave: Wilde soon gets to watch her gallop a glorious palomino across a red-rock horizon as she metronomically sows Dad's ashes to the winds. Mere screen moments later,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Cornel Wilde Director(s): John M. Stahl DVD Release Date: Released the 22 February 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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A suave tennis player (Ray Milland) plots the perfect murder, the dispatching of his wealthy wife (Grace Kelly), who is having an affair with a writer (Robert Cummings). Amazingly, the wife manages to stave off her attacker, a twist of fate that challenges the hubby's talent for improvisation. Alfred Hitchcock wisely stuck to the stage origins of Dial M for Murder, ignoring the temptation to "open up" the material from the home of the unhappy couple. The result may not be one of Hitchcock's deepest films, but it's a thoroughly engaging chamber movie. It also features Grace Kelly at her loveliest, the same year she made Rear Window with Hitchcock. Dial M for Murder was filmed in the briefly trendy 3-D process, and Hitchcock shot some scenes to bring out the depth of... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Ray Milland - Grace Kelly Director(s): Alfred Hitchcock DVD Release Date: Released the 07 September 2004 Usually ships in 6 to 7 days
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Before he made the classic All About Eve, writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz made this clever story about three wives who spend an afternoon at a children's picnic mulling over a letter all three had just received, from a woman who says she's just run off with one of their husbands. As the wives--a former farm girl (Jeanne Crain), a radio soap opera writer (Ann Sothern), and a social climber from the wrong side of the tracks (Linda Darnell)--mull over the troubles of their marriages, each begins to think that she's the one left behind. A Letter to Three Wives doesn't have the crackling show-biz milieu of Eve, but it has the same mix of snappy dialogue and topnotch performances. The tone ranges from florid sentiment to unblinking cynicism, yet Mankiewicz... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Jeanne Crain - Linda Darnell - Ann Sothern Director(s): Joseph L. Mankiewicz DVD Release Date: Released the 22 February 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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