SUSAN HAYWARD CENTENNIAL WEEK
by Timothy Brayton
Yesterday, Eric did an extraordinary job of tackling Susan Hayward's performance in I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955), which I think a lot of us might agree was her all-time best performance. Today, I'd like to offer up what I consider to be her most Susan Haywardiest performance: as the good girl-turned-wretched alcoholic in 1949's My Foolish Heart, the film that netted Hayward the second of her five Oscar nominations.
It's a story tailored with laser focus on letting the lead actress show off Everything with a capital "E"...
Hayward's foolish heart goes from virginal innocent to sarcastic, biting drunk, with a nice stop-over in '30s-style "Fallen Woman" mode.
We first meet Eloise Winters (Hayward, of course) near the end of her story, unhappily married to Kent Smith's Lew Wengler, and quite thoroughly smashed-up on what seems to be a lifetime of drinking. It's putting Hayward's very best foot forward: in a career that went just all over the place, she was always at her best diving headlong into the raging misery of crippling chemical addiction, and it's entirely possible that she never did it better than right here.
What sets Hayward's performance in My Foolish Heart apart from her later, ever-more-explicit bids to win one of those damned Oscars already, is that she's not so interested in leaning on the tragic elements of the story. No, the Eloise we meet right off the bat isn't someone whose life we'd like to have for ourselves, and yes, Hayward is certain to foreground that in her bitter growling and pared-down sloppiness. She gets at something unusually realistic, by '40s standards, about the viciousness of alcoholism; but that includes the secret, angry pleasure it gives to the alcoholic. That's what's missing even from something as great as her work in I'll Cry Tomorrow: that savage kernel of glee in knowing that even if her own life has gone to hell, at least she can take other people down with her.
That's only a fraction of what My Foolish Heart hands over to Hayward, though it's decidedly what she's best at. And that gets to what we might call the Susan Hayward Problem, which is that throughout her career, it seems like she was an awfully tricky person to cast right. Take a look at any of her 1940s publicity shots, and she looks like a fairly standard glamor girl, the kind who gets secondary roles as the leading lady's sassy best friend, or rival. It certainly doesn't seem too much of a leap to think she could work out well as a small-town ingénue type.
The problem comes in that even from an early age, Hayward clearly had an interest in troubled psychological darkness that her belied her simply pretty looks. She thrives on playing edgy, destructive sorts, if not necessarily addicts, then at least women with a rage and fire inside of them. Elsewhere in 1949, for example, we find her at the center of the proto-Dallas Western melodrama Tulsa, giving her best un-nominated performance as, basically, the female version of Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. Nevertheless, her career is littered with more straitlaced roles. At her most ambitious, as in My Foolish Heart, she spends the film's extensive flashback to Eloise's simpler, more romantic girlhood trying to lay the bedrock for the dipsomaniacal fireworks to come, layering in thorny underbrush.
It's fascinating, there's no doubt about that. As to the question of whether it works or not, I can't honestly say that it does. As Eric points out, in I'll Cry Tomorrow, "Hayward drives the film past melodrama". In My Foolish Heart, she doesn't, no matter how hard she tries. For that we can maybe blame the more generic story, the weakness of the earliest scenes, where Hayward fails to convince as an untroubled young lover, or her relative lack of star power, preventing her from overwhelming the production as she would her projects in the mid-to-late '50s.
What we end up with is a whopper of a performance that doesn't always gel in a movie that has absolutely nothing else to recommend itself other than that performance. My Foolish Heart is notable as the only feature ever adapted from the works of J.D. Salinger, and it was precisely in reaction to what he saw at this film's artistic failure that he refused to entertain the thought of any further adaptations. A little extreme, no doubt, but it's impossible to pretend that My Foolish Heart is great cinema or great melodrama. As a showcase for Hayward at her most dynamic (and her most interestingly compromised), though, it can't be topped.