Barbara Stanwyck: Comedy Goddess

by Cláudio Alves 

Despite being one of Old Hollywood's most electrifying actresses, Barbara Stanwyck feels somewhat forgotten (apart from cinephiles) when compared to her contemporaries like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford or Ingrid Bergman. The one role that arguable does keep her immortal with the mainstream is the devilish Phyllis Dietrichson in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, the noir to end all noirs starring the greatest femme fatale of them all. Still, to believe that Stanwick was essentially a noir vixen is unfair to her grand legacy. More than many actresses of her time, she rejoiced in hopping from genre to genre, unencumbered by exclusive contracts to studios that might want to pin her down to one type of role. 

Because of that, she was able to experiment with the extremes of Pre-Code libertinism (Baby Doll), weepy melodrama (Stella Dallas), historical epics (Titanic), tragic romances (There's Always Tomorrow) and even camp classics (Walk on the Wild Side). Her tonal flexibility was unparalleled as she was able to mold her trademark toughness and sexual confidence into almost any role conceivable. She was much more than just the venomous Mrs. Dietrichson, even though that is one of her greatest achievements. I'd go so far as to say that she was one of the great comediennes of her era, on par with Irene Dunne, Carole Lombard, and Jean Arthur. Just take look at her second Oscar nomination…

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Eric Rohmer Centennial: Six Moral Tales

by Eric Blume

Last weekend marked the 100th birthday of one of France’s greatest directors, Eric Rohmer, and we here at TFE figured that a nice way to celebrate him would be a look back at the six-film series that launched his career, the Six Moral Tales, which were released between 1962 and 1972.  

These films basically have the same plot:  a man obsessed or in love with one girl finds himself distracted by another woman, only to return to the first girl.  Rohmer uses this framework to examine the stunted male psyche, the rationalizations of behavior, and the mystery of love...

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Oscar's ridiculous accents

by Cláudio Alves

The Academy loves transformative performances, ones where an actor's chameleonic abilities are on full display. While the recent avalanche of biopics winning acting Oscars may suggest such dynamics are a recent phenomenon, it isn't so. Since the 20s, we've seen it happen regularly. Just look at Warner Baxter who won the second-ever Best Actor Oscar for putting on brown face and playing the Cisco Kid in In Old Arizona. That particular example also brings up another favorite bit of acting work that the Academy seems to adore beyond reason – accents. Bad ones at that.

Some performers, like Meryl Streep, are brilliant at mimicking regional and personal accents, doing them so naturally that one forgets the artifice. Many others, can't be helped and often fail at the task. To be perfectly frank, I'm not a person that's much annoyed by bad accents onscreen. Nicole Kidman's American accent in The Portrait of a Lady is quite unconvincing, for instance, but I still consider it one of the actress' best works. That said, sometimes there are levels of incompetence too flagrant to ignore.

Such is the case of some Oscar champions, including a Best Actor winner whose efforts are cringe-worthy… 

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Mirror, mirror on the wall…

by Cláudio Alves

In a career full of little gimlets of cinematic madness, The Lady from Shanghai is Orson Welles' most demented work. With an incomprehensible plot and a cast willing to go to the extremes of grotesque, it's a waking nightmare on celluloid. Through surrealism, Hollywood's most famous enfant terrible untethered himself from the demands of audiences and studios alike, spitting on their face as he went about it. The result is a film noir in the process of imploding unto itself, unencumbered by reality it projects shrapnel of shock and provocation every which way.

Beautiful stars turn into fleshy gargoyles and the dialogue gets increasingly florid, like drunken poetry coming directly from the pits of hell. Appropriately enough, an atmosphere of apocalyptic nihilism infects the hearts of everyone involved, onscreen characters and offscreen audiences alike. And then, this melodrama for the end of the world explodes into an ecstasy of beauty. As the lunatic plots converge and the characters reach their nasty apotheosis, Welles' venomous flower of a film loses itself in a hall of mirrors…

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The bruised authenticity of "In a Lonely Place"

by Cláudio Alves

There's something deeply unsettling about finding yourself scared of someone you love. Part of it is the admittance of personal failure to oneself for the frightened person is the one that let themselves become vulnerable. To love is to let defenses fall and lay splayed at the mercy of another, believing our beloved will never abuse the gift of openness they have been given. We hope against hope that this trust is well-founded but sometimes it isn't. To realize you're scared may lead you to accept loneliness as a companion or else learn to live with fear. Like a toxic cocktail of arsenic and vinegar, that second option is a difficult thing to swallow and can be deadly. It often is. 

Such nightmares of heartbreak and panic have rarely been better captured in celluloid than in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place…

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