David Thomson
"The coup of the film would seem to be casting Ryan O'Neal as Mose and Tatum, his real daughter, as Addie. She was ten when she won the Supporting Actress Oscar, and she has done nothing else to remind one of this flawless performance. Was it being with her dad that did it? Was it that Bogdanovich at that time had an assured way with actors? Or is it so good a role that any adult could play it? Whatever answer you prefer, I think this is among the toughest views of children in the unduly sentimental range of the American film. The real movie star of the years in which Paper Moon was set was Shirley Temple, whose goodness was as true as her dimples. Whereas Addie is born old and wise--and this this is a film that every ambitious child loves.
"Another point of view is to say that Tatum O'Neal is far more than a supporting actress in Paper Moon. Her role dominates the film. She is its mind, its conscience, its humor and fears. So if Tatum had got Best Actress (that went to Glenda Jackson in A Touch of Class), then a further justice could have been done--giving the Supporting Actress Oscar to Madeline Kahn for her superb Trixie Delight. There is much else, including John Hillerman in tow parts, Randy Quaid, P. J. Johnson, and Burton Gilliam...."
David Thomson, Have You Seen...? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (2008), p. 642
"Oddly, Kahn had already done a beautiful job in a real part, all lampoon aside, in Paper Moon (1973)... Kahn played a small part in the film's center as Trixie Delight, the baby-talking hooker whom the con man picks up. Figuring herself Kahn's rival, Tatum at one point pulls a sit-down strike, a serious threat in a road picture. Nothing can move her--until Kahn picks her way up a hill on her bitty spike heels in her pathetic finery to intimidate, bribe, and at last beseech the little girl not to ruin this gig for her. It's a poignant, smartly underplayed passage, the only honest thing the character says in the whole picture. Kahn got an Oscar nomination for her role, too...."
Ethan Mordden, Movie Star: A Look at the Women Who Made Hollywood (1983), p. 239
Anne Bancroft, The Miracle Worker
"....It was Arthur Penn's film of the [The Miracle Worker] (1962) that brought her back to movies and a working of raw emotion, torn between independence and her bond with Helen Keller, great enough to justify the dissatisfaction with her early films. The Oscar for that part was irrelevant to its frightening complexity. As well as nursing the performance of Patty Duke, she so dramatized the struggle between liberty and discipline that she probably helped reveal Penn's own talent to himself...."
David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film (3rd Edition) (1994), p. 41
David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film (3rd Edition) (1994), p. 41
Angela Lansbury, The Manchurian Candidate
"There are sublime things in the picture: the dream in which a ladies' flower-club meeting slips in and out of brainwashing; the entire conceit of Lawrence Harvey as someone not quite there; the furious, digestive satisfaction of Angela Lansbury feeding on all around her;...."
David Thomson, Have You Seen...?, (2006) p. 514
"....The effect of Miss Page's increased power and leisure, which expects no reistance from the movie, is to eviscerate the entire film. The same is true of Gregory Peck's pious Lincoln impersonation in To Kill a Mockingbird and of Angela Lansbury's helicopterlike performance in The Manchurian Candidate, in which every sentence beings and ends with a vertical drop."
Manny Farber, "The Decline of the Actor", The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, p. 546-47.....
"....Angela Lansbury is at her most splendid as the mole.... Even today, after a quarter century's worth of bold cinema, Lansbury's portrayal terrifies, flighty and flinty on the surface but rigid with cold passions underneath. Her grandest passion is the Sido-Soviet advance, but her greatest, to our horror, is her son Laurence Harvey. "They" have destroyed him in the brainwashing, and she will avenge him. She is the Queen of Hearts. She is Mrs. Bates. And she is the Manchurian Candidate, the choice of the East, her regency to be guaranteed by assassination...."
Ethan Mordden, Medium Cool (1990), p. 26
David Thomson, Have You Seen...?, (2006) p. 514
"....The effect of Miss Page's increased power and leisure, which expects no reistance from the movie, is to eviscerate the entire film. The same is true of Gregory Peck's pious Lincoln impersonation in To Kill a Mockingbird and of Angela Lansbury's helicopterlike performance in The Manchurian Candidate, in which every sentence beings and ends with a vertical drop."
Manny Farber, "The Decline of the Actor", The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, p. 546-47.....
"....Angela Lansbury is at her most splendid as the mole.... Even today, after a quarter century's worth of bold cinema, Lansbury's portrayal terrifies, flighty and flinty on the surface but rigid with cold passions underneath. Her grandest passion is the Sido-Soviet advance, but her greatest, to our horror, is her son Laurence Harvey. "They" have destroyed him in the brainwashing, and she will avenge him. She is the Queen of Hearts. She is Mrs. Bates. And she is the Manchurian Candidate, the choice of the East, her regency to be guaranteed by assassination...."
Ethan Mordden, Medium Cool (1990), p. 26
Helen Mirren, Prime Suspect
John Leonard:
"....On American TV, when a woman smokes at all, she's bad, unless she's also working-class and therefore stupid.... But on American TV, whether or not she smokes, no woman older than Lolita is allowed to carry a mini-series, either, unless she's also a glamour puss. At Granada in England, they'd rather have someone who can act. Mirren, a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company who made her first movie with James Mason in 1969 and has appeared on the stage in plays by everybody from Shakespeare to Chekov to David Hare, is not a glamour puss. What she is is splendid....
"In fact, Jane does neglect the hearth and any other sort of healthy emotional life outside her work, which is why she herself is a prime suspect in the eyes of all the men around her. But the marvel of Prime Suspect is that this difficult woman is permitted to find her satisfaction in a difficult job...."
[left out some]
New York, January 27, 1992
"For adulthood's paw prints, we can look to Helen Mirren, who returns as Jane Tennison of Scotland Yard in Prime Suspect 2.... Mirren once again is a listening intelligence. Her brain's an ear. Really, television doesn't get any better."
New York, February 15, 1993
David Denby:
".... Mirren has brought off the most sustained example of great acting in the history of television.... Mirren remains naked throughout Prime Suspect without removing a single garment. No matter how many squalid crises are forming, no matter how many people are fighting for her attention, Mirren always has a private moment with the camera, a moment in which we see, beneath the harassed, brisk manner, exactly what she's thinking and feeling. She sets the emotional and moral values. And we accept what we learn from her because she's always a three-dimensional person, hurt and hurting, strong yet easily angered. Maturity has never looked so ripe, so sexual-- and so intellectually focussed at the same time. Mirren has ended, for the time being, the tedious, pointless distinction between mind and body. She's put a whole woman on the screen and made people grateful just for her existence."
Esquire, 1994
(quoted by Anthony Slide in Some Joe You Don't Know: An American Biographical Guide to 100 British...
James Wolcott:
"A performance as thorny and propulsive as Helen Mirren's in the Prime Suspect series has a crackle that holds up in reruns; her trim execution recalls the Humphrey Bogart of The Maltese FalconandThe Big Sleep."
"....The heiress to Glenda Jackson as the queen of the quality miniseries...."
New Yorker, January 25, 1993
See also Amy Taubin, Village Voice, January 28, 1992
David Ansen, Newsweek, May 16, 1994
"....On American TV, when a woman smokes at all, she's bad, unless she's also working-class and therefore stupid.... But on American TV, whether or not she smokes, no woman older than Lolita is allowed to carry a mini-series, either, unless she's also a glamour puss. At Granada in England, they'd rather have someone who can act. Mirren, a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company who made her first movie with James Mason in 1969 and has appeared on the stage in plays by everybody from Shakespeare to Chekov to David Hare, is not a glamour puss. What she is is splendid....
"In fact, Jane does neglect the hearth and any other sort of healthy emotional life outside her work, which is why she herself is a prime suspect in the eyes of all the men around her. But the marvel of Prime Suspect is that this difficult woman is permitted to find her satisfaction in a difficult job...."
[left out some]
New York, January 27, 1992
"For adulthood's paw prints, we can look to Helen Mirren, who returns as Jane Tennison of Scotland Yard in Prime Suspect 2.... Mirren once again is a listening intelligence. Her brain's an ear. Really, television doesn't get any better."
New York, February 15, 1993
David Denby:
".... Mirren has brought off the most sustained example of great acting in the history of television.... Mirren remains naked throughout Prime Suspect without removing a single garment. No matter how many squalid crises are forming, no matter how many people are fighting for her attention, Mirren always has a private moment with the camera, a moment in which we see, beneath the harassed, brisk manner, exactly what she's thinking and feeling. She sets the emotional and moral values. And we accept what we learn from her because she's always a three-dimensional person, hurt and hurting, strong yet easily angered. Maturity has never looked so ripe, so sexual-- and so intellectually focussed at the same time. Mirren has ended, for the time being, the tedious, pointless distinction between mind and body. She's put a whole woman on the screen and made people grateful just for her existence."
Esquire, 1994
(quoted by Anthony Slide in Some Joe You Don't Know: An American Biographical Guide to 100 British...
James Wolcott:
"A performance as thorny and propulsive as Helen Mirren's in the Prime Suspect series has a crackle that holds up in reruns; her trim execution recalls the Humphrey Bogart of The Maltese FalconandThe Big Sleep."
"....The heiress to Glenda Jackson as the queen of the quality miniseries...."
New Yorker, January 25, 1993
See also Amy Taubin, Village Voice, January 28, 1992
David Ansen, Newsweek, May 16, 1994
Ronee Blakley, Nashville
Pauline Kael, New Yorker, March 3, 1975 (as reprinted in Reeling and For Keeps, p. 612)
"....Opal is always on the fringe of the action; her opposite is the figure that the plot threads converge on--Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), whose ballads are her only means of expressing her yearnings. Barbara Jean is the one tragic character: her art comes from her belief in imaginary roots.
"The movies often try to do portraits of artists, but their artistry must be asserted for them. When we see an actor playing a painter and then see the paintings, we don't feel the relation. And even when the portrait is of a performing artist, the story is almost always of how the artist achieves recognition rather than of what it is that has made him an artist. Here, with Ronee Blakley's Barbara Jean, we perceive what goes into the art, and we experience what the unbalance of life and art can do to a person. When she was a child, Barbara Jean memorized the words on a record and earned fifty cents as a prize, and she's been singing ever since; the artist has developed, but the woman hasn't. She has driven herself to the point of having no identity as a performer. She's in and out of hospitals, and her manager husband (Allen Garfield) treats her as a child, yet she's a true folk artist; the Nashville audience knows she's the real thing and responds to the purity of her gift. She expresses the loneliness that is the central emotion in country music. But she isn't using the emotion, as the other singers do: it pours right out of her--softly. Arriving at the airport, coming home after a stretch of treatment--for burns, we're told--she's radiant, yet so breakable it's hard to believe she has the strength to perform. A few days later, when she stands on the stage of the Opry Belle and sings "Dues," with the words "It hurst so bad, it gets me down," her fragility is so touching and her swaying movements are so seductively musical that, perhaps for the first time on the screen, one gets the sense of an artist's being consumed by her gift. This is Ronee Blakley’s first movie, and she puts most movie hysteria to shame; she achieves her effects so simply that I wasn’t surprised when someone near me started to cry during one of her songs. She has a long sequence on the stage of the Opry Belle when Barbara Jean's mind starts to wander and, instead of singing, she tells out-of-place, goofy stories about her childhood. They're the same sort of stories that have gone into her songs, but without the transformation they're just tatters that she clings to--and they're all she's got. Ronee Blakley, who wrote this scene, as well as the music and lyrics of all her songs, is a pechy, dimpled brunette, in the manner of the movie stars of an earlier era; as Barbara Jean, she's like the prettiest girl in high school, the one the people in town say is just perfect-looking, like Linda Darnell. But she's more delicate; she's willowy and regal, tipping to one side like the Japanese ladies carved in ivory. At one point, she sings with the mike in one hand, the other hand tracing the movements of the music in the air, and it’s an absolutely ecstatic moment.”
left out a lot, yo
"....Opal is always on the fringe of the action; her opposite is the figure that the plot threads converge on--Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley), whose ballads are her only means of expressing her yearnings. Barbara Jean is the one tragic character: her art comes from her belief in imaginary roots.
"The movies often try to do portraits of artists, but their artistry must be asserted for them. When we see an actor playing a painter and then see the paintings, we don't feel the relation. And even when the portrait is of a performing artist, the story is almost always of how the artist achieves recognition rather than of what it is that has made him an artist. Here, with Ronee Blakley's Barbara Jean, we perceive what goes into the art, and we experience what the unbalance of life and art can do to a person. When she was a child, Barbara Jean memorized the words on a record and earned fifty cents as a prize, and she's been singing ever since; the artist has developed, but the woman hasn't. She has driven herself to the point of having no identity as a performer. She's in and out of hospitals, and her manager husband (Allen Garfield) treats her as a child, yet she's a true folk artist; the Nashville audience knows she's the real thing and responds to the purity of her gift. She expresses the loneliness that is the central emotion in country music. But she isn't using the emotion, as the other singers do: it pours right out of her--softly. Arriving at the airport, coming home after a stretch of treatment--for burns, we're told--she's radiant, yet so breakable it's hard to believe she has the strength to perform. A few days later, when she stands on the stage of the Opry Belle and sings "Dues," with the words "It hurst so bad, it gets me down," her fragility is so touching and her swaying movements are so seductively musical that, perhaps for the first time on the screen, one gets the sense of an artist's being consumed by her gift. This is Ronee Blakley’s first movie, and she puts most movie hysteria to shame; she achieves her effects so simply that I wasn’t surprised when someone near me started to cry during one of her songs. She has a long sequence on the stage of the Opry Belle when Barbara Jean's mind starts to wander and, instead of singing, she tells out-of-place, goofy stories about her childhood. They're the same sort of stories that have gone into her songs, but without the transformation they're just tatters that she clings to--and they're all she's got. Ronee Blakley, who wrote this scene, as well as the music and lyrics of all her songs, is a pechy, dimpled brunette, in the manner of the movie stars of an earlier era; as Barbara Jean, she's like the prettiest girl in high school, the one the people in town say is just perfect-looking, like Linda Darnell. But she's more delicate; she's willowy and regal, tipping to one side like the Japanese ladies carved in ivory. At one point, she sings with the mike in one hand, the other hand tracing the movements of the music in the air, and it’s an absolutely ecstatic moment.”
left out a lot, yo
Greta Garbo, Ninotchka
Andrew Sarris, "You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet...." , p. 389-321
"Ernst Lubitsch has been credited with jesting that Greta Garbo and Gary Cooper were the same person. To prove his unlikely thesis, he asked the rhetorical question, 'Have you ever seen them together?' Certainly not on film...."
"Whatever the genesis of Ninotchka, its fruition crowned Garbo once and for all not merely as, in the drunken words of Melvyn Douglas's Leon, "Ninotchka the Great ... Duchess of the People! ... Grand Duchess of the People:" but also the Queen of Tragedy and, at long last, Comedy. With Ninotchka, "GARBO LAUGHS" supplanted "GARBO TALKS" as the watchwords of discerning moviegoers. From the moment she steps off a train in her commissar's costume, Garbo's exquisite gravity of expression and the metronomic doomsday delivery of her lines are as profoundly hilarious as anything in the history of talking pictures....
"Garbo herself ranked Lubitsch over even Cukor [Camille] as her greatest director. John Bainbridge (in his Garbo) describes Lubitsch's unusual modus operandi with Garbo on the set of Ninotchka:
"Fortunately, Ninotchka demonstrated that Garbo had the talent and instincts to play the most demanding roles of Chekov, Ibsen, Shaw, Pirandello, and any other tragicomic dramatist in the modern repertory. The instant shift in her great drunk scene from light farce to light pathos without missing a beat of conviction is a moment of rare sublimity in American talking pictures...."
The edited version may look like this:
".... From the moment she steps off a train in her commissar's costume, Garbo's exquisite gravity of expression and the metronomic doomsday delivery of her lines are as profoundly hilarious as anything in the history of talking pictures....
"Garbo herself ranked Lubitsch over even Cukor [Camille] as her greatest director....
"Near the end of her career as at the beginning, Garbo projected all the elemental choices involved in being or becoming a normal woman. The first flutterings of desire, the perennial fears of betrayal, the shame, the guilt, the joy of forbidden loves. Curiously, she shied away from the roles in which she could have gained in reputation what she lost in control. She was reluctant to play even the very mild and thoroughly enchanting drunk scene in Ninotchka. She was never cast as a mad-woman, or a problem alcoholic, or an addict of any kind....
"Fortunately, Ninotchka demonstrated that Garbo had the talent and instincts to play the most demanding roles of Chekov, Ibsen, Shaw, Pirandello, and any other tragicomic dramatist in the modern repertory. The instant shift in her great drunk scene from light farce to light pathos without missing a beat of conviction is a moment of rare sublimity in American talking pictures...."
"Ernst Lubitsch has been credited with jesting that Greta Garbo and Gary Cooper were the same person. To prove his unlikely thesis, he asked the rhetorical question, 'Have you ever seen them together?' Certainly not on film...."
"Whatever the genesis of Ninotchka, its fruition crowned Garbo once and for all not merely as, in the drunken words of Melvyn Douglas's Leon, "Ninotchka the Great ... Duchess of the People! ... Grand Duchess of the People:" but also the Queen of Tragedy and, at long last, Comedy. With Ninotchka, "GARBO LAUGHS" supplanted "GARBO TALKS" as the watchwords of discerning moviegoers. From the moment she steps off a train in her commissar's costume, Garbo's exquisite gravity of expression and the metronomic doomsday delivery of her lines are as profoundly hilarious as anything in the history of talking pictures....
"Garbo herself ranked Lubitsch over even Cukor [Camille] as her greatest director. John Bainbridge (in his Garbo) describes Lubitsch's unusual modus operandi with Garbo on the set of Ninotchka:
In working with Garbo he was a paragon of gallantry, thoughtfulness, and charm. Arriving on the set in the morning, he called at Garbo's dressing room and formally paid his respects. Then he removed his coat and worked in shirt sleeves the rest of the day. At five o'clock, when work was over, Lubitsch again put on his coat and called at the star's dressing room, where he bade her a courtly good evening. This daily routine, as far as anyone could remember, was unprecedented on a Hollywood stage."Near the end of her career as at the beginning, Garbo projected all the elemental choices involved in being or becoming a normal woman. The first flutterings of desire, the perennial fears of betrayal, the shame, the guilt, the joy of forbidden loves. Curiously, she shied away from the roles in which she could have gained in reputation what she lost in control. She was reluctant to play even the very mild and thoroughly enchanting drunk scene in Ninotchka. She was never cast as a mad-woman, or a problem alcoholic, or an addict of any kind. The studio may have been as hesitant as Garbo in exploring more morbid subjects in which their star would have to forgo dignity and decorum.
"Fortunately, Ninotchka demonstrated that Garbo had the talent and instincts to play the most demanding roles of Chekov, Ibsen, Shaw, Pirandello, and any other tragicomic dramatist in the modern repertory. The instant shift in her great drunk scene from light farce to light pathos without missing a beat of conviction is a moment of rare sublimity in American talking pictures...."
The edited version may look like this:
".... From the moment she steps off a train in her commissar's costume, Garbo's exquisite gravity of expression and the metronomic doomsday delivery of her lines are as profoundly hilarious as anything in the history of talking pictures....
"Garbo herself ranked Lubitsch over even Cukor [Camille] as her greatest director....
"Near the end of her career as at the beginning, Garbo projected all the elemental choices involved in being or becoming a normal woman. The first flutterings of desire, the perennial fears of betrayal, the shame, the guilt, the joy of forbidden loves. Curiously, she shied away from the roles in which she could have gained in reputation what she lost in control. She was reluctant to play even the very mild and thoroughly enchanting drunk scene in Ninotchka. She was never cast as a mad-woman, or a problem alcoholic, or an addict of any kind....
"Fortunately, Ninotchka demonstrated that Garbo had the talent and instincts to play the most demanding roles of Chekov, Ibsen, Shaw, Pirandello, and any other tragicomic dramatist in the modern repertory. The instant shift in her great drunk scene from light farce to light pathos without missing a beat of conviction is a moment of rare sublimity in American talking pictures...."
Vivien Leigh, A Streetcar Named Desire
"Everything that kept the Broadway "Streetcar" from spinning off into
ridiculous melodrama--everything thoughtful, muted,
three-dimensional--has been raped, along with poor Blanche Dubois, in
the Hollywood wood version....
"However, if the author surrendered without firing a shot, the actors and directors certainly did not. Marlon Brando, who on the stage gave a revolutionary head-on portrait of the rough-and-ready, second-generation American Joe, has upped the voltage of every eccentricity by several thousand watts. The performance is now more cinematic and flexible, but the addition of a lush physicality and a show-off's flamboyance to the character of Stanley makes him seem like a muscular version of a petulant, crazily egotistical homosexual. Brando, having fallen hard for the critics' idea that Stanley is simply animal and slob, now screams and postures and sweeps plates off the table with an ape-like emphasis that unfortunately becomes predictable."
"As the ex-school-teacher-harlot-belle in this study of social-sexual disintegration, Miss Leigh injects a bitter-sweet fragrance and acrobatic excitement into the role, but the effects are freakish, too ambitious and endless...."
Manny Farber, October 20, 1951
reprinted p. 369-70
(left out some)
"However, if the author surrendered without firing a shot, the actors and directors certainly did not. Marlon Brando, who on the stage gave a revolutionary head-on portrait of the rough-and-ready, second-generation American Joe, has upped the voltage of every eccentricity by several thousand watts. The performance is now more cinematic and flexible, but the addition of a lush physicality and a show-off's flamboyance to the character of Stanley makes him seem like a muscular version of a petulant, crazily egotistical homosexual. Brando, having fallen hard for the critics' idea that Stanley is simply animal and slob, now screams and postures and sweeps plates off the table with an ape-like emphasis that unfortunately becomes predictable."
"As the ex-school-teacher-harlot-belle in this study of social-sexual disintegration, Miss Leigh injects a bitter-sweet fragrance and acrobatic excitement into the role, but the effects are freakish, too ambitious and endless...."
Manny Farber, October 20, 1951
reprinted p. 369-70
(left out some)
Sean Young, Blade Runner
David Thomson:
"As for me, you can have all the Indian Jones films if I can keep thirty minutes of Blade Runner. I prefer, and find so much more pathos and interest in, Harrison Ford when he sometimes wonders not just whether his girl is a replicant but whether he, Rick Deckard, might be one, too...."
"....In the most direct sense, Deckard had to know or guess, and he lives with the mystery as to whether Rachael (Sean Young)---the inventor's daughter, and "special"--is someone he can love or may have to kill. (The vexed career of the glorious Ms. Young was never as well served as here.)
"So the agent's grim progress by way of one replicant after another--Brion James, the staggering Joanna Cassidy, the amazing Daryl Hannah, and the truly noble Rutger Hauer--is not just his task, but seemingly the destruction of the most vivid people in the film.... [T]his was the first occasion on which I felt that Scott is so good a director he could handle nearly anything...."
David Thomson
"Have You Seen...? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films" (2008), p. 106
also from same book, get Paper Moon
"As for me, you can have all the Indian Jones films if I can keep thirty minutes of Blade Runner. I prefer, and find so much more pathos and interest in, Harrison Ford when he sometimes wonders not just whether his girl is a replicant but whether he, Rick Deckard, might be one, too...."
"....In the most direct sense, Deckard had to know or guess, and he lives with the mystery as to whether Rachael (Sean Young)---the inventor's daughter, and "special"--is someone he can love or may have to kill. (The vexed career of the glorious Ms. Young was never as well served as here.)
"So the agent's grim progress by way of one replicant after another--Brion James, the staggering Joanna Cassidy, the amazing Daryl Hannah, and the truly noble Rutger Hauer--is not just his task, but seemingly the destruction of the most vivid people in the film.... [T]his was the first occasion on which I felt that Scott is so good a director he could handle nearly anything...."
David Thomson
"Have You Seen...? A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films" (2008), p. 106
also from same book, get Paper Moon
Kim Stanley, Seance on a Wet Afternoon
Richard Attenborough:
"The complexity of dramatic impression vital to the credibility of Myra was hard to find. Also an intellectual ability to follow and understand the character. I didn't believe Simone could convey, as Kim did, the otherworldliness which this woman inhabited in her private fantasies....
"She so occupied the psyche of this extraordinary woman, it impelled her to take certain moves and make certain decisions which just a good actress, a really very good actress, simply wouldn't get anywhere near. She transferred her viewers into the world which she occupied....
"It was quite complicated when I put my actor's hat on. Because you never quite knew what she was going to do, not merely in terms of the delivery of her lines. It used to drive the camera operator to his wits' end--you didn't know which side of the set she was going to be on.
"[In 1963], the constraints on lenses and microphones and so one were considerable. Now if somebody's two or three feet off their marks, it couldn't matter less. You're capable of holding, with a good focus puller, whatever you want. In those days, you couldn't be a foot off your mark, unless the dolly pusher was absolutely superb. But the end result was bewitching."
--Interview with Jon Krampner, January 25, 2002, Female Brando, p. 221-23.
Bryan Forbes:
"She always went beyond the evidence, never taking the easy route and constantly surpris[ing] me and Richard Attenborough with the purity of her invention...
"There was one notable occasion when I was panning her through the kitchen with the child out to the back yard. And she suddenly stopped, but the camera operator went on, and I had to say, 'Cut!' I said, 'What's the problem, Kim?' She said, 'I was relating to the oranges.' There was a bowl of oranges on the table. So I said, 'What a brilliant idea. I wish I'd thought of it. Unfortunately, Kim, it's a wasted shot. Why don't you relate to them on the move, instead of stopping and relating?' She was a tortured soul in many ways. She ws really too good an actress to suffocate herself with all that Method shit."
--Interview with Jon Krampner, October 12, 2001, Female Brando, p. 222-23.
"The complexity of dramatic impression vital to the credibility of Myra was hard to find. Also an intellectual ability to follow and understand the character. I didn't believe Simone could convey, as Kim did, the otherworldliness which this woman inhabited in her private fantasies....
"She so occupied the psyche of this extraordinary woman, it impelled her to take certain moves and make certain decisions which just a good actress, a really very good actress, simply wouldn't get anywhere near. She transferred her viewers into the world which she occupied....
"It was quite complicated when I put my actor's hat on. Because you never quite knew what she was going to do, not merely in terms of the delivery of her lines. It used to drive the camera operator to his wits' end--you didn't know which side of the set she was going to be on.
"[In 1963], the constraints on lenses and microphones and so one were considerable. Now if somebody's two or three feet off their marks, it couldn't matter less. You're capable of holding, with a good focus puller, whatever you want. In those days, you couldn't be a foot off your mark, unless the dolly pusher was absolutely superb. But the end result was bewitching."
--Interview with Jon Krampner, January 25, 2002, Female Brando, p. 221-23.
Bryan Forbes:
"She always went beyond the evidence, never taking the easy route and constantly surpris[ing] me and Richard Attenborough with the purity of her invention...
"There was one notable occasion when I was panning her through the kitchen with the child out to the back yard. And she suddenly stopped, but the camera operator went on, and I had to say, 'Cut!' I said, 'What's the problem, Kim?' She said, 'I was relating to the oranges.' There was a bowl of oranges on the table. So I said, 'What a brilliant idea. I wish I'd thought of it. Unfortunately, Kim, it's a wasted shot. Why don't you relate to them on the move, instead of stopping and relating?' She was a tortured soul in many ways. She ws really too good an actress to suffocate herself with all that Method shit."
--Interview with Jon Krampner, October 12, 2001, Female Brando, p. 222-23.
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