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
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...."
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