Grace Kelly (in return for the great sacrifice of wearing dowdy clothes and glasses) got the Oscar, but it was Bing Crosby who deserved it for his portrayal of a man who lies as naturally and as often as breathing to preserve his image as a nice, sweet guy. His alcoholism seems a lesser flaw than his essential phoniness--he blames his wife for things she has not done so that everyone can admire how graciously he forgives her; he vilifies in private a fellow actor to whom he is charming in public. It was far more courageous of Bing to show what people might have conjectured, with some justice, was the dark side to his public happy-go-lucky persona than it was for Kelly to wear baggy cardigans. Anyone who has had one of these men in their lives will relish this characterisation, given tremendous force by its being done by such a beloved entertainer.
The best performance, though, is William Holden's, and the only one with energy and sex appeal. (What do you say of a woman who makes a picture with William Holden and Bing Crosby and has an affair with...Bing Crosby?) Yet all of them are at the mercy of Clifford Odets's couch-bound drama--and that's the analyst's couch, not the casting one. This is a story in which characters who live a life of secrecy or lies, on being confronted with The Truth, suddenly exhibit a remarkable degree of honesty and self-knowledge and come out with an articulate expression of their psychology. And for all the self-consciously sophisticated dialogue, the instigation for Bing's alcoholism is a piece of Victorian sentimentality-- he stops holding the hand of his cutesy-wootsy little blonde son for one minute, and the kid rushes into traffic to get run over. Poor Bing also has to deliver one of the most tasteless lines in the history of cinema: "I gave that woman ten years of the worst kind of hell outside a concentration camp."
The songs Bing is given, though they are by Ira Gershwin and Harold Arlen, are limp and mediocre, and the ones he sings onstage, at his audition and as part of the musical in which he appears, are dire. In fact, the stage show is so awful it is hard to believe it was not written in a spirit of parody--it's a combination of the worst parts of Oklahoma! and Our Town; the sign on the hotel in the set even says Our Town Hotel, for God's sake! Everything we see is, like the audition song, stuff that would have been considered dull and corny 20 years earlier. The scenes backstage, however, are rich in amusing theatrical atmosphere.
Odets was a notorious misogynist, a trait that he cannot keep from creeping into the movie. When Holden makes scathing remarks about Kelly, his ex-wife, or women in general, he sounds much more believable than when he has to express his love for Kelly in uninteresting, awkward dialogue. And though the music surges at the end to bless Kelly when she decides to reject Holden and return to Bing (and was there ever any question she wouldn't? come on, who has top billing?) I couldn't buy the tragic nobility. The alcoholic and his enabler, both characters who live by sucking the blood of other people, have done it again: they have leeched off the warm, impulsive Holden, screwed him up, and then tossed him aside, having gained the strength to go on. One can't help wondering--did Odets know this and cynically misrepresent it to his audience, or did he fool himself?
The best performance, though, is William Holden's, and the only one with energy and sex appeal. (What do you say of a woman who makes a picture with William Holden and Bing Crosby and has an affair with...Bing Crosby?) Yet all of them are at the mercy of Clifford Odets's couch-bound drama--and that's the analyst's couch, not the casting one. This is a story in which characters who live a life of secrecy or lies, on being confronted with The Truth, suddenly exhibit a remarkable degree of honesty and self-knowledge and come out with an articulate expression of their psychology. And for all the self-consciously sophisticated dialogue, the instigation for Bing's alcoholism is a piece of Victorian sentimentality-- he stops holding the hand of his cutesy-wootsy little blonde son for one minute, and the kid rushes into traffic to get run over. Poor Bing also has to deliver one of the most tasteless lines in the history of cinema: "I gave that woman ten years of the worst kind of hell outside a concentration camp."
The songs Bing is given, though they are by Ira Gershwin and Harold Arlen, are limp and mediocre, and the ones he sings onstage, at his audition and as part of the musical in which he appears, are dire. In fact, the stage show is so awful it is hard to believe it was not written in a spirit of parody--it's a combination of the worst parts of Oklahoma! and Our Town; the sign on the hotel in the set even says Our Town Hotel, for God's sake! Everything we see is, like the audition song, stuff that would have been considered dull and corny 20 years earlier. The scenes backstage, however, are rich in amusing theatrical atmosphere.
Odets was a notorious misogynist, a trait that he cannot keep from creeping into the movie. When Holden makes scathing remarks about Kelly, his ex-wife, or women in general, he sounds much more believable than when he has to express his love for Kelly in uninteresting, awkward dialogue. And though the music surges at the end to bless Kelly when she decides to reject Holden and return to Bing (and was there ever any question she wouldn't? come on, who has top billing?) I couldn't buy the tragic nobility. The alcoholic and his enabler, both characters who live by sucking the blood of other people, have done it again: they have leeched off the warm, impulsive Holden, screwed him up, and then tossed him aside, having gained the strength to go on. One can't help wondering--did Odets know this and cynically misrepresent it to his audience, or did he fool himself?