Naturally, after last year’s 100 Essential Female and Male Performances lists, we felt the need to further explore the performances by those great male and female actors that did not initially make our epic lists. Whether through the helpful suggestions in the comments section, grueling grad genre studies or just good old-fashioned movie watching, I have been made aware of some truly great performances over the past year that I think deserve a similar treatment, deserve to have the spotlight shined on them.
Though our initial lists of 100 were divided into “Male” and “Female”, further updates will merge the gender barriers for equality’s sake, queuing the honorees in alphabetical order, 25 men, 25 women. Some of the people on the list already transgress the boundaries of what is male and what is female: to categorize a performance like Volker Spengler as Elvira in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons by solely by gender makes little sense. In addition to taking the gender division out of list for this round, we are keeping the categories from the first list (Life Support, The Dark Side, Classics You Should Have Seen By Now, From Page to Screen and Under the Radar), though we are no longer ordering our lists by category.
The Classics You Should Have Seen by Now
Hideko Takamine
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
(Mikio Naruse, 1960)
In the West at least, the films of Naruse have never quite received the same level of interest or acclaim as those of other celebrated Japanese auteurs such as Ozu and Kurosawa. The cinema scholar Freda Freiberg places the blame for this, in part, upon the responses of American male critics who “failing to find either the boyish playfulness of Ozu or the macho histrionics of Kurosawa [in Naruse’s cinema] treated him as second-rate.” But Naruse’s finely detailed films are ripe for rediscovery, not least for the stunning performances that the director coaxes from his actresses. As Freiberg points out, the focus of Naruse’s best work tends to be on “single women on the fringes of Japanese society battling to make a living and keep their self-respect.”
The modernist melodrama of When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, with its beautiful black-and-white Cinemascope photography and cool jazz score, exemplifies this interest. The film centers on the widowed Keiko (Takamine), a bar hostess in Tokyo’s Ginza district. As Keiko assesses the very limited options available to her as a woman in this society — suicide, remarriage, opening a bar of her own — the film develops into both a feminist social critique and a profoundly intimate portrait of one woman’s emotional life. Takamine’s beautifully modulated and deeply affecting performance captures both Keiko’s professionalism — her smiling compliance with her clientele – and her frustrations, fears and regrets. But Keiko is no one-dimensional victim: rather, Takamine invests the character with humor, stoicism and moral strength, so that her final walk up the stairs to the job that she despises feels less like a pathetic surrender to circumstance than a valiant commitment to endurance. “Life is a battle for the women here,” Keiko recognizes. “A battle I must not lose.” The mixture of vulnerability and strength in Takamine’s captivating performance conveys precisely that.
Alex Ramon
Under the Radar
David Thewlis
Naked
(Mike Leigh, 1993)
Preparing for his role as homeless Mancunian conspiracy theorist Johnny, Thewlis immersed himself in the foreboding tones of Joy Division, exhausted such heavy texts as The Bible and the writings of Bertrand Russell, and took part in such in-character exercises as shop lifting and sharpening a screwdriver. In an interview with The Guardian, Naked director Leigh says of Johnny, “He’s one of those kids teachers have turned away from because their intelligence is too unruly.”
Despite Johnny’s slightly schizoid unpredictability being evened out by a predilection for puns, the character was clearly not the lightest in Thewlis’ nor Leigh’s oeuvre, but he is the most memorable. Concealed screwdriver or no, Johnny’s — and Thewlis’ — chief weapon is words. More than an act of corruption, Johnny is merely trying to expose the humans he encounters in his wonderings to the ills of the world. Charismatic and horrifyingly intelligent, Johnny verbally pummels others as a way of exorcising what entraps him, namely his own intellect and the way in which society works. In one of the film’s standout scenes, Johnny deliberates philosophically with a security guard in an empty building. The scene is devoid of props or even lights, yet the sheer frenzy in which Thewlis delivers his words holds the viewer spellbound and chilled:
In a featurette included in Naked‘s Criterion release, Neil LaBute cites Thewlis’ performance as an example of an actor bursting onto the screen, a la Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. Although far from that particlar brand of hunky brutishness, Johnny is still as much a palpable force to be reckoned with. Thanks to the great care Thewlis takes with preparing the character, and the kind of care Leigh takes with preparing his actors — during his famed six month rehearsal period — Johnny is simply unforgettable. He may not be as big a heartthrob as Brando, but he is every bit as magnetic, watchable and indelible. Johnny is wiley, you never know what he might do or say next, so you have no choice but to keep your eyes on him at all times.
Maria Schurr
Life Support
Anton Walbrook
The Red Shoes
(Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
Based in part on the infamously flamboyant ballet impresario, Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballet Russes, Walbrook’s Boris Lermontov is tangled mess of ego, insecurities, and creative genius. Like the fables of Diaghilev, and even of George Balanchine, Lermontov is only fulfilled if he can control his muse, his prima ballerina, body and soul. If she decides to marry, or look beyond his company for a private life, he discards them coldly. This obsessive need for a chaste Terpsichore, dancing only for the maestro’s desire is what destroys the idealism of the promising English ballerina Vicky Paige (Moira Shearer). Really, the entire plot and often, the dialogues of The Red Shoes, are very banal. The constitute the sort of bourgeois, love-triangle story that was popular in the late ’40s and early ’50s. But what makes The Red Shoes a masterpiece is director Michael Powell’s dazzlingly innovative use of technicolor to illuminate his scenes with the vivid splendor of fairy tales, and of course, Walbrook’s enigmatic performance.
Part nurturer, part predator, sensualist, and celibate ascetic, Walbrook’s Lermontov is a richly layered European decadent. We’ve seen that character often enough, in the performances of Conrad Veidt, Jeremy Irons, and most recently, Christoph Waltz in Inglorious Basterds. The part of Lermontov that is the Walbrook’s own personality, and the part that is the crafted character, blurs into one another. Walbrook was homosexual, and tortured about it. During the filming of The Red Shoes, Shearer recalled that Walbrook was distant on set, and often wore dark glasses and ate his meals alone. Nevertheless, his Lermontov is a mystery, shrouded by the ominous and the inevitable. It is Walbrook’s small, steely pink-rimmed eyes, and tragic pride that stay with you after the film has ended — the maestro’s unwitting destruction of his own dream.
Farisa Khaled
From Page to Screen
Eli Wallach
The Misfits
(John Huston, 1961)
The specter of excess and dysfunction hangs over The Misfits. Marilyn Monroe’s drug habit, director Huston’s gambling, Clark Gable’s stubborn machismo and writer Arthur Miller’s disintegrating marriage (with Monroe) are compounded by the stars’ subsequent deaths in giving the movie’s somber themes an uncanny resonance. Wallach, missing though he may be from the production’s most infamous incidents, encapsulates the film’s heady drama of the normal and abnormal in his role as Guido, the widower and handyman whose lonely exterior and manful competence conceals an inner egoism. He delivers Miller’s earnest, reflective dialogue with carefully modulated sincerity — a foil to Monroe’s weepy naivete and Gable’s calm detachment.
In the movie’s final scenes he reveals himself in all his bitterness, but as we uncover his personality, with its weaknesses and traumas, we find ourselves more sympathetic than judgmental. He’s the nice but not-so-selfless guy who always finishes second and never knows why, a misfit in the truest and most destructive sense of the word. Best known for his role as Tuco, the incorrigible bandit in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Wallach proves himself capable of a more cautious performance without sacrificing a bit of personality.
Dylan Nelson
Life Support
Fredi Washington
Imitation of Life
(John M. Stahl, 1934)
Not everybody knows that the 1959 Douglas Sirk version of Imitation of Life, the archetypal melodrama starring Lana Turner, was made first in 1935 by John M. Stahl with star Claudette Colbert in the Turner role. Both films aspire to tackle relevant social issues such as sexism and racism, but sadly both films are anachronistic in their portrayal of the black female experience. Because they are so dated, they both contain wincing moments that we as spectators might today view as racist, but in their original context, both were actually quite revolutionary for their times, even daring in their presentation of women of color.
In 1935 there were laws that reinforced rampant racism that the paternity of the light-skinned, bi-racial character of Peola, played by with nuance and poise by Washington, had to actually be explained onscreen so as not to accidentally infer she was the child of miscegenation, as sexual or romantic relationships between people of different races was still very much against the law and widely considered morally wrong by many white Americans at the time (and the likely bottom line for Hollywood was that something so risque could hamper the film’s box office). There is a deep well of sadness in Washington’s performance, which feels both personal and political, with special attention paid to the prone, nervy body language of the character, which indicates Peola’s deep depression. Washington was asked by several studios, and advised by her managers, to consider “passing” for white so she could work in the industry, something she would not consider. Peola’s disgust at her dark-skinned mother Delilah (Louise Beavers) uttering the word “mammy” as a term of endearment is palpable, as is her tragic, polarizing confusion towards her skin tone. “You don’t know what it’s like to look white and be black,” cries Peola in the scene where she renounces her only family and her race to go live in another city anonymously as a white woman. It is clear that Washington did know what that was like and her own real life experience feels tailor-made for this character.
In hindsight, we can now see Peola as the racist “tragic mulatto” cliche that abounded in literature and American pop culture at the time, but what Washington did was actually a cinematic first as she and co-star Beavers made film history by becoming two of the first black female film characters to actually be integral to the story (even though Beavers played an archetypal mammy; a proto-Aunt Jemima, the role was still substantially better than what other black actresses had to work with). The only other substantial film role Washington appeared in was opposite Paul Robeson in The Emperor Jones, based on Eugene O’Neill’s play. She was so upset by the lack of respect and opportunity given to young black actresses at the time that she quit acting altogether to work in New York as not only a theater actress (co-founding Negro Actors Guild of America in 1937), but also as a journalist an activist. In these various roles during the prime Civil Rights years, Washington worked with the NAACP and as an African American casting consultant in Hollywood, rather than pursue a career of playing stereotypical roles that were not befitting of her talent.
Matt Mazur
Ethel Waters, Jacki Weaver, and more…
Under the Radar
Ethel Waters
Cabin in the Sky
(Vincente Minnelli, 1943)
Playing the good, faithful, and self-sacrificing wife is rarely a gratifying task. It is made even less gratifying when your adversary (the wily temptress who endeavors to lead your man astray) is a young and beguiling Lena Horne. Doubtless the situation is made no more palatable by the fact that the movie in which one is asked to play the good wife swells with the complacent racism all-too-characteristic of its era, displaying a prejudicial manner of viewing African Americans that even emerges from cinematic projects that were more than likely considered outlandishly liberal at their moment of inception. Yet Waters in Cabin in the Sky not only acquits herself of the seemingly thankless role but also manages to transcend it. She never condescends to chastise Little Joe; she never nags him. She also avoids playing the long-suffering soul in an attempt to guilt him into following the righteous path. Instead she reassures him; tells him how happy he makes her — gloriously portrayed in her rendition of “Happiness is Just a Little Thing Called Joe” — and, despite the fact that Joe obviously falls under the bewitching spell of Horne’s character, Waters projects a confidence in her husband’s ability to resist temptation and to realize the contentment promised by her loving embrace.
The faith Waters exudes is not sanctimonious; it is simple, it is hearty, and it is loving. In violent, yet hopeful end to their doomed marriage, Joe’s choice of Waters over Horne is no surprise given Waters’ passion and vivacity in a role that asks it’s performer to at turns be in pious, religious ecstasy, playfully, romantic and sexy, and vocal powerhouse — characteristics that were not typical in African American women’s roles in film at the time. Waters makes a unique, soulful leading lady. While her Petunia could have wound up a rueful cliche in the hands of a less capable, less finely-tuned actress, she instead turns out to be a subversive, highly original milestone: the first time a black woman anchored a film with such a dramatic range of demands on her talent in a substantially-drawn leading role. Waters, who would go on to work successfully in Hollywood, garnering an eventual Oscar nomination for Pinky in 1949, was thankfully up to the challenge, though much of the film’s success is often credited erroneously to the younger, sexier Horne in her break-out film role.
Chadwick Jenkins
The Dark Side
Jacki Weaver
Animal Kingdom
(David Michôd, 2010)
There is an old African proverb about spiders that says “when spider webs unite, they can tie up lions.” Weaver, an icon in her native Australia, plays a version of an arachnid in Animal Kingdom, a patient, cautious black widow, as well as a fiercely protective lioness who acts as feral den mother to a pride of thuggish, small-town crime lords. Turning on a dime without ever letting the gears show, Weaver pounces, leaps and slaughters with simply the raise of an eyebrow or the sickly-sweet inflections of her cooing voice, particularly during a key scene of the film in which she orders a hit on a potential snitch.
It is this “everyday” facade, the illusion of normalcy, and her enchanting, bubbly manner of speaking — she could be anyone’s grandmother — that makes the character of Janine “Smurf” Cody precisely so deadly. She doesn’t have to use her poison or her claws, she manipulates others to do the dirty work for her and spends her time visiting with old neighborhood ladies, shopping at the supermarket or appearing as the grieving, misunderstood mother for television news cameras when her family’s crimes hit the mainstream media. Her ability to deceive and devour so effortlessly is what makes Janine’s outright toxicity so dangerous, both for the police and for her family. For Janine, being a criminal is as much an instinct as it is a defense. Once again, as in nature, the black widow consumes the men, and Weaver’s truly brilliant performance captures both a Darwinian struggle and an urban tragedy.
Matt Mazur
The Classics You Should Have Seen by Now
Dianne Wiest
Bullets Over Broadway
(Woody Allen, 1994)
When Helen Sinclair, the gleefully outre (and infinitely quotable) actress, finally barrels into Allen’s ebullient backstage comedy, she is heard first: a stentorian baritone, lobbing ultimatums from a staircase. (“I’m still a star!” she bellows. “I never play frumps or virgins!”) We recognize the type, sight unseen. Helen is not, after all, the first great actress to masquerade as a sequins-dripping star. Boozy and hot-blooded, she descends the stair like the filmic love child of Margot Channing, Norma Desmond and Tallulah Bankhead (minus any of Tallulah’s sparkling self-awareness.)
But what the hell does this dragged-out diva have to do with her Oscar-winning occupant Wiest? To this day, Helen remains an inspired anomaly in the filmography of Wiest — who was playing pucker-faced pipsqueaks long before any of us could even pronounce Zellweger. Yet, it’s the actress’ innate sensitivity and intelligence that makes her larger-than-life turn so unexpectedly delicious. Her Helen smolders with self-seriousness and, behind smudged Cleopatra lashes, Wiest’s eyes burn with the conviction of someone who really means it. “The world will open to you like an oyster,” she says, late in the film. “No… not like an oyster. The world will open to you like a magnificent vagina.” In the hands of a lesser actress, there would certainly be a wink to the audience, an elbow-nudge to the ribs. (Whatever it means.) It’s to Allen’s credit that the rest of the cast (Jennifer Tilly, Chazz Palminteri, Tracey Ullman: no small potatoes) gels as a cohesive ensemble, but Wiest still ekes out the diva’s share of laughs.
Ray Dademo
The Dark Side
Margaret Wycherly
White Heat
(Raoul Walsh, 1949)
An unknown actor, then as now, Margaret Wycherly provides the crucial pillar in the 1949 gangster/noir classic White Heat. For a film that is as much about mummy issues as it is about nihilism and violence, James Cagney’s old dear has to be that perfect combination of domineering and doting, gentle and insistent. Wycherly (whose only other notable gig had been playing Gary Cooper’s Mum in Sergeant York eight years previously) achieves this careful balance, appearing alternately creepy and sweet, supportive and immovable. She stings with her barbs, she soothes with her coo. When she’s picked up by the cops and does her “I dunno where my son is” routine, the steel in her eyes is simply remarkable.
Though you never see her do it, you can clearly imagine her picking up a tommy gun and spraying into a crowd of those boys in blue. For my money, her under-appreciated performance is a master lesson in projection, subtlety, and grace. Indeed, even the film itself seems to under-appreciate her work. Her off-screen death leaves us feeling cheated at not being witness to her final moments. Although it allows us to appreciate something of the shock felt by Cagney’s character when he hears of her demise, the suddenness of her departure from the film remains the only significant problem with an otherwise flawless example of a latter day gangster flick.
Stuart Henderson
The Classics You Should Have Seen by Now
Jane Wyman
All That Heaven Allows
(Douglas Sirk, 1954)
A significant moment in Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows finds Wyman’s Cary Scott reading aloud the famous “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” passage from Thoreau’s Walden, a text that serves as a guidebook to life for Cary’s new lover Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson) and his bohemian friends. The quote serves as one of Sirk’s scathing critiques of 1950s American conformism cloaked, as always, in the fabric of gaudy melodrama that initially led to his work being dismissed as pap before film theorists and followers (Fassbinder, Haynes) alike finally and rightfully cast him as one of his era’s most shrewdly subversive social critics.
Widowed but affluent in her posh New England suburb, Wyman’s Cary is psychologically imprisoned by her luxurious surroundings in ways which never reveal themselves until she is in the thick of her relationship with the young (30 years old to her mid-40-something) gardener who rescues her from the freshly empty nest of her late husband and absent children, an affair that is met at first with subtle disapproval and then outright condemnation from both her country club society friends and her selfish offspring. Even as Sirk paints, however beautifully (cinematographer Russell Metty renders every autumnal suburban lawn and wintery outdoor landscape pure eye candy), in his characteristic broad strokes, though, Wyman uses a subtler palette, suggesting Cary’s conflict in hushed tones and forlorn glances that anchors the drama in human frailty rather than hysterical soap-operatics. It is a generous performance, even, with Wyman respecting the material where another might have found cause for showy histrionics simply by virtue of the actress’ remembering the “quiet” in quiet desperation.
Jer Fairall
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