Melbourne Toasts Gloria Grahame

“Just as Bogart peels off the mask of the hard-boiled hero to reveal insecurity and self-destructiveness,” wrote Imogen Sara Smith a few years ago, “Gloria Grahame finds shades and angles in the stock roles of woman as redeemer or victim. With her lisp and dimpled pout, Grahame was best known for playing provocatively masochistic, damaged sexpots, but here her sidelong wit and irrepressible left eyebrow bring out a much subtler allure . . . A ‘get-out-before-you-get-hurt type’ who is nonetheless drawn to a dangerous and erratic man, Laurel is one of the most psychologically complex women in film noir.” In a Lonely Place will return to the Criterion Channel next month as part of our Peak Noir: 1950 program.

Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) caps off the first evening of the series. If In a Lonely Place “savagely sketches the vulgarity and shallowness of Tinseltown,” as Smith put it, Minnelli offers what Howard Hampton, writing for Artforum in 2019, called “a crash course in mid-twentieth-century Hollywood mores and backlot intrigue.” Hampton noted that “the most frequent sobriquet for the film is ‘cynical.’ But Minnelli’s animating impulse is love of the medium and its eccentric possibilities.” What Grahame did with “a parodic little part as the doomed Southern belle” won her her only Oscar.

She “should have won again the next year for The Big Heat, where her energy is the best reason to see the film,” wrote Roger Ebert when he revisited Fritz Lang’s noir in 2004. “There was something fresh and modern about Grahame; she’s always a little ditzy, as if nodding to an unheard melody. She was pretty but not beautiful, sassy but in a tired and knowing way, and she had a way of holding her face and her mouth relatively immobile while she talked, as if she was pretending to be well-behaved. ‘It wasn’t the way I looked at a man,’ she said, ‘it was the thought behind it.’”

In 2015, Matías Piñeiro wrote a brief ode for Film Comment to Grahame’s performance as the wife of a respected psychologist (Richard Widmark) in Vincente Minnelli’s The Cobweb (1955). She plays “the woman you love to hate. She is foolish, unfaithful, stubborn, ill-tempered, and just plain bad. But her mature performance and Minnelli’s understanding of character make Karen McIver a figure with human resonance, a woman left alone in her desiring, morally lost, and frustrated by every action she undertakes.”

As Irene, a woman plotting to knock off her ex-lover’s new wife (Joan Crawford) in David Miller’s Sudden Fear (1952), Grahame “makes good use of that nasal voice that always suggested she was up to something, even in the rare films where she wasn’t,” wrote Farran Smith Nehme for Film Comment in 2016, “and Irene moves like a woman conscious of every look she gets. She made this movie the same year as her Oscar for The Bad and the Beautiful, but Sudden Fear gives Grahame the more substantial part—scheming, venal, but inspiring some pity by the end.”

The series wraps with Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire (1947), featuring Grahame in what the Cinémathèque calls “her breakout role as the brazen bar girl.” In 2017, Serena Bramble put together an excellent Grahame primer in the form of a fourteen-minute video essay for Sight and Sound. Bramble shows us that in Crossfire, the “cadence of her performance—from the sensuality in her face to the anger in her voice to the search of hope in her eyes for a better tomorrow, to the way her body language indicates a deep need for a warm shoulder—is devastating. It earned her an Oscar nomination, and was her favourite role.”