[Description of plot of Pillow Talk.] I could go on, but I think you get my point. “A Streetcar Named Desire” it is not.
Yet she holds you. (So does Hudson, a superb comic actor.) How does she do this, when every development and twist seem to have been thought up by a nut who has never met any actual people? I’ll tell you. She treats that part just as she treated Ruth Etting: like a real person, with real feelings. She doesn’t enlarge it or wink at the audience. She doesn’t make herself act funny, which, of course, never is funny. She doesn’t condescend to the situations or suggest that she is slumming. She does what any smart acting teacher would advise: she commits.
No, I'm not making it up.
1 comment:
There is a scene in "The Thrill of it all" (which I have seen 80 million times, just for Doris' facial expressions) wherein Beverly (Doris) is making a live commercial based on her "product testimony", and she says she has never used the product. Off-screen a TV producer is upset: "You have used it!" he sputters in a whisper, "You HAVE used it!"
And she looks at him in a totally-indescribable way and says, "I haven't!"--and I wait the whole movie for it. It's just one of those expressions/moments you can't put into words, and exactly what she excelled at.
As John Updike once said about her, those understated things that no other actress could do? The sign of greatness.
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