When Colbert finally tells Welles that she knows who he really is, he tells her to forget the past because “tomorrow is forever”—a line that cues not only the heavenly choir when he dies, but the final scene as Colbert and Brent arrive to take the now doubly orphaned Margret to live with them. “Where are we going?” she asks. “Home,” Colbert replies, but Margret’s tomorrow in an affluent and gracious Baltimore suburb is a far cry from Natalie’s in a rented bungalow, where drunken Nick Gurdin will soon be pointing a knife at his wife’s swollen belly.
LIKE IRVING PICHEL, the director of Natalie’s next-but-one movie had also been an actor, and although Miracle on 34th Street is soft-centered, George Seaton permitted Natalie (and Maureen O’Hara as her mother) some hard-edged moments. In Natalie’s case they’re comic: the wonderfully superior look of disbelief when Edmund Gwenn’s Kris Kringle insists that he’s Santa Claus; and that enthusiastic imitation of a monkey, when he introduces her to the game of “Let’s Pretend.” It’s safe to guess that Seaton perceived and encouraged Natalie’s comic talent, particularly the monkey imitation. He almost certainly improvised a moment for her in a later scene between Maureen O’Hara and John Payne. When she enters the room, again in monkey mood, they’re evidently used to it, and continue their dialogue while she monkeys across to a door at the other end, then exits.
The monkey business also bears out Roddy McDowall’s comment that for children, acting in front of a camera becomes “an expanded version of ‘Let’s Pretend.’ ” And in the case of Miracle on 34th Street, “Let’s Pretend” interacted with both the movie and Natalie’s life. Many years later she recalled not only that she believed Gwenn was Santa Claus, but that Seaton and Gwenn used to have “long discussions about comedy, how the art of comedy was overlooked and not given its due.” That Natalie absorbed their discussions at the age of eight, and could recall them more than thirty years later, shows her already leading a double life, playing a game and yet aware of acting as a profession.
In the same way, if Natalie the child believed that Gwenn was Santa Claus, her look of disbelief in the movie had to be “acted.” Then how much of her performance was instinct, how much developing craft? O’Hara remembered that “the director coached us all,” also that Natalie “obviously enjoyed acting,” was totally unself-conscious about it, and had a “wonderful” sense of humor. And as Seaton filmed some of her dialogue scenes in takes that lasted three minutes, Natalie had clearly begun to acquire technique and a sense of timing that didn’t have to be created in the editing room.
Stella Adler: Only craft releases talent.
Miracle on 34th Street was a major studio picture with a shooting schedule of more than two months. Driftwood, made shortly afterward, was what Variety termed “a low-budgeter,” shot in three weeks. But Allan Dwan was another “actor’s director,” who had acted in high-school productions, and had directed two movies with Shirley Temple, whom he found considerably less interesting than Natalie. And Driftwood, although a B movie, didn’t look like one. This was due partly to its cinematographer, John Alton, and partly to Dwan himself, an indomitable veteran who began making two-reelers in 1914. His exuberance and invention enabled him to produce superior work at a studio like Republic, where “to shoot a picture in anything over twenty-five days was dangerous.”
Dwan quickly sensed that Natalie’s talent was strong enough to carry a movie; and a potentially cloying Little-Miss-Fix-It role in the Shirley Temple mold became a display of astonishingly pure conviction, as well as an example of the difference between a child actor who believes in the character she’s playing and the child performer who believes only in herself.
Jenny, the backwoods orphan who regards “How do you do?” as a question that expects an answer, disapproves of small-town folk who treat it as a formality. “Most folks don’t give a damn what you really feel,” the local doctor explains. “That’s civilization.” Jenny’s response, “I don’t like civilization,” is one of several moments to warn of cuteness ahead, but Natalie avoids them with a sureness that reveals a child actress already “at the top of her game.”
And then, in a series of inadequate movies over the next seven years, she almost disappears. The Green Promise (1949) is her least pallid role, although a clone of Jenny, and important only for the traumatic episode that created her lasting fear of dark water. But I’m a Fool (1954), the TV show that introduced her to James Dean, suggests a “new” Natalie, anxious and romantic, ready to emerge when someone gives her the chance.
A year later, someone does. S. E. Hinton, author of The Outsiders and other “young adult” novels, described Rebel Without a Cause as the film that “gave teens the right to redefine the world.” It also gave Natalie the right to redefine herself as an actress, just as she’d begun to redefine herself in life.
She has two major scenes, the first only a few minutes after the movie opens. Jenny with her pigtails (who decided that she belonged to “civilization” after all, just as Susan in Miracle on 34th Street was converted from skeptic to “believer”) is now Judy, deeply alienated from the world of middle-class suburbia that she’s supposed to belong to. Wandering the streets in the middle of the night, she’s picked up by a police car and taken to juvenile hall. She wears too much makeup, like most Warner actresses of the time (and also like Natalie offscreen), and her scarlet lipstick matches her coat.
It’s a very demanding scene, her interrogation by the social worker, and she’s equal to all its abrupt emotional changes. In retrospect, the parallels with her own life at the time seem uncanny: the need for love and her failure to find it, the anguished confession of her fear that “I’ll never get close to anybody,” and finally her horrified reaction (verging on hysteria, and a foretaste of the bathtub scene in Splendor in the Grass) when the social worker says that her mother’s coming to pick her up. “My MOTHER?!”
During her second major scene, with James Dean and Sal Mineo in the deserted mansion at night, Natalie goes through another series of emotional changes. Her comic impersonation of a selfish, uncaring mother is followed by a reversion to childhood in a game of hide-and-seek with Dean, then by sisterly concern for lonely Mineo, and finally by her declaration of love to Dean, surprisingly and effectively chaste. She begins by explaining, half to herself, that she admires Jim as “a man who can be gentle but free.” Then she realizes: “All this time I’ve been looking for somebody to love me, and now I love somebody.” Unexpectedly, it’s Judy who makes the first move for a mouth-to-mouth kiss (they’ve only brushed cheeks before), and Dean who reciprocates in an almost passive way. But at “the age when nothing fits,” something begins, very tentatively, to fit.
The movie’s emotional impact derives equally and indivisibly from the actors, from Stewart Stern’s script, which he based on his own experience of adolescent loneliness, and from Nick Ray. As Natalie later recalled, he felt that “it was important to know a lot personally about the actor,” and he also felt that the director had to discover as much as he could about himself. When he pointed the finger at absent or inadequate fatherhood in all three families, it pointed at himself as well. He drew on his own life to understand and probe the bisexuality of Dean and Mineo, and as Natalie’s lover, he knew the intensity of her need for love.
Natalie Wood: I remember Kazan, in Splendor in the Grass, we talked about breaking down the part into three or four sections, so that where were the beats? Where were the turning points to get from one into the other? And I’ve always tried to use that when I work on a part, as a starting-off point, and just sort of create a back life. (AFI seminar)
The Natalie of Splendor in the Grass wears minimal makeup, revealing the extraordinary beauty of a face stripped of its Warner Bros. WarnerColor look and (with the passing of six years since Rebel) of its slightly plump, adolescent prettiness. In the early scenes, she’s alternately restless and languid, and her movements reflect the first erotic stirrings of an inexperienced girl in 1929 Kansas. Inge’s screenplay is very skill
ful in the parallels it draws between two different families with similar dysfunctions. Deanie’s mother, Mrs. Loomis, is a dominating, puritanical figure who insists that marriage is a social/financial transaction, and sex a duty to be endured (“A woman doesn’t enjoy these things”). Her father’s more understanding, but weak and browbeaten. In Bud Stamper’s family, the dysfunctions are mirror images of Deanie’s. His mother is sympathetic but helpless, and his father a powerful, ruthless tyrant who warns Bud against becoming sexually involved with Deanie: “If anything happened, you’d have to marry her.”
The contrasts and conflicts extend to the two leading characters, passionately in love but unwillingly chaste. Deanie is openly vulnerable and uncertain, Bud self-assured on the surface, but inwardly not strong enough to stand up to his father. There’s also a similar pattern in the way Audrey Christie’s Mrs. Loomis is a throwback to Mrs. Morel in Sons and Lovers, while Pat Hingle’s Stamper foreshadows the corporate greed of the 1990s. And although Kazan in his autobiography objected to the way Rebel made parents the villains, Deanie’s mother and Bud’s father are clearly the villains of Splendor.
When Bud yields to pressure from his father and tells Deanie that he doesn’t want to see her anymore, she’s at first distracted, then increasingly disoriented. In the schoolroom scene, when the teacher asks her to read a few lines from Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” and explain the feelings they suggest to her, she hesitates, falters, and seems in need of physical support, as if Bud’s rejection has cut the ground from under her feet. Then it becomes an almost impossible effort to read the lines, and after starting to explain that they describe the loss of youthful innocence and idealism, she walks up to the teacher, asks in a desperate whisper, “May I please be excused?” and runs out of the room.
As in Rebel, Natalie’s performance moves from one turning point to another. In the bathtub scene, Deanie reaches the edge of breakdown when Mrs. Loomis asks, “How far have you gone with Bud?” A look of terrible bitterness crosses her face as she says, “I’m pure!” Then she starts to thrash about in the water. Mrs. Loomis, who secretly hopes for Deanie to marry Bud because “he’d be quite a catch,” suggests getting in touch with his father, and the effect on Deanie is like an electric shock. She sits bolt upright in the tub, face close to camera, eyes dilated. “Don’t you dare!” she cries, then starts to scream.
A genuinely frightening moment, followed by the suicide attempt that decides Deanie’s parents to commit her to a sanitarium, where she withdraws into an almost equally frightening lethargy. And after her gradual return to life, it’s a more “adjusted” but still unfulfilled Deanie who goes to see Bud at the ranch where he’s worked since his father lost his money in the Depression and committed suicide.
He’s now married a waitress he met at a cafe, and Deanie’s about to marry a patient she met at the sanitarium, who’s become a successful doctor. It was Kazan’s idea for Deanie to “overdress” for the meeting, while Bud looks grimy in overalls and his wife (Zohra Lampert) is visibly pregnant under her housecoat. Natalie recalled at the AFI seminar that Kazan wanted Deanie to feel “kind of foolish” in her white dress and hat, and Zohra Lampert “to feel embarrassed” because Deanie looked so beautiful, but he also wanted them to like each other: “So he created the bond, but he gave a very active, specific direction. He didn’t just say, ‘Look at your dress.’ He said, ‘Think, Look how lovely Zohra looks, and how sweet she is.’ ”
In the poignantly written and acted farewell scene, when Bud walks Deanie out to her car, there’s an echo of the lines from Wordsworth’s poem and its intimation of emotional loss. They ask each other if they’re happy, and each gives the same answer. Happiness is not something they think about very often. But although they don’t say it, the looks they exchange imply that they’ll always share the memory of “what remains behind.” And before she gets in the car, Deanie looks at Bud for what’s probably the last time. Wistful and resigned, full of hope and regret, she seems to be looking beyond him to her whole life, past as well as future.
THERE’S NOT MUCH to say about Natalie’s Maria in West Side Story, the only movie musical whose two leading players are not professional singers or dancers, have fewer dance numbers to perform than the supporting players, and all of whose songs are dubbed. The foreground story, in fact, is a “young love” romance that seems very conventional after Splendor in the Grass, and Natalie has to wait until the final sequence for a genuinely dramatic scene.
In Gypsy, she felt, she had “one good moment, saying farewell to the boy in the railroad scene”—one of those isolated moments, she explained, when “you feel like you managed to hit a reality level.” Unfortunately, her reality is undercut by the studio set, stagy but without the deliberately theatrical flair of Boris Leven’s designs for West Side Story. Her reality level is less compromised in the “Let Me Entertain You” sequence, as she develops the “refined” style of stripping that surprised and intrigued Gypsy’s audience. Called to perform for the first time at short notice, Louise stares at herself in a mirror before going onstage. Her remote expression suggests that she barely recognizes herself in low-cut gown and white gloves; but during the montage that follows her first tentative performance, she becomes increasingly confident, and each time she takes off an additional item of clothing, she seems to discard a piece of her old self.
At first Natalie was as nervous as Louise before her first strip, especially with the real Gypsy Rose Lee, full-figured and five foot ten, watching from the sidelines. But instead of trying to imitate her, Natalie followed her rule of concentrating on the persona of the character she had to play. “You may be totally unlike the person, but if it’s written in such a way that it strikes you and you have the response, I think that means you’re right for it.” She had the response, and the Gypsy she created, although unlike the original, was right on its own terms.
ONE OF THE FEW good things about The Great Race, Natalie commented later, was that she had to learn fencing. Other movies required her to become adept at roller-skating, football and tennis, so perhaps George Zepaloff’s athletic gene served her well. “Body movement,” she believed, “is very important,” and in total contrast to Deanie, coltish and hesitant, Angie in Love with the Proper Stranger has an abrupt, impatient “out of my way” New York walk.
This movie, like Splendor, demonstrates that Natalie was always at her most expressive, and most beautiful, in minimal makeup and simple costumes. The simplicity, of course, is appropriate for a Macy’s salesgirl, and allows her to blend perfectly with the everyday locations. In the opening scene, directed by Robert Mulligan with an energy and sharp eye for incidental detail that he sustains throughout the movie, Angie enters a crowded theater where hundreds of jazz musicians are answering calls for gigs. She tracks down one of them (Steve McQueen) to inform him that she’s pregnant as a result of their one-night stand. “All I want from you is a doctor—an address, you know.” Her nervous defiance unnerves Rocky, who’s lived a promiscuous, provisional life and doesn’t even remember her. Until the last twenty minutes, the movie’s an antiromantic romantic comedy about two people, conflicted in different ways, who fall in love without wanting to or even realizing it. Angie wants to escape from her aggressively protective older brother, head of the family since their father died, but she can’t face the prospect of living on her own. She finally decides to make the break, and explains that she’s always been scared of independence. But now, she adds after a moment, “I’m not scared. I’m terrified!” This is wonderfully played and timed: the buildup to her confession, the anxious laugh that follows it, the hurried exit that looks more like beating a retreat—and turns out to be exactly that, as the door opens a minute later and she returns, head bowed, unwilling to look the family (or herself) in the eye.
It’s as funny and true as a later scene is chilling and true. When Angie agrees to an abortion, Rocky sets up an appointment through a friend. Nothing obviously squalid or melodramatic in the
setting, an office and a corridor of an anonymous building in a quiet, anonymous street. In the office at one end of the corridor, a briskly practical woman (not a qualified doctor, as it turns out) unpacks instruments from a suitcase. Angie’s mounting unease is intercut with Rocky’s mounting discomfort as he waits outside. When Angie’s fear proves stronger than her determination, she becomes hysterical; Rocky realizes he can’t let Angie go through with it and decides they have to get married instead.
His proposal (indignantly rejected) is reluctant and unloving: “I’m willing to take my medicine.” But Steve McQueen, in a performance that matches Natalie’s, suggests that Rocky is trying to hide what by now he really feels. Then the script changes gears and resolves the situation in a 1960s equivalent of 1930s romantic comedy. Although skillfully handled, it brings a touch of formula to a movie that’s previously avoided it.
Incidental note: Several reviewers objected to the scene at the abortionist’s because they felt sure the couple could have afforded a safer one. But how? Apparently it never occurred to them that a salesgirl and a frequently unemployed musician would have very limited resources, even though the movie makes clear that Angie’s savings amount to only $200, and Rocky has to borrow $250 to make up the fee—a lot of money for both of them at the time.
George Segal: I think Love with the Proper Stranger was Natalie’s real breakthrough. In Rebel Without a Cause she was very promising, but not yet completely secure. And I found her performance in Splendor in the Grass a bit Hollywood, maybe because I was expecting a grittier movie from Kazan.
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