Shots In The Dark - the extraordinary screen presence of the late Gloria Grahame

Interview, Sept, 2000 by Graham Fuller

AN ACTRESS FROM YESTERDAY WHO'S MORE TODAY THAN GWYNETH, NICOLE, AND WINONA

How can a movie star from the past convince us that he or she is more in touch with our times than contemporary stars? When the extraordinary Gloria Grahame appeared in such film noirs as In a Lonely Place (1950), The Big Heat (1953), and Human Desire (1954), she wasn't projecting into the future. But in inhabiting a world that, however illusory, mirrored the disenchantment in postwar American society, she seemed preternaturally attuned to the moment, so much so that her acting transcended time and place. That immediacy can seem shocking today. She died at the age of fifty-seven in 1981, but it's hard not to believe some producer can't still call up the twenty-seven-year-old Grahame and ask her to work with Kevin Spacey (our most modem leading man) or William H. Macy, who would have been perfect casting for the role of the doleful sap who claims he's married to Grahame's embittered dancehall tramp in Crossfire (1947).

Grahame could be droll and hedonistic--in The Big Heat, her high-spirited but fatally vain Debby Marsh lives for "expensive fun"--but as with other noir stars, including Ida Lupino, Joan Bennett, Robert Ryan, and Robert Mitchum, her knowing demeanor constantly reminded us that life was a vicious game played by adults, with sex, money, and manipulation as the weapons. Essentially escapist, modern American cinema sweeps the muck of human existence under the carpet. Although directors like Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson still insist on addressing moral squalor, film actors seldom have the opportunity to register turpitude without wallowing in shtick. It's as if being adult--whether that means emotionally sophisticated or simply depraved--is as make-believe as all the other absurd things actors have to do.

Look at the scene in which Grahame and Humphrey Bogart's characters talk at a bar in In a Lonely Place, and you will see what I mean by sophisticated. The couple is everything two consenting adults ought to be--serene, sexy, unselfconscious, and insouciant, at least until they spot the cop who questioned Bogart about a girl who was murdered after leaving his apartment. This kind of scene is rare nowadays, although one exchange--also at a bar--between Richard Gere and a rueful Laura Linney in Primal Fear (1996) had the same uninflected knowingness about it. It makes me think modernity in the cinema is the ability to catch the rhythm of the world, not a function of living in the year 2000. Except for appealing distractions like her furrow-browed Ado Annie in Oklahoma! (1955), Grahame caught the rhythm virtually every time. Her personal life may have been more bewildering to her than her onscreen existence--among her four husbands were her sometime director Nicholas Ray, who hit her, and, later, his son Anthony .

Grahame's roles revolve around her subtle uses and abuses of her sexiness. Like Mitchum (her sister's brother-in-law), she had heavy-lidded eyes, a certain stillness, and a deadpan delivery. Simply by leaning against a doorjamb, as she does in Macao (1952), moving slowly across a courtyard in In a Lonely Place, or even doing her silly "Hup! Hup!" routine in The Big Heat, she could seem untouchably dangerous, as volatile as gelignite. The Big Heat gets its name from the city corruption that detective Glenn Ford sticks his nose into, but it could also refer to the furnace inside Debby--or maybe the scalding coffee her hoodlum lover (Lee Marvin) throws in her face. Then there's the astonishing scene in Human Desire, Fritz Lang's version of La Bete Humaine, in which, fresh from her lover's bed, Grahame's character wriggles away from her lug of a husband claiming she's too sticky to be touched. There isn't an actress in Hollywood today who could have pulled oft that musky moment without making it seem coy or cras s--though both Brittany Murphy and Tara Reid have fleetingly intimated they have Grahame's DNA.

Often in brief pivotal roles, Grahame could twist movies, bend them to her will. Hilarious in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) as the capricious Southern belle whose husband makes it big as a screenwriter in Hollywood, she draws us so deeply into her character that when she dies offscreen, she cancels our interest in the rest of the movie. (She won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance.) Although Annette Bening did a splendid take on Grahame in The Grifters (1990), her smirk was a lie. Grahame smirked for real--you just know she felt the irony of being a seductive woman and how far she could take it. Like James Dean, another actor who worked with Ray, she was quicksilver, but not the kind you can bottle. Graham Fuller is Interview's Film Writer at Large.