By Jennifer Baldwin. When featuring an intriguing star, TCM’s Star of the Month tribute is an overdose of straight-up, hardcore, pure pleasure. For one night each week, the month is turned over to a movie star and we witness, with relentless intensity, every curve and turn and height of the star’s career – until the month ends and we feel indecent over how much we’ve come to know this person.
We don’t really “know” them, of course. We only see their performances. But film is funny in its deceptive intimacy, and saying farewell to the Star of the Month is like saying farewell to a summer camp best friend or a wartime romance: “It was wonderful, darling. I’ll never forget the good times we had. We’ll always have that April on TCM!” The star is in your life, in your living room, for a whole month and then, suddenly, the star gets snatched away. The light goes out.
Of course, some months I’m just not interested in the chosen one. Singing Cowboys in July? Don’t fence me in, baby, I’d rather be out playing beach volleyball at the park. But just this past month of June, Jean Simmons had me glued. I hadn’t realized it until she passed away last year, but Jean Simmons was around a lot in my teenage years. I really identified with her, with the intelligence, strength, and vulnerability she brought to the screen. Young Bess at fifteen; Guys and Dolls at sixteen; Elmer Gantry at seventeen. I must have watched these movies on an endless loop when I was in high school.
When I finally got around to Angel Face in college, it bothered me for weeks. I told friends and family and random people on the street about this movie, about this character — Diane Treymayne — and how I just couldn’t shake her. She creeped me out, and I just couldn’t shake her. She was a murderer, a psychopath, but I just couldn’t let her go. I SYMPATHIZED with her. It was disturbing.
You’re not supposed to sympathize with the Spider Woman. Sure, you can understand her motivations, even get some perverse pleasure out of her power and wicked determination, but you’re not supposed to feel bad for her. But there I was — and here I am — feeling sorry for Simmons’ Diane Treymayne.
And that ending! That last, stomach-shocking scene, throwing all my emotions for a fireball crashing loop. Every time I watch the finale in Angel Face I go, “Oh my God! What the hell?!” Every time. Every single time. And I’ve seen it at least a dozen times.
But the movie — along with Simmons’ performance and Dimitri Tiomkin’s score — just drips with an intoxicating dementia, both beautiful and corrosive, so that it eats at you even if you want to shake it off. Angel Face and Leave Her to Heaven would make a wicked double bill. (Watch a clip from Angel Face here.)
In a further evil irony, Simmons herself could never shake off the pain of making Angel Face. She never even managed to watch the movie all the way through. The horrible memories of filming it were too painful and she just couldn’t look. Director Otto Preminger singled her out for torment, and producer Howard Hughes (to whom she was under contract at the time) was out to make her life miserable because she had rebuffed his amorous advances (and also because she sued — successfully — to get out of her contract with him).
Even in this excellent radio interview from 2007, Simmons can barely talk about Angel Face. And yet it’s one of her masterpieces.
Oh Tuesdays in June, how I will miss you! You gave us Uncle Silas (a creepy Old Dark House flick from England featuring scene-chewing excellence from Katina Paxinou); Adam and Evelyne (a cute-if-kinda-kinky British romance with real life couple Simmons and Stewart Granger); So Long at the Fair (a movie with perhaps the creepiest premise in all of suspense/mystery cinema); The Actress (with Jean Simmons as a young, starry-eyed, but determined Ruth Gordon, and Spencer Tracy as her cantankerous father; one of Jean’s best performances); Footsteps in the Fog (Granger as murderer, Simmons as blackmailer, and yet their romance is weirdly hot); Home Before Dark (my new favorite Jean performance; she gets to play crazy but it’s not overblown); and Life at the Top (sequel to Room at the Top, with Jean playing wife to Laurence Harvey and making her character both horrible and quietly sympathetic at the same time).
After mainlining Jean Simmons movies all month, it makes me sad to think she wasn’t a bigger star. We can perhaps once again “thank” Howard Hughes for that, since he refused to loan out Jean for Roman Holiday. I love Audrey Hepburn in the role, but what it might have been for Jean! Howard Hughes: great for aviation, lousy for talented dark-haired actresses.
I’m sorry to see Jean in June go, but at least I’ll have the “Arab Images on Film” festival including Sirocco (1951), The Sheik (1921), and Kismet (1955) to console me in July. Also, British Agent (1933) is screening in July. I saw it for the first time at the 2011 TCM Film Festival and didn’t much care for it. I’m curious to see if my opinion improves on a second viewing. If you have any interest in Hollywood’s ever-shifting portrayal of Soviet Russia, this is a must-see.
Other movies in July to help me get over losing Jean:
• Steamy Pre-Code Heat Lightning (1934).
• Clark Gable playing a “mirror universe” dark version of his Rhett Butler persona in Band of Angels (1957).
• Marge and Gower Champion dancing to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” in Lovely to Look At (1952).
• Minor film noir gems Three Strangers (1946) (with Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre), and The Unfaithful (1947) (a loose adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Letter, with Ann Sheridan).
Maybe there’s enough here to fill the Jean Simmons void …
Jean Simmons was one of those actresses that simply exuded class, integrity, and strength of character. She hated making Angel Face, for instance, but you can never tell by her performance on screen: it’s fantastic. In other words, she was a pro.
She also showed an underlying good-natured impishness in a lot of her roles, so that behind the initial straight-laced demeanor of a Sarah Brown or a Sister Sharon, lay a mischievous Hattie Durant waiting to come out.
And yet when the role called for it, she could portray pathos in a way that felt honest and real.
Frankly, she was an extremely gifted actress. I’ve always liked her and always identified with her on screen, but watching so many of her films in one month has made me realize just how talented she was. She was a great actress, not just a beautiful one. It was no fluke that Olivier picked her out at age nineteen to play Ophelia to his screen Hamlet. Hers is the most honest, flesh-and-blood performance in that film, in fact. It’s unfortunate that she didn’t make more ‘great’ movies. Her talent was much bigger than the mediocre films she often appeared in. I’ll certainly miss my Jean Simmons Tuesdays.
So long, Miss Simmons, we’ll always have that June on TCM!
Posted on July 1st, 2011 at 11:05am.
Excellent tribute to a luminous star. And you haven’t even mentioned the films where, in my opinion, she’s at her most gorgeous: Great Expectations, The Egyptian, and above all, although she doesn’t have much to do but slink about, Black Narcissus.
Thanks AJ! And yeah, there’s a lot more I could have said about Ms. Simmons. Great Expectations, for instance, goes flat once Simmons as Young Estella turns into Valerie Hobson as the adult version. The Egyptian is one of her movies I’ve not seen, so I’ll have to check it out!