The Country Girl (1954)
Directed by George Seaton
“The little actor cons another part,” says the poet Wordsworth, thinking of how we go from being small children “trailing clouds of glory,” to adopting the habits that will fit us into the roles of ordinary human life, by imitating the grownups around us. He isn’t too happy about that, though he sees that it is inevitable. What’s the most distinctive feature of mankind as acting in the world? Is it his intellect — Homo sapiens? Is it his tool-making — Homo faber? Or is it that he plays, that he puts on a show — Homo ludens?
This week we’ve been focusing on the great Feast of the Bright Showing, that is, the Feast of Epiphany. But in this life of ours, among such creatures as we are, the show is ambiguous. A canny poker player will sometimes show a card he need not show, as a bluff or a threat or a way to rattle his opponent. A nation may likewise make a show of force, for the same variety of reasons. In healthy times, boys and girls like to show themselves in smart clothes, to catch the eye of the opposite sex. When he comes a-courting, Mr. Mockingbird perches out in the open and sings for hours on end, imitating one bird after another, or cats or dogs or police sirens or buzzsaws, apparently endless in his repertoire, to shy away his rivals and to put on a good show for Miss Mockingbird, a show of stamina and daring and ability.
The problem, or at least one of the problems for us human beings, is that we ourselves may become the most appreciative audience for our own show; we put on the show for the same reason the Queen in the fable looked in her flattering mirror all the time. That’s not just selfish or hypocritical. It’s a danger. We can get swallowed up in the show, and lose our grasp on reality, even failing to see what we really are, or to know what we really feel, or to acknowledge what we have really done. And this brings us to our stunning Film of the Week, The Country Girl. This is a film that Debra and our daughter Jessica have long prized, and I’m now writing this after having seen it for the first time, at Debra’s recommendation — she thought it would be perfect for our topic this week, and she’s right.
The film is literally about putting on a show. Bernie Dodd (William Holden) is the director of a stage play, a musical about settling the American west. Against the judgment of his producer and financier, he secures for the lead role a has-been, Frank Elgin (Bing Crosby), because he knows that Elgin can both sing and act, and he thinks he is perfect for the role. But Frank has been hitting the hard booze, ever since his little boy died in an accident for which he holds himself responsible. The only person who has managed to keep Frank alive and occasionally working — though at jobs far beneath what he used to do — is the Country Girl of the film’s title, his wife Georgie (Grace Kelly). But Dodd, soured from his own failed marriage to a meddlesome and domineering woman, believes that Georgie is bad for Frank, and when pressure mounts after the play flops on the road in Boston, he demands that Georgie take herself out of the role of Frank’s caretaker and manager. But scorn is not all that he feels for her.
No more of the plot. The film is tightly focused on these three people, all of them in one way or another not as he or she appears to be, and in their tense encounters, with sharp and unsentimental dialogue, it is hard for us to evaluate them too. They must reveal themselves by fits and starts, and that includes their own looking at what they are. You will believe that the part of Bernie Dodd was made for William Holden; he plays the same sort of dry cynic in two of our favorite films, Stalag 17 and The Bridge on the River Kwai. But Bing Crosby as a weakling? In our opinion — I’m speaking here for Debra too — this is his finest performance on screen, most difficult, subtle, and sensitive. And as for Grace Kelly, also cast against type, she won and well deserved her Oscar for Best Actress. Credit the director, George Seaton, who also wrote the screenplay, for putting these three together.
I watched this a while back when I “discovered” Holden and made it a point to watch all of his films. I was surprised by Bing, though, and I thought that he should have won an Oscar for his tremendous performance.