The way Summer Under the Stars is constructed is that female stars and male stars alternate, meaning one day a male star is featured, the next one a female star and so on. And that means that today we are celebrating a woman for the last time this August. And the woman is Susan Hayward who fittingly stars in…
Smash-Up: the Story of a Woman (1942)
Susan plays a nightclub singer. She falls in love with and marries a man who is also a singer. They are very happy, eventually they have a child. The problems begin when his career takes off and she has to stay at home and take care of the baby. She becomes lonely and depressed and eventually starts to drink.
The first time we see Susan Hayward in the film, she’s in a hospital bed, with her head covered in bandages. This might seem like a very specific „story of a woman”, maybe a condemnation of a woman who dares to want more – because apparently wanting more leads t a tragedy. But can’t we see the downfall of Susan Hayward in a feminist light? Isn’t this story a bit like Yellow Wallpaper? Susan can’t sing, she can’t really leave the house, she feels bored, so her mental health suffers.
There is a Manchester by the Sea element to the story but maybe the bad things could be avoided not by Susan willing to be submissive and silent and calm but by the world allowing her to be more than a wife and a mother.
The Lusty Men (1952)
Nicholas Ray in the middle of the day – what a treat! And while The Lusty Men (still not sure about this title but I think it’s mostly hilarious) is not among my Ray favourites, his style definitely comes through.
What is a very obvious Ray touch is that it’s a story of people and their emotions and their relationships and the underlying sadness of almost every action we take in this life. But this time all of this is set among the world of rodeo. Yee yee?
Susan Hayward is the wife of Arthur Kennedy who decides to become a rodeo rider under the eye of Robert Mitchum who was a professional but had to quit the rodeo business after an injury. Arthur turns out to be good, he’s loving the money and the attention, Susan is scared for his life, Robert starts to feel something for Susan.
It’s very interesting to watch all those very human emotions in a setting as ridiculous as rodeo (maybe it does feel less bizarre to Americans, though) – too bad it feels a bit tired after a while.
Where Love Has Gone (1964)
But if I used the word „bizarre” when talking about The Lusty Men, I don’t even know where to begin with Where Love Has Gone. It opens like a soap opera, with establishing shots of San Francisco accompanied by a cheesy ballad, it features Bette Davis, it’s about murder and teenage girls…
I didn’t know what Where Love Has Gone was about before I sat down to watch it so I was shocked when I realized (pretty much from the first scene) that it was based on Lana Turner and the death of Johnny Stamponato! A young girl is accused of murdering her mother’s boyfriend. Then I checked out Wikipedia and apparently it’s based on a book and totally-not-about-Lana-Turner-are-you-crazy-it’s-completely-different!
Sure.
Susan Hayward plays the not-Lana-Turner character and Bette Davis plays her mother who is very rich and makes sure everybody knows that.
The film spans almost twenty years but you wouldn’t know that because not a single character changes their appearance even remotely and everything looks the same all the time. Most of the film consists of marital problems: alcoholism, violence… and that could have been well-done. My biggest problem is that the film ventures into [SPOILER] the ridiculous, untrue territory of „not-Lana’s” daughter having an affair with her boyfriend and not-Lana herself killing him out of jealousy. I won’t spoil if that is the actual event in the film but even mentioning it annoys me.
It’s melodramatic, Bette plays a caricature and not in the fun way, it hates teenage girls somehow. Whatever.
See you tomorow for the last day (!) of Summer Under the Stars.
Swingin' at the Seance 