After having watched and reviewed all five nominated performances, it's time to pick the winner!
It’s an overall mixed performance that never truly reaches a level of excellence and Rosalind Russell’s ability to find humor in almost every angle of the script is often as misplaced as it is delightful but she deserves some kind of praise for appearing strangely indispensable despite all the problems in her work.
Teresa Wright’s approach to the part is charming and lovely but it is neither truly impressive nor challenging. Still, she created some of the movie’s most memorable moments and always adds a welcome change of pace whenever she appears.
The work with Spencer Tracy clearly had a strangely appealing affect on Katharine Hepburn, letting her open up her usual screen personality without losing all her qualities that made her such a natural choice for the character of Tess Harding. It's a delightful, charming and sometimes multi-layered performance even if those layers often were not able to connect to each other.
2. Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver
Greer Garson's performance is filled with the right amount of charm and seriousness, showing how Kay Miniver adjusts herself to the tasks she was given without losing the core of her identity, making the part not only tailor-made for her but also allowing her to embrace this portrayal of womanhood without scarifying the integrity of the character for the sake of sentimentality.
Bette Davis has rarely ever been so charismatic and hardly ever before or again allowed herself to be so completely in touch with the sentimentality of the story without actually becoming a part of it. It’s a mature and thought-through piece of work in a movie that could have existed with a purely emotional approach, too, but gained a vast portion of credibility thanks to Bette Davis’s central work that explored all the possibilities of the role while still working in harmony with the broader goals of the story.
5 comments:
This year seems to have lacked a great performance, even if they were all at least good.
Yeah, most of the 40s years look pretty unspectacular to me.
But, Bette is a great pick!
Yeah, this year is very underwhelming. Bette only won because of weak competition (it was bad timing that all her fantastic performances were up against too strong competition).
I knew Bette would win! And I was right about your ranking too, except Garson was your second pick instead of Hepburn. What's next?
Bette really deserved this one.
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