![]() There’s only so much that even a Wyler can do to turn an actress as beautiful as de Havilland into someone plain. Sloper because his daughter’s social graces are so (sympathetically) clunky he just can’t bring himself to love her. Not taken in, though, is the doctor himself, who thinks he knows a fortune-hunter when he sees one - though Clift is such an appealing presence that the movie is probably more effective than its antecedents (I’ve read James’s wonderful novel, but it was many years ago) in making us entertain the possibility that he’s sincere in his affections. The latter - and it’s a good role for Hopkins - is a not unsavvy flibbertigibbet, which, when combined with a romantic streak, makes her prone to cheerlead a courtship by the young Montgomery Clift’s Morris Townsend, whose dashing good looks and world travels camouflage the fact that he’s also something of a bounder. The two reside in the Washington Square neighborhood with the doctor’s sister (Miriam Hopkins) an often extended houseguest in a world of polite society, which is something to think about the next time you see somebody strumming a guitar adjacent to that neighborhood Arch down NYU way. Ralph Richardson is de Havilland’s acting equal here as Catherine’s doctor father, a widower who has never forgiven her for being plain and socially maladroit when his idealized late wife was anything but. Later, she does - because, as she says, she’s been “taught by experts” (a brutally delivered line of dialogue). ![]() We can’t imagine the Catherine Sloper character seen early in the film displaying a cruel streak. ![]() 2 - and with The Snake Pit coming in the middle, talk about a run), the metamorphosis is more attitudinal. TEHO, however, takes place over a full generation, so the actress’s transformation from rural American beauty to crusty Londoner conveys the normal aging process. Leaving aside Marie Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc - a performance as unique as the film it serves - I can’t think of another actress showcase that gets to me more than Olivia de Havilland’s in 1949’s The Heiress, as long as we (getting down to basics) leave the schoolboy crushes of a 72-year-old male out of rival considerations.Īdapted from the 1947 Ruth and Augustus Goetz play whose springboard was Henry James’s source novel Washington Square, my favorite William Wyler film after The Best Years of Our Lives (with something like a dozen close runners-up) allows de Havilland to undergo a subtly eerie transformation before our very eyes in a spellbinding example of refined worm-turning.Īctually, she undergoes a transformation as well in To Each Her Own, which three years earlier had earned de Havilland her first of two deserved Oscars for an underseen grade-A soaper that may be the best movie Mitchell Leisen ever directed (it’s less arguably the best drama, though Hold Back the Dawn would get some votes). Stars Olivia de Havilland, Montgomery Clift, Ralph Richardson, Miriam Hopkins.
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