Sight and Sound (2013) - Secret appeal
Details
- magazine article: Secret appeal
- author(s): Dan Callahan
- journal: Sight and Sound (01/Jan/2013)
- issue: volume 23, issue 1, page 10
- journal ISSN: 0037-4806
- publisher: Tower Publishing Services
- keywords: Actors, Alfred Hitchcock, Appreciation, Biography, Doris Day, James Stewart, Motion picture actors and actresses, Motion pictures, Singing, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
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Abstract
Callahan examines the surprisingly complex appeal of 1950s sensation Doris Day. Day's smile on screen was blindingly bright, but when she wasn't smiling that megawatt smile, her face often took on a discontented, suspicious look. Alfred Hitchcock didn't need to do much coaxing to get her to show the depth of the confused neuroticism beneath that smile in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), her finest film performance. It was also the intensity of her emotion that made her one of the finest singers of her time, first with Les Brown and his orchestra and then in her film debut in Michael Curtiz's It's Magic.
Article
A new BFI season provides an opportunity to reassess the surprisingly complex appeal of 1950s sensation Doris Day
Talking about her career in the 1993 documentary "Doris Day: A Sentimental Journey", Day cries, "If I can do it, you can do it. Anybody can!" Even at this late date, she was still hawking the same hard-sell ebullience that made her the number-one American female box-office star of the 1950s. But the very intensity of her positive thinking pointed clearly to its darker undercurrents.
Day's smile on screen was blindingly bright, but when she wasn't smiling that megawatt smile, her face often took on a discontented, suspicious look. Alfred Hitchcock didn't need to do much coaxing to get her to show us the depth of the confused neuroticism beneath that smile in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), her finest film performance. Her character in the Hitchcock film has given up her singing career to please her husband (James Stewart), and this sacrifice makes their marriage tense and edgy -- a dynamic that explodes when Stewart medicates his wife right after he tells her that their son has been kidnapped. Day harrowingly catches this woman's panic and the indignity she feels at being treated like a child as she slips off into sleep.
Here is a movie star who clearly represents the conflict in her generation between female energy and the limits the society of that time tried to put on that energy. Audiences responded to the outward simplicity of her cheerful image, but ...
A Doris Day season plays at BFI Southbank, London until 29 December 2012
