Note: I’m old so I take it for granted that beauty, physical characteristics, and charisma are legitimate objects of analysis. Film is a visual medium. Faces, bodies, and presence are part of meaning as well as the reason actors and actresses got hired. I note that some modern bloggers – i.e. whose parents were still wearing three-cornered pants when I was content watching* Casablanca and My Favorite Wife as a teenager - often avoid that territory entirely because, I suspect, they associate talking about looks with objectification.
She Doesn’t Pose - She Decides: My Late Appreciation of Ruth Chatterton
When I was younger - young enough to think youth itself a credential - I used to admire Ann Sheridan and Ida Lupino for their looks. That was the word for it then: looks. It covered a lot of ground and excused a good deal of laziness. You saw a face, you approved of it, and that was that.
Time passes, and if you are lucky it takes some of your certainties with it. You begin to notice other things. In my case, it was Ruth Chatterton.
Chatterton came to pictures late, which is another way of saying she came prepared. In her late thirties, she had none of the damp innocence - think Evelyn Venable or Rochelle Hudson - the studios liked to photograph and sell. Chatterton looked as though she knew what she was doing and, worse for the illusion of romance, why she was doing it. In The Rich are Always with Us or Charming Sinners she doesn’t ask for your belief; she proceeds as if she already has it. The remarkable thing is that she usually does.
There are actresses who feel (naturalistic Myrna Loy), and actresses who show that they feel (passionate Bette Davis). Chatterton gives the impression of thinking. You can watch something occur to her. It is not a trick and it is not decoration. It is an activity. Her face does not simply register emotion; it arrives at it. That is where her beauty begins to assert itself, makes her character complicated and fascinating. The movie-goer is not looking at a set of features but at a process of wisely blending thinking and feeling.
She’d been on the stage since she was a girl, and the stage is a hard teacher. It does not forgive vagueness. By the time she reached the camera she knew how to use her face the way a good speaker uses a sentence. Early sound pictures needed that. The microphone was merciless, and the camera had time on its hands. It stayed with you. Chatterton could meet it.
If you line her up with her contemporaries, the differences are plain enough. Janet Gaynor had that breakable quality, as if a strong opinion might do her damage. Miriam Hopkins fluttered; she seemed to be in a state of continual adjustment. Dolores del Río belonged to another climate altogether – the border ethereal maybe. Chatterton, by contrast, looks as though she has already made up her mind. The jaw is set, the gaze direct. She does not invite; she considers and concludes. It suited the Pre-Code moment, when a woman might be allowed to know something and act on it as though she were her own person, though the movie-goer yelled at her, begged her, to do something else, like not marry the worthless Jim in Sarah and Son. Yet she could turn, when required, and show hurt in a way that suggested not weakness but cost, as in Anybody's Woman and The Laughing Lady. There were men in the audience who wanted to comfort her, and others who suspected she would not thank them for it.
There is also the matter of stillness. Genuine poise is so rare as to be unexpected, but it’s a real strength. Chatterton can stand in a scene and let it come to her. She does not arrange herself for the camera; she occupies the space and obliges the camera to adjust. The effect is not dramatic in the usual sense. The tranquility is closer to authority, to presence, to excellence. Like the pause between two notes, it gives shape to what surrounds it.
All this is to say that her beauty does not begin or end with her features, which are good enough without being extraordinary. It lies in a combination of intelligence, control, and a certain independence of manner that refuses to apologize for itself. You are aware of a mind at work and of a will behind it. There were men in the audience who wanted to get her opinion on something (or anything), and others who suspected she would not tell them what they wanted to hear.
I used to think beauty was something you could recognize at once and be done with. Chatterton suggests otherwise. She is beautiful in the way a well-made argument is convincing: you follow it, you wonder at it, you resist it even, and in the end you find you have been persuaded.
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* On TV in Detroit from 1956 to 1983, Bill Kennedy hosted old movies weekdays with a dry, sardonic wit, for example, dismissing Ida Lupino’s epic courtroom meltdown in They Drive by Night as “pretty corny.” On a simple studio set, he introduced movies, ran contests and giveaways, chatted with viewers, and interviewed visiting stars - becoming a familiar, slightly irascible afternoon companion for local audiences.
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