There’s a good chance that this Christmas, as well as
so many others over the last half-century, millions of Americans will catch
Grahame in her early eye-catching, scene-stealing role as Violet Bick, the
blonde flirt who served as a foil to Donna Reed’s wholesome small-town girl as
an early rival for Jimmy Stewart’s affections, in It’s a Wonderful Life.
In a way, that role would prefigure several of the
film noir characters in which Grahame would shortly specialize: Crossfire,
In a Lonely Place, The Big Heat, Human Desire, and Odds
Against Tomorrow.
I’m thinking of the nightmare sequence in Frank
Capra’s Yuletide classic, where Stewart’s George Bailey gets to see what life
would have been like had he never been born. One of the many people whose life
is changed for the worse, in the dark honky-tonk town now known as
Pottersville, is Violet—not given a chance to start life out of town through a
loan from George, but instead hauled away screaming by cops arresting her for
prostitution.
Grahame was the ultimate “good-bad girl”—a woman who
moved easily across, and beyond, the traditional confines of the goddess, the
siren and the victim prototypes of noir. These characters’ vivacity led them to
seek excitement, but as objects of the male gaze they drew trouble—whether as
the anxious girlfriend of a screenwriter with an unexpected violent streak (In
a Lonely Place), the lonely mistress of a racist heist participant (Odds
Against Tomorrow), and, perhaps most notably, a gangster’s moll who, for
defying him, suffers hideous disfigurement at his hands (The Big Heat).
While her role as the sweet southern belle who serves
as the muse of her novelist husband in The Bad and the Beautiful had none
of these violent overtones, it was every bit as tragic, and it helped Grahame
win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1952 on her second try.
The ceremony should have been Grahame’s moment to
celebrate. But she was so anxious that her four-word acceptance speech (“Thank
you very much”) led to whispers that she had been drunk, and her dismay at how
she looked onscreen resulted in repeated plastic surgery that only subtracted
from her appearance.
Far worse would engulf her by mid-decade, when she
appeared in the screen adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical Oklahoma.
In this case, her nervousness had a more solid foundation: unlike others in the
case, she was not a professional singer. Her apprehension took concrete, and
unwelcome, form when she struck co-star Gene Nelson on the set, virtually
sealing her reputation as difficult to work with.
But her reputation took its biggest hit with the 1960
announcement of her marriage to her former stepson Anthony Ray. Anthony’s
father, director Nicholas Ray and another ex-husband of Grahame’s, Cy Howard sued
Grahame, suing her for custody of their respective child with her. The
resulting sensational headlines reportedly led Grahame to a nervous breakdown
at the most difficult passage that actresses in that time experienced: career
decline at age 40.
I was surprised to find, while channel-surfing the
David Janssen series The Fugitive, that Grahame had appeared in an
episode. But these small-screen appearances became more characteristic of her
career in the 1960s than the high-profile movies of the prior decade.
Through most of the Seventies, Grahame toiled onward, in
supporting roles in theater, television, and onstage. Even in the last six
years of her life, as cancer increasingly ravaged her, she bravely continued
working and maintained a relationship with a younger lover, Peter Turner—a period
recounted in the biopic Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool, starring
Annette Bening as the actress.
In a retrospective of Grahame’s best films on the Web
site of the British Film Institute, David Parkinson aptly summarized the nature
of her appeal: “With her lisping voice and sleepy eyes, Grahame… gave femme
fatality a raw but touchingly vulnerable sensuality, ensuring she was always
much more than just good at being bad…. At her best…, Grahame lit up the screen
with her beguiling, intense presence.”
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