Yeah, I’m a few days late on this one. Like I said, I was really busy making that facebook page and all.
Sadly, we’ve lost another great actress of the classic era. Jean Simmons died on Thursday, just a little over a week short of her 81st birthday.
Simmons started her career on the screen in small roles in B-pictures before moving up the ranks in Hollywood. Soon she was getting supporting roles in major films with major directors, like Michael Powell and David Lean. Soon she was playing the leading lady in a variety of roles, from Shakespeare to noir to biblical epics.
She worked diligently in film throughout the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, and she then moved on to many television projects, including the miniseries North and South and the popular television show Murder She Wrote.
She’s known for her more popular films, like Black Narcissus and Great Expectations, but since this is Obscure Classics after all, I want to hit on a few of her lesser remembered films.
Angel Face is a fantastic noir that Simmons made with film noir heavyweight Robert Mitchum. It has an intentionally slow pace that builds the suspense for a wallop of a conclusion. Mitchum is, as always, pretty great. But it’s Simmons who really anchors the movie. She’s definitely nuts, but she’s so calm about it that it’s really downright eerie.
So Long at the Fair is a strange film, based on a supposedly true story (the details on it are sketchy and hard to pin down). This time Simmons is playing a sane person who everyone thinks is crazy, and it’s a more frantic performance than the one in Angel Face. It works as both a bizarre mystery and as a strong costume drama.
January 25, 2010 at 6:02 pm
No one seems to remember one of my favorite Jean Simmons movies: “Home Before Dark” with Dan O’Herlihy, Rhonda Fleming and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. Jean Simmons won the New York Film Critics award for best actress for this film. Simmons plays a woman recently released from the hospital after a nervous breakdown who returns home to the same situation that precipitated her breakdown. It’s not a happy film, but in the end she starts to pull herself together. Her scenes with Zimbalist are very touching.
It used to be on late night TV all the time in the 70’s, my mother,brother and I watched it everytime.
January 26, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Angel Face is one of my favorite films noir. Simmons was one of the screen’s great beauties.