The only emancipation Susan Hayward had was a vivacious personality hemmed in by the fact that she seemed incapable of having a profession. I know of only one film where she isn't the vibrant victim of sacrificial circumstance, but even there, she trundles headlong into marital discord with a child. Michael Craig is ludicrous in Stolen Hours, my birth year film. At least in Dark Victory, however frothy, George Brent's character is appealed to, convincingly, with a feminine outcry beauties have used for ages. Those eyes of Bette beg for deliverance from peril, and the damsel's pieces fall into place. Everyone undercuts Dark Victory, with good reason, but it lives, in its many remakes, because of a preeminent dramaturgic defiance. Daniel Petrie tries to tone down the roar of pathos in this Kennedy era upgrade, and while the comparisons to the other versions shouldn't be discarded, Hayward doesn't really give us a rationale for why the ERA surged to the forefront, and then failed to pass not much more than a generation later. She isn't self-made, cannot project herself as a manipulator capable of wielding power, like Stanwyck can. She is the perky bitch with an underbite to whom men apply their fists, and it is embedded in the way Hayward's romantic males treat her in this film. Craig bullies her with his adamant stance. "It must be marriage," really means I need you to submit, properly, for the good of my social standing in merry old England. We cannot snoop around with my eschatological fascination over your impending doom, and it isn't credible. Men will fuck anything, but shackle themselves to lost causes? Hayward's socialite rebuffs rescue, but not the need for a high end trollop to cling to bravado. It is mildly disgusting, in a way, this tactic of hers, with so little range, all this energy, with nothing to sate it, except to apply her knitting needles for new mothers giving birth. Hayward's merger of her kitten with a whip vitality into Barbara Graham's saga almost pulls something off, something close to the female fury of insurrection, five years earlier, in 58, but even this is mired in revisionist controversy, as journalist Edward Montgomery purportedly skewered himself over Graham's culpability. Did Graham deserve the pink butterfly of the gas chamber? Is it really less humane than lethal injection, especially in light of the fact that pharmaceutical conscience is overriding American law on the matter, by withholding the drugs which allow death penalty state executions?
Yes, much has changed. Women now run countries with the same ineffectual parity that Trudeau junior makes Keystone pipeline deals. They've managed homeland security, which should be constrained as a bureaucratic nightmare. They've run state departments, and Harvard, and lost money which was never there in The Big Short, but our primal instincts still lurch in emblematic pursuit of Hayward's need to cling to masculine anchors toward her end game: getting snuffed, extinguished, despite desperate advocates on her behalf, who never really stop to examine just what it is about her presence which needs to be preserved. She certainly has no idea of why she fights the straight jacket she challenges but yields to continuously, as long as the script offers her the appropriate stature, a working class woman with no education who mimics a certain degree of brassy cosmopolitan hauteur.
The piece I am working, which I bounced of Wiecek giving Twitter the polite version of the Canadian finger, may take me more time. I am writing it specifically for an unapologetic Facebook magazine whose publisher already told me he wasn't sympathetic, and I pushed back, and then he hedged, so I've decided I need a few different versions, but my above hostility may just make a pop culture deadline for another market, which I'd like to meet. It closes in ten days, and with a little tweaking, maybe I'll make it. See defiant dowager post it raw, just like Hayward micro-managed: dead woman walking. I am both pushing myself hard, and not hard enough, as I really should bite the bullet, and allow my analytical ability not to break in finding an attorney who will assess my case before I do something unwise, and I am not joking here. My building manager humiliated me above, beyond, any legal authority to do so. She has a case for eviction, and instead, she appears to prefer to jeopardize her own personal security. No one really sees how angry I am, and why I really cannot drag this out another year, winding up in jail, sacrificed on the liberal corruption of which large metropolitan areas like Philadelphia have an inexhaustible supply.
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