Joan Collins, Octogenarian
On this Thursday, May 23rd, Joan Collins turns eighty. She’s been a “name” actress for six decades, thought of by some as the poor man’s Elizabeth Taylor of 1950s Hollywood. Collins was an English beauty who seemed perennially poised on the brink of a movie stardom that never quite happened. Her shots at becoming a major leading lady were all but over by the early 1960s. She found subsequent employment with guest appearances on television, notably on Star Trek and Batman, occasionally turning up in a feature film that nobody saw. Her big-screen nadir would seem to be Empire of the Ants (1977), but perhaps she’s in a few films even worse.
Collins famously rose from the ashes and became more popular than ever when she starred as Alexis Carrington on TV’s Dynasty, becoming the queen bitch of 1980s nighttime soaps. She reveled in campy cattiness and shoulder-padded glamour, bringing some welcome old-style high-wattage glitter to a starved small screen. It was good fun to watch her luxuriate in luxury, especially because she retained an irresistible air of self-conscious amusement, never losing her sense of humor regarding the expensively produced crap that finally put her on top. I guess she’d been in the business too long, and had survived too many hard knocks, to take any of her newfound success very seriously. In her fifties, she was suddenly a thirty-year overnight sensation.
Looking back on Collins’ movie career of the mid-to-late 1950s, it seems clear that she was a better actress than was acknowledged at the time. Though she never really got the kind of breakout role that might have proved she was more than just a beautiful face, she was often good and unforced in bad, forced movies. Her work could be simple, direct, and honest, which means it was easy to overlook, but also that it has aged well. And she did get her share of high-profile pictures. In 1955 alone, she appeared in Howard Hawks’ Land of the Pharaohs, The Virgin Queen with Bette Davis, and The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, playing Evelyn Nesbit. Then, in 1956, came The Opposite Sex, a semi-musical remake of The Women, in color and with the addition of men (who somehow manage to be less vivid than the men in the 1939 version, who never appear!). Collins got the old Joan Crawford role, Crystal, the gold-digging predator. For Crawford, the result was probably the finest performance of her career. And Collins acquitted herself most ably, coming through with just the right combination of traits, equal parts luscious and rotten. This time around, Crystal is a chorus girl rather than a perfume-department salesgirl.
The Oppsoite Sex is a sluggish film, effortfully directed by David Miller, severely lacking in humor or wit (even though it’s based on one of the funniest and wittiest of all Golden Age comedies). Leslie Nielsen is June Allyson’s husband, stolen away by Collins. Ms. Allyson is so unbearable (in her smug perfect-wife period) that you may, like me, find yourself rooting for Collins. When Allyson slaps her during a backstage confrontation, the subtext rises to the surface: Allyson is apparently punishing Collins for stealing the picture from her. (Nielsen is a Broadway producer, Allyson a retired star, with Collins appearing in the latest Nielsen show.) While Allyson is charmless and labored in her effects, Collins shows no discernible effort, instinctively and confidently wielding her seductive appeal. She has the devastating impact of those for whom beauty and glamour merge seamlessly.
A major frustration of this movie is having to endure Allyson’s musical numbers while the great singer Dolores Gray (in the Roz Russell role) warbles only the title tune over the opening credits (a good song that she sells silkily, with her patented brand of brassy purring). The impossibly throaty-voiced Allyson, who can barely speak, had to endure the indignity of a dubbed singing voice for her one ballad.
Joan Blondell, wasted in the ever-pregnant Phyllis Povah role, is interesting casting simply because she used to be the real-life wife of Dick Powell, who was now the real-life hubby of Allyson. Also in the ensemble are Agnes Moorehead in the Mary Boland role and Ann Miller in the Paulette Goddard role. Oh, it’s a knockout cast, on paper anyway. But, aside from Collins and Gray, no one scores, no one even makes a dent of an impression. (Similarly to Gray, why cast a musical-comedy dynamo like Ann Miller and then not have her sing and dance, especially while Allyson is working so hard in her futile attempts to wow us?) The movie flatlines early on, but there’s never anything flat about Joan Collins. She tackles a classic performance, meets her role’s requirements, and joins the ranks of first-rate calculating bad girls.
With Island in the Sun (1957), another all-star affair, you find yourself trapped in a travelogue soap opera. (Its titular location is a place called Santa Marta, a British colony.) The film’s veneer of seriousness can’t quite mask its trashy essence; it’s just a melodrama gussied up with “issues” of race and politics. If there was anything daring about it in 1957, well, now it’s pitifully tame, mostly glossy and colorful and expensive-looking. The film’s two interracial loves are both extremely chaste: John Justin and Dorothy Dandridge are allowed to hug, while Harry Belafonte and Joan Fontaine don’t even go that far. Meanwhile, wealthy Brits James Mason and Ms. Collins, brother and sister, learn that they are racially mixed. It seems that it was Grandma who had some Jamaican blood. Collins is engaged to fellow Brit Stephen Boyd who doesn’t give a damn about her racial make-up. She becomes pregnant by him before they wed. In an outlandish twist, the siblings’ mother, Diana Wynyard, informs Collins that she needn’t worry about race because her partly Jamaican daddy isn’t her real father! It seems that the very grand Wynyard (star of 1933′s mostly terrible, Oscar-winning Best Picture Cavalcade) was no saint indeed.
The other, and most overheated, plot is Mr. Mason’s, concerning his jealousy over a wrongly suspected affair between his wife, Patricia Owens, and Michael Rennie. Mason strangles Rennie to death and rapes Owens. Policeman John Williams, back in Dial M for Murder mode, pursues Mason and, in doing so, walks off with the movie. Only he and Ms. Collins impress with their smart, understated performances, while the usually great Mason falters in an impossibly whiny role. He’s a bore in all his unsympathetic self-pity, behaving like a complete idiot throughout.
Director Robert Rossen can’t seem to unearth a shred of depth from any of the intertwining storylines. Most of the acting fades into the lush locale, with just about everyone surprisingly lifeless, aside from Mason’s overexertions and the two intelligently judged turns from Mr. Williams and Ms. Collins.
It’s not my intention to suggest that Joan Collins had the makings of a great actress, but I do think she was unfairly dismissed, showing considerable potential that went mostly unnoticed. In The Opposite Sex and Island in the Sun, she more than holds her own opposite some major stars. There was certainly something genuine there, something that would have us still talking about Joan Collins on the occasion of her eightieth birthday.
