The Country Girl (1954)
Bernie Dodd has to keep faded star Frank Elgin sober, and the key is Frank's wife.
Bing Crosby? That old Christmas guy that everybody loves? You cast him as an alcoholic, suicidal actor? And Grace Kelly? Grace Kelly, the prettiest girl in the entire world? You cast her in a role where she won’t be pretty? And you cast William Holden, the king of smug, self-centered characters, as—oh, a smug, self-centered character, good job. Still, what are you doing with Bing and Grace??
Bernie Dodd (William Holden) is putting on a musical and he hand-picked the alcoholic but undeniably talented Frank Elgin (Bing Crosby) for the lead role. The trick to getting a good performance out of Frank is Frank’s wife, Georgie (Grace Kelly). Frank tells Bernie that Georgie is holding him back, but it turns out Georgie is the only reason Frank is hanging on at all.
The Country Girl, based on a play by Clifford Odets, has a lot in common with Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” They both deal with men at the end of their careers and their long-suffering wives, but Bing Crosby’s performance here—at turns charming, mealy-mouthed, sniveling, and (eventually) triumphant—carries the movie.1 And Grace Kelly as the codependent wife who sacrifices everything for her husband? Yeah, she earns a well-deserved Best Actress Oscar.2
Rating: 8/10, but did you consider making Grace Kelly pretty? and making it an uplifting Christmas movie instead?
Cast and Crew
William Holden, back again. His schtick is wearing a bit thin here as he plays the same character he did in Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17. He shouts at Frank, he cajoles Frank, he kisses Frank’s wife.3 In 1954, Holden starred alongside Grace Kelly in another film: The Bridges at Toko-Ri, a Korean War movie based on a James Michener novel about blowing up bridges. That wasn’t Holden’s last movie about blowing up bridges; we’ll see him again.
We last saw Grace Kelly in High Noon, but she didn’t have much to do there and we kicked our discussion of her to today. Is she just a pretty, sad face? Well, with her performance here, we can conclusively say “no.” Her nuanced role as Georgie is critical to the movie, and her dowdy appearance shows that Kelly isn’t just relying on her looks to get by.
What do you need to know about Princess Grace? Well, her career was short but she made the most of it. After High Noon, she did the Clark Gable/Ava Gardner adventure romance Mogambo (1953) that was shot on location in Equatorial Guinea.4 Afterwards came two classic Hitchcock movies from 1954: Dial M for Murder, where Kelly’s husband hires someone to kill her, and Rear Window, where Jimmy Stewart has a broken leg and Kelly is more elegant than anyone on Earth has ever has been.
After The Bridges at Toko-Ri and The Country Girl, 1955 has Kelly in another Hitchcock movie, To Catch a Thief, where a reformed burglar played by Cary Grant must catch a copycat burglar. Kelly’s final film, in 1956, was High Society, a Philadelphia Story remake with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.
Why was Grace Kelly’s Hollywood run so short? Well, she married Prince Rainier of Monaco5 and became busy with, y’know, being a literal princess. They had three kids together—two daughters, Caroline and Stephanie, and one son, Albert. Albert was an Olympic bobsledder before ascending to the Monegasque throne in 2005. It was only five years for Grace Kelly in Hollywood, but damn, she made them count.
And oh: Bing Crosby. I mean, Bing Crosby has a case as the most successful entertainer of all time, right? He was the biggest recording artist in the 1930s and 1940s and was also one of the biggest movie stars in the world. That’d be like if, in the ‘90s, Mariah Carey starred in A Few Good Men, Mission: Impossible, and Jerry Maguire.6
Even though Bing was an enormous star, his oeuvre isn’t rife with specific titles that show up in trivia. You need to know his 1942 film Holiday Inn, which contains the song “White Christmas” (sung by Crosby, written by Irving Berlin).7 Crosby was also nominated for Oscars twice for playing Father O’Malley, first in 1944 for Going My Way8 and then again in its sequel, The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945). Finally, you should know that he collaborated with Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour on the popular Road to…. movie series that satirized popular genres of film.9
Ya gotta know playwright Clifford Odets as well. Besides “The Country Girl,” the play that this film was adapted from, Odets also did “Waiting for Lefty,” which is about a group of cab drivers planning a strike. It’s a ripped-from-the-headlines play, since it came a year after a 1934 NYC cab strike and many of its lines were pulled directly from labor meetings. Odets is also known for “Golden Boy,” a play about boxing that was turned into a movie with—hey, William Holden!—as well as for script-doctoring Sweet Smell of Success (1957), a Burt Lancaster-Tony Curtis flick. Odets’ productivity and career took a big hit when he named names in front of HUAC.10
The Trivia
When saying he needs a performer who can both sing and act, Dodd mentions two shows that don’t require that: “Blossom Time” and “The Student Prince.” “Blossom Time” is a love story about the composer Franz Schubert that was the longest running show on Broadway in the 1920s, while “The Student Prince” is a love story about a, uh, student prince. They’re both shows based on operas (or operettas) and, as such, have less focus on the acting.
Both “Blossom Time” and “The Student Prince” were turned into popular films. The Student Prince (1954) famously had dubbed singing from Mario Lanza, a tenor known as the “voice of the century.” Lanza was supposed to act in the movie as well, but his temper and weight got him fired.
Mario Lanza was previously in the movie musical The Great Caruso (1951), about the early 20th century Italian tenor Enrico Caruso. Caruso was known for his performance as Pagliacci, the eponymous sad clown from the Ruggiero Leoncavallo opera.11 Caruso’s recording of the aria “Vesti la giubba”12 was the first record to ever sell a million copies.13
Odds and Ends
Dodd mentions a chance once being taken on Laurette Taylor; Taylor, an actress who suffered from alcoholism, had her career revitalized when she originated the role of Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”...when Elgin is auditioning, he talks about his “imaginary valise”; valise is an old-timey, French word for suitcase…the three leads in this film have a meal at Sardi’s, the NY restaurant with all the caricatures on the wall.
Oh, and you know that lamp with the bare bulb that you see on stages that aren’t in use? It’s called a ghost light and it’s used to prevent people from walking off a dark stage and hurting themselves.
Maybe Crosby learned from Fredric March’s mistakes in the 1951 Salesman adaptation—Crosby is nuanced here instead of showy, understated and subtle instead of manic.
Spoiler: this is neither the first nor the last time a pretty girl “going ugly” is rewarded by the Academy.
The kiss comes out of nowhere, by the way. Bernie believes for most of the movie that Georgie is what’s holding Frank back, but when he finds out that she’s his sole emotional support, he immediately falls in love with her. Gross.
Fun fact: Equatorial Guinea is the only African country with Spanish as a national language.
Rainier’s last name was Grimaldi, meaning he was descended from Francesco Grimaldi and part of the family that has ruled Monaco since 1297.
But no, it’s not like Mariah Carey starring in Glitter (2001).
CAUTION: Crosby was also in a 1954 movie called White Christmas, which featured an updated version of Holiday Inn’s “White Christmas.” While we’re on the subject of Bing’s Christmas songs, he also did a “Peace on Earth / Little Drummer Boy” medley with David Bowie that’s…extremely odd to watch.
In Going My Way, Bing sings the Irish lullaby, “Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ral (That’s An Irish Lullaby).” “Come on Eileen” uses that refrain as well.
Also, snagging two Best Actor Oscar noms for playing the same character is pretty rare: the list appears to be Bing, Paul Newman (as Eddie Felson), and Peter O’Toole (as Henry II). We’ll get to those Newman and O’Toole films soon enough.
Does this make them the spiritual forebears of the Epic Movie / Date Movie / Disaster Movie franchise? No, probably not. Anyway, here are the words that finish the Road to titles: Singapore, Zanzibar, Morocco, Utopia, Rio, Bali, Hong Kong, and an unfilmed one, Fountain of Youth.
Some see the title character in the Coen Brothers movie Barton Fink (1991), played by John Turturro, as a caricature of Odets.
Note that Pagliacci is often double-billed with the Mascagni's opera, “Cavalleria Rusticana.” You’ll also sometimes have to say “Mascagni” and “Cavalleria Rusticana,” so you should have a plan for that.
If you’re opera-intolerant, you can skip to 1:45 in that link to hear the part from that aria that you’ve definitely heard before. Really though, the whole thing is a banger.
Are there other 20th century tenors you need to know? Sure are. For starters, there’s the Three Tenors (Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo, and José Carreras) and the Blind Tenor (Andrea Bocelli). Are there others? Of course, but the marginal value of learning tenors beyond those guys falls off pretty quickly (unless you, y’know, like tenors or something).