Her ability to connect directly with an audience begins with the voice – lush, weary, tender, worldly, skeptical, ranging nimbly between hard and soft. It could be metallic, mannish and brittle or gentle as a down pillow, sometimes within the same film, as befits an actress who was at ease in every genre, from woman’s melodrama to the western, with noir and screwball comedy in between. More iconoclast than icon, more a character star on the order of Bogie or Cagney, she was neither a great beauty nor a glamour puss. The importance of this – her refusal or inability to be simplified into a single image – has to be seen as a major factor in her longevity. If she was underappreciated in her time, her minimalist gifts – the fluid movement, the stillness in repose, the sense of interiority – have come to seem ultramodern. A cross-genre retrospective will showcase the many facets of this iconoclast.

Curated by Molly Haskell.

Ladies of Leisure (Femmine di lusso, 1930) d. Frank Capra • Night Nurse (L’angelo bianco, 1931) d. William Wellman • Baby Face (1933) d. Alfred E. Green • Stella Dallas (Amore sublime, 1937) d. King Vidor • The Lady Eve (Lady Eva, 1941) d. Preston Sturges • Ball of Fire (Colpo di fulmine, 1941) d. Howard Hawks • Double Indemnity (La fiamma del peccato, 1944) d. Billy Wilder • Clash by Night (La confessione della signora Doyle, 1952) d. Fritz Lang • All I Desire (Desiderio di donna, 1953) d. Douglas Sirk • Forty Guns (Quaranta pistole, 1957) d. Samuel Fuller