Last night on Criterion I watched the 1958 film The Goddess, directed by John Cromwell and written by Paddy Chayefsky, starring Kim Stanley, Steven Hill, and Lloyd Bridges. It was part of Criterion’s Method Acting collection, and this film felt much more like a play, with theatrical acting from Actors Studio alums, Southern belle accents straight out of a Tennessee Williams play, long monologues, and a lot of drama about desperate people searching for something to belong to, someone to love them, but just being miserable alcoholics with mental issues instead.
Kim Stanley, more famous for being an acclaimed theater actress (she was in the 1954 cast of Bus Stop) plays this struggling woman whose mother abandoned her as an impoverished child because she didn’t want to be a mother, and feels her good looks and sexuality is the only thing that gets her attention, and uses it to not feel lonely. This leads her to rocky marriages with similarly troubled men, abandoning her own daughter with the same words verbatim as her mother said (“I’m only 26/19! My body is still young! I want to live and be free! I don’t want a child!”), and tossing them aside to become a movie star, using the casting couch to get ahead, and largely losing herself in alcoholism, forgettable men, and mental breakdowns.
A very young Patty Duke plays her as a child, and Steven Hill was excellent as her first husband, a somber guy with issues who resents his movie star father, and is a much more loving parent to their child than she ever could be. And I was surprised to see that Lloyd Bridges had more of an athletic build when he was young, playing a boxer, I associate him more as an old man regretting giving up sniffing glue in Airplane! or threatening to fight Jerry on Seinfeld.
I really liked this, a melodrama that felt more like a play, and seeing a little of what made Kim Stanley a legendary theater star.
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