OVP: Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman

Film: Smash-Up (The Story of a Woman)
Stars: Susan Hayward, Lee Bowman, Eddie Albert, Marsha Hunt
Director: Stuart Heisler
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Susan Hayward, Best Original Story)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

The films of Susan Hayward tend toward the highest end of melodramatic, and this, a movie about a night club singer who indulges in the drink (to excess, obviously, or there would be no movie) is no exception.

The film tells the tale of Angie Evans (Hayward), a night club singer with a strong case of nerves that she quenches with a double before show time, who is soaring to success, but is also in love with a man named Ken Conway (Bowman) who is down-on-his-luck and she's supporting him (it's 1947, this is not remotely socially acceptable).  Angie encourages Ken, and he slowly becomes successful both at work and at home, with a wife and baby in the personal column and a burgeoning career as a singer and radio personality on the other hand.  Angie abandons her promising career to be a stay-at-home mom, and were this not a movie, you'd suspect that would be the end of it.

But this is a movie, and it's a Susan Hayward movie to boot, so you just know that she's going to turn to some sort of demon, and in this case, it's alcohol.  Angie begins to become bored, and feels restless in the face of her husband's overwhelming success (and persistent reliance on his assistant, played by Hunt, with whom Angie suspect he's having an affair), and slowly becomes an alcoholic.  The interesting thing, of course, is that alcoholism was in the process of being completely rethought around the time of this movie.  Bill Wilson's Twelve Step program was just under ten years old, and with films like The Lost Weekend gaining fame, there was a lot more focus on films dealing with alcoholism as not a comedic trope (think of Stagecoach, amongst others), but as a dramatic tool for a character.

Hayward borrows a lot from Ray Milland's Oscar-winning performance two years earlier (in fact, actors have been nominated for playing addicts for decades since The Lost Weekend, even this past year), slurring her speech, and truly finding a balance between being able to hide her addiction rather than the dramatic trap of constantly failing and failing and failing for the sake of drama (see La Vie En Rose for a lesser example).  This is a woman you can believe became successful even with her alcohol issues, and Hayward plays her as a real person.

The rest of the cast, and the rest of the film after her spiral, are a mess.  Bowman is severely out of his element trying to play dramatic, and Eddie Albert, usually so full of life and pizzazz, is relegated to such a background role that you aren't sure what the point of the character is except to serve as a scene partner for Angie and Ken's frustrated complaints.  The film ends on such a peach blossom of a note (Hayward, after nearly burning her daughter alive and being in bandages from the opening scene, is told that her face will completely heal, and that her daughter and home life will be fine).  I know it's the 1940's, but are we really going to buy that the issues just end there?  I know this is something I'm going to have to get over as I immerse myself more fully into the Golden Age and the code, but this film loses massive realism points as a result.

The film received a nomination for Original Story (someone, someday needs to explain to me exactly what the point of this category is, and how it differs from Original Screenplay), and if you're noticing a particular wryness in the dialogue ("I just remembered I have an appointment with a headache"), it's because legendary wit Dorothy Parker was one of the nominated writers behind this film.  However, the plot is so melodramatic and the writing suffers whenever it's not being uttered by Hayward or Hunt that I don't hold out much hope of it scoring well in the OVP, and I've graded it as such.

Hayward, on the other hand, is in a good position in one of the weakest Best Actress fields ever put together for the Oscars.  Once you get over her striking resemblance to Vivien Leigh, you see that this is a woman with extreme dramatic chops in front of the camera; all the melodramatic weighings-down of the plot cannot stifle the way that she yearns for her daughter, her husband, and the way she can capture unrest so well on screen.  Granted, there are times when she goes to the rafters for no reason (look at the way she flails while saving her daughter, or the way that she repeats the same "I'm drunk" facial expression over and over again), but there's some great moments to hang onto in this performance, in a year that featured Deborah Kerr, Rosalind Russell, Loretta Young, and Dorothy McGuire in roles in which none are highly celebrated.

And what about you-have you seen Smash-Up?  What are your thoughts on Hollywood's progressive views on alcoholism?  And where does Susan Hayward rank on your 1947 Best Actress ballot?