Saturdays with the Stars: Anne Baxter

Each month of 2021 we will be taking a look at the leading ladies of some of Alfred Hitchcock's many celebrated classics; we'll be doing this series chronologically to when they first entered Hitchcock's filmography.  Last month we looked at Carole Lombard, an actress whose career seems to run counter to everything we understand about Alfred Hitchcock's work, but who managed to convince the famed director to make his one American comedy.  This month, we're going to conclude our trilogy of famed actresses who aren't instantly name-checked as "Hitchcock's leading ladies" despite their celebrity with an actress who definitely made a Hitchcock film where she got above-the-line billing, but isn't known for that film when you think of her biggest roles.  However, unlike Lombard or Maureen O'Hara before, this month's actress very much fits into the cool, enigmatic elegance that Hitch would make his signature (even if she didn't sport his favorite hair color).  This month, our star is Anne Baxter.

Anne Baxter was born two hours northwest of Carole Lombard's home town in Indiana, in the lighthouse-laden Michigan City.  She had a posh upbringing, the daughter of a Seagram executive and the granddaughter of legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright.  She went to boarding school in New York, where she got to see a Broadway performance from Helen Hayes that changed her life, inspiring her to be an actress.  Though theater was a struggle (she was dismissed at a young age by Katharine Hepburn), she eventually went to Hollywood, where she nearly had a very different career thanks to our director in question: Baxter auditioned for the Joan Fontaine role in Rebecca, but Hitchcock didn't want to cast her as she was "too young."  Still, she got a Fox contract, and had star billing in major movies like The Pied Piper within two years.

Baxter's role with Hitchcock is in one of his least-known pictures of the 1950's, I Confess, and it's rarely talked about today.  In fact, if you're looking for more information about Baxter's relationship with Hitchcock, you're far more likely to find discussion of her failed attempt to get the lead in Rebecca than any talk of this film, so once again we don't have a leading lady that (publicly) said much against Hitchcock (it seems like Baxter had more trouble with her leading man Montgomery Clift).  Baxter is a weird choice for me this month because I have seen all of her three most famous films (The Razor's Edge, All About Eve, The Ten Commandments) & I only feature movies I've never seen before for Saturdays with the Stars, but she is not center stage in any of these films, and so this month I want to explore what it's like with Anne Baxter at center stage, getting top billing, including her (much-delayed) picture with Alfred Hitchcock.