OVP: The Turning Point (1977)

Film: The Turning Point (1977)

Stars: Anne Bancroft, Shirley MacLaine, Tom Skerritt, Leslie Browne, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Martha Scott

Director: Herbert Ross

Oscar History: 11 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Actress-Shirley MacLaine, Actress-Anne Bancroft, Supporting Actor-Mikhail Baryshnikov, Supporting Actress-Leslie Browne, Original Screenplay, Art Direction, Cinematography, Film Editing, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Shirley MacLaine-click here to learn more about Ms. MacLaine (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We are jumping 16 years into Shirley MacLaine's career this week (really, MacLaine is one of those actors we should probably return to someday for this series as she's had such a long career in movies) to 1977.  In the years after The Children's Hour, MacLaine had what were probably the peak years of her fame.  She got another Oscar nomination for Irma la Douce, replaced Marilyn Monroe in What a Way to Go! and was winning opposite Michael Caine in Gambit (an underrated movie).  By the 1970's, though MacLaine's star wasn't nearly as bright as it had been.  Sweet Charity bombing at the box office (today we consider this one of MacLaine's signature roles, but at the time it was a massive flop) cost her dearly, as did the low-rated & quickly-cancelled TV series Shirley's World and between 1972-77 she didn't star in a single narrative film.  Instead she found success in other venues, including her Oscar-nominated documentary The Other Half of the Sky and a series of sold-out concerts she did in London & New York.  But it wasn't until 1977's The Turning Point came along that MacLaine had what would be considered a "cinematic comeback," one that would kick-start a terrific second act for the actress that would dominate the next decade at the movies.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Turning Point is a film that is ostensibly about two women who used to be rivals at a prominent ballet company: Deedee (MacLaine), who got pregnant early in her career and quit to start a family with Wayne (Skerritt), and Emma (Bancroft), a one-time great prima ballerina who has not been able to retire from the ballet despite her best days clearly being behind her.  Deedee's daughter Emilia (Browne) is accepted into Emma's ballet company, and quickly becomes a star, repeating the paths of both Emma (by standing out quickly) and her mother (by romancing her costar Yuri, played by Baryshnikov).  As the film continues, Deedee struggles with her daughter, who clearly favors the path of Emma & wants to emulate her, and with her long-standing jealousies with Emma, whom she begrudges for potentially taking away her chance at stardom.  This culminates in the two women having a rooftop fight where they air their grievances, with Deedee admitting that she still thinks about the career that might have been, and Emma (after fighting this assertion for much of the film) admitting that she encouraged Deedee to get pregnant so that she wouldn't be competition for the titular part in Anna Karenina they were both up for.  The film ends with Emilia becoming a prima ballerina like Emma, and both women rekindling a broken friendship, understanding that Emilia will have regrets about her life no matter what she does next.

The film is at its best when it's trying to talk about this lost youth, a universal topic (no one appreciates their youth until it is over), and one that MacLaine & Bancroft both embody.  Their rooftop argument is the best part of the picture, and it gives it a life that (quite frankly) it's lacking in the remainder of the movie.  MacLaine is good at capturing that worry that she made the wrong decision, that fear that she made a decision not because it was the correct one, but because it was the easy one.  Bancroft, too, captures this-she lived MacLaine's dream, even if she knew it would eventually fade as she got older, and has to now accept that her time in the spotlight is done.  These two are at their best when they are playing off of each other, two actresses that never really got past their prime (even if they're playing characters that feel their greatest moments are memories).

The problem with The Turning Point is that much of the film is not centered around these two women, but instead their relationships with Emilia.  Browne's Oscar nomination is kind of notorious at this point because she's considered such a leaden actress, but this belief is not incorrect upon my visiting the picture.  There are times where you almost think she's doing this weird avant-garde character work (like when she randomly affects a Russian accent in a drunken bar scene), but that's not the case-it's just wooden & mechanical.  One could say the same for Baryshnikov, but he's asked to do less work than Browne in keeping the film afloat, and he also has a magnetism (particularly in the dance sequences) that is impossible to ignore.  Browne doesn't stand out as a dancer in the same way (she's talented, but you don't see why she's a great rather than just as good as the rest of the chorus line), and she brings down huge chunks of the movie.  Neither Bancroft nor MacLaine can elevate her scenes, and honestly, she makes you question whether these two women should've been included in Oscar's lineup at all considering they can't pull off their scenes with Browne.

As a result, I'm mixed on The Turning Point, a movie that infamously was cited for 11 Oscars but won none.  The rest of the tech awards are a mixed bag.  The cinematography for the dance sequences is impressive, though so magical & outside the rest of the picture it honestly feels a bit cheap to give it a full nomination (it'd be like nominating only half the film).  The sound & editing are in the same boat-great dancing, the rest not as much, though what I will say for the editing is that they do a great job of hiding that Bancroft is not an actual dancer (strangely it was MacLaine who in real life trained in ballet, not Bancroft whose character is the great talent in the picture).  The Art Direction might be my favorite of the tech nominations-you do get a sense of the opulent grandeur of the stage, and unlike the other tech nominations, it doesn't feel like it's lacking in the scenes not directly associated with the dancing, as all of the homes & dressing rooms feel like reflections of the actual characters.  This is all to say, it's less the film was snubbed by not winning a single Oscar & more that the film was simply over-rewarded in a year that, to be fair to Oscar, didn't have a lot of obvious contenders beyond the two alien odysseys & Annie Hall.