Madame Sousatzka (1988)

Film: Madame Sousatkza (1988)

Stars: Shirley MacLaine, Navin Chowdhry, Shabana Azmi, Peggy Ashcroft, Twiggy

Director: John Schlesinger

Oscar History: No nominations, but MacLaine became the only woman to win Best Drama Actress at the Globes and not get an Oscar nod that year.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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 finishing our month devoted to Shirley MacLaine with a trip into the late-1980's.  MacLaine after The Turning Point entered an unusual phase, where she was quickly box office gold again, and scored two major hits: Steel Magnolias in 1989, and Terms of Endearment in 1983, which won the Best Picture Oscar & won MacLaine the Oscar for Best Actress.  These two films are arguably the movies that MacLaine is best-known for to modern audiences, but it's worth realizing that MacLaine was only cited for an Oscar for one of them, which gets us to a weird fact for Shirley.  MacLaine has been nominated for five Oscars & won once, a respectable number in a career.  But when you look at the Golden Globes, it's hard not to think that she should have more Oscar citations.  She has been nominated ten times for a Golden Globe for film acting & not had it translate to the Oscars-that's more than ANY other actor.  More than Jack Lemmon, more than Barbra Streisand, more even than Meryl Streep.  This is weird because some of these films were very Bait-y and got cited for other acting trophies (The Children's Hour, Being There, Postcards from the Edge), but perhaps the strangest is our film today.  Madame Sousatzka gave Shirley the distinction of being the only person (to date) to ever win Best Actress in a Drama to not get a nomination at the Oscars that year for Best Actress.

(Spoilers Ahead) Madame Sousatzka is the story of the titular madame (MacLaine), a Russian immigrant who is a brilliant piano teacher, but whose personal demons kept her from being a great success on the stage.  She is tutoring Manek (Chowdhry), a promising musician who lives in a poor household with his single mother, and who is determined to become a great concert pianist.  The two have divergent viewpoints on how he should approach life, with Madame oftentimes intruding not just on his sensibilities about music (preferring the likes of Bach & Beethoven over more modern music), but also on what he reads & how he dresses.  This is all done with a number of outside forces trying to recruit Manek to start his career earlier than Madame Sousatzka expects, and worries from the childless Madame that she is trying to force young Manek to choose between she and his own mother in terms of where his allegiances lie.

The film doesn't break up much new ground, and honestly it aged poorly.  In 1988, the story of an aging white woman trying to instill the lessons & culture of a bunch of dead white men to an impoverished young Indian man wouldn't reek of "problematic" in the same way it does today (even if, let's be real, it probably should have).  This aging problem aside, it's still a routine story, and the story doesn't give us enough understanding, particularly of Manek's mother, to give us some sort of dimensionality beyond the typical "teacher/student" tale we all know by heart.

In terms of MacLaine's Oscar chances, it's definitely the type of film that Oscar would go for-they're all about aging stars in inspirational stories, and particularly in the 1980's, there was a welcomeness to nominating aging actors as often as they could find them.  I think for this year, MacLaine was a victim of a strong field.  Glenn Close & Melanie Griffith were both in Best Picture nominees, Jodie Foster was having a huge "she's a star as an adult" part in The Accused, Meryl Streep was, well, Meryl Streep, & Sigourney Weaver was packing a double punch with dual nominations.  It's hard to even say if MacLaine was in sixth place-both Christine Lahti (Running on Empty) and Susan Sarandon (Bull Durham) were very in the running & might have been next up to bat.

And that's where we're going to leave Shirley this month.  Her career has thankfully continued in the coming decades, getting more Globe nominations (Postcards from the Edge, Used People, In Her Shoes), but Terms of Endearment has (to date) been her final dance with Oscar, mirroring in many ways actresses like Susan Hayward & Susan Sarandon whom Oscar loved, and then gave Best Actress & forgot.  Next month, we're going to get to a different Oscar winner, one who worked with Hitchcock relatively early in her career but whose career otherwise would make her the least-likely Hitchcock blonde imaginable.