Women, Method Acting, and the Hollywood Film

Keri Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367463465
• eBook ISBN: 9781000378689
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

Women, Method Acting, and the Hollywood Film is the first study dedicated to understanding the work of female Method actors on film.

While Method acting on film has typically been associated with the explosive machismo of actors like Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro, this book explores an alternate tradition within the Method—the work that women from the Actors Studio did in Hollywood. Covering the period from the end of the Second World War until the 1970s, this study shows how the women associated with the Actors Studio increasingly used Method acting in ways that were compatible with their burgeoning feminist political commitments and developed a style of feminist Method acting. The book examines the complex intersection of Method acting, sexuality, and gender by analyzing performances such as Kim Hunter's in A Streetcar Named Desire, Julie Harris's in The Member of the Wedding, Shelley Winters's in The Big Knife, Geraldine Page's in Sweet Bird of Youth, and Jane Fonda's in Coming Home. Challenging the longstanding assumption that Method acting's approaches were harmful to women and incompatible with feminism, this book argues that some of Hollywood's most interesting female actors, and leading feminists, emerged from the Actors Studio in the period between the 1950s and the 1970s.

Written for students and scholars of Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Theatre and Performance Studies, and Gender Studies, Women, Method Acting, and the Hollywood Film reshapes the way we think of a central strain in American screen acting, and in doing so, allows women a new stake in that tradition.

1

Women and the Method

In 1962 the Saturday Evening Post announced the rise of a new kind of film actor, one who “prefers a little apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village to the magnificence of a 10-room California pad” and is “aware that a world of crises exists beyond what is reported in Hedda Hopper’s column.”¹ The intellectual, bohemian figure being described was Geraldine Page, by then a multiple Academy-Award nominated actor for her roles in Hondo (1953) and Summer and Smoke (1961), and soon to be recognized again for Sweet Bird of Youth (1962). Given Page’s stature, the Post is surprised at how firmly she has rejected the trappings of Hollywood glamor to pursue a career grounded in an alternative set of values: the craft of acting, hard work, intellectual development, and social engagement. The photograph that illustrates the article emphasizes that Page rebuffs familiar ideas of an actress’s glamor: no filter hides the wrinkles under her 38-year-old eyes or the weathered skin on her cheeks, and no dye covers her greying hair. Both text and image emphasize Page’s actorly versatility over Hollywood’s preferred qualities of beauty and star quality: she wears a “plain brown dress and sports tousled hair,” her is face “unremarkable” but “expressive,” and she has “an ability” to “play almost any heroine between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-five.”

Where would such an actor come from? From the world of New York theatre, perhaps unsurprisingly, but from a very specific corner of it that was still an object of public fascination in 1962: the Actors Studio, home of “the Method” that had emerged ten years earlier as a galvanizing force in American screen acting with the compelling performances of A Streetcar Named Desire, and which, by the time of Page’s interview, was associated in the public mind (erroneously, according to her) with working-class masculinity, mumbled delivery, and youth cultural angst. It was decidedly not associated with actors like Page whose rebellion was of a different variety—that of asserting the right to a new range of roles in the decades following World War II. Page is determined in the Post interview to overturn and expand the public perception of what Method acting is, and perhaps more importantly, who a Method actor is. She insists that Method acting is not the sole province of intense male actors like Brando, James Dean, and Steve McQueen, and that the Actors Studio, rather than being a site of misbehavior or cultish, Freud-obsessed neurotics, was a serious crucible for the development of actorly craft, including her own. While the Post’s interviewer may have expected to be compiling an ordinary celebrity profile, Page has other plans in mind: to offer a tutorial about the Method as a broad and empowering approach to acting for both men and women.

Page’s account attempts to provide a corrective to common understandings of the Actors Studio—the place where Marlon Brando pretended to be a chicken and an ape, or where actors substituted Freudian therapy for art—and draw attention to the Studio as she saw it: as a much-needed working environment for maintaining and expanding the skills of actors, and a welcoming home where members were encouraged to challenge stereotypes and break out of ruts, both their own and those imposed by the commercial theatre and film worlds. It is worth pausing over this 1962 interview because the stereotypes that Page says had already started to accrue around the conception of Method acting ended up ossifying into axioms. The masculinist view of Method acting today is not far removed from the one she was seeking to overturn in 1962, and Page’s invitation to look at the Studio’s work from other points of view—specifically her point of view as a female actor—has never been taken up. This is even more remarkable given that, beginning in the late 1940s, a dynamic group of women—artistically ambitious, feminist, and identified with the burgeoning counter-culture—shared experiences like Page’s at the Actors Studio, finding there a place where they could generate a new relationship to acting, including new kinds of roles and positions of artistic leadership.

Given the strong association of Method acting with masculinity, one might assume that the Actors Studio did not focus on developing the talents of women, yet this is far from the truth. Women have been foundational to Method acting since its inception in the New York theatre world of the 1940s. One of the Studio’s three co-founders (alongside Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis), was Cheryl Crawford, drama alumna of Smith College, a queer woman who had co-founded the Group Theatre with Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg (she was also the co-founder of the American Repertory Theatre with Eva Le Gallienne). The Actors Studio’s first Broadway production was the work of a female playwright—Bessie Breuer’s Sundown Beach (it opened at the Belasco Theatre on September 7, 1948), a drama that grappled with the challenges facing women in their relationships with men returning home from World War II (Julie Harris played a character who gets pregnant while her husband is at war). The first cohort of the Actors Studio, the one that boasted Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and Karl Malden, also included Julie Harris, Patricia Neal, Maureen Stapleton, and Anne Jackson. Women played powerful roles at the Actors Studio, in New York’s broader Stanislavsky-based acting circles, and subsequently in Hollywood, where several generations of female Method actors carved rich careers. For over half a century, women have been working as Method actors, contributing high-quality, challenging, and often feminist performances, and leaving statements about the mutually enriching relationship between feminism and Method acting, yet there has been almost no sustained attention to their work, or to how it helped to reshape the possibilities of film acting for women.

The Method and Masculinity After the War

Before we can restore women’s work in the Method, it is necessary to pause over the many overdetermined meanings that became associated with male Method actors at mid-century. In László Benedek’s The Wild One (1953), Marlon Brando plays the brash motorcycle gang leader Johnny Strabler. When he is asked by a young woman in a soda shop “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” he answers ““Whaddaya got?” Johnny’s anarchic, open-ended rebellion sent shock waves through popular culture. When Brando came to prominence in Hollywood, he not only became synonymous with Method acting—he also became perhaps the most globally resonant icon of his cultural moment. The Method rebel, particularly Brando, but also James Dean and Montgomery Clift in their performances of social alienation and youthful angst in films like George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951), Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Kazan’s East of Eden (1955), came to embody energies of opposition to the imperative of social conformity that accompanied Cold War America’s programs of containment and consensus. The figure of the male Method actor, in his poetic and leather-clad resistance to authority, gained a cultural status that no female Method actor was granted—the privilege of being considered the representative type of society. Looking back from 1966, Pauline Kael called Brando “the major protagonist of contemporary American themes in the fifties” and “the hero who really strikes a nerve.”² Kael sees in Brando “a reaction against the postwar mania for security” and “a contemporary version of the free American,” and suggests that when a delinquent is elevated into a hero, it is because his stance “expresses something in many people that they don’t dare express” and that, in this case, it was “the courage to act out a no to a whole system of authority, morality, and prosperity.”³

For Kael, as for others of her generation, films starring Method actors, no less than Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), Camus’s The Stranger (1942) or Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), represented a significant artistic response to the crises of moral and political authority unleashed by the war. The Method actor’s disgust at the world he had inherited, and his struggle to find a place within it on new terms, made him a compelling archetype for the era of existentialism.⁴ His appeal transcended US borders—he was received with enthusiasm by the French intellectual coterie of Cahiers du Cinéma who, in the process of elevating Nicholas Ray to high stature in the pantheon of auteurs, also found themselves enthralled by James Dean’s “youth,” “stubborn intensity,” and “futile heroism” (112) in Rebel Without a Cause, as well as his emergence “from inauthenticity” (114) at the film’s end in which they saw resonances with French absurdism and existentialism.⁵

Not only did male Method performances transfix critics and the film-going public. In what became one of the more curious culture wars of the period, the techniques of Method acting, its theories and preparation processes, also became an object of fascination, concern, adulation, skepticism, mockery, and suspicion. Debates, diatribes, and defenses of the merits and perils of Method acting as well as parodies of Method actors as neurotics peppered popular culture. In 1957, Robert Lewis, one of the co-founders of the Actors Studio, even felt the need to give a series of public lectures in New York in an attempt to demystify Stanislavsky’s System and describe the work done at the Actors Studio with hopes of quelling some of these stereotypes (it was published by Samuel French in 1958 as “Method—or Madness?”). Also in 1958, Bette Davis filmed a pilot for a television series called The Starmaker in which she plays a theatrical agent comically trying to manage a male Method actor client who bursts into her office with the words “Paula, I’m suffering!” and who runs the gamut of supposed Method tics and antics: impulsive, quasi-suicidal, histrionic, mumbling, and alternating between outbursts of anger and quaking on the couch in the fetal position.

Why did the Method have such power to amuse, enthrall, and fluster mid-century Americans? Perhaps its roots in techniques developed by the Russian theatre director Konstantin Stanislavksy brought a provocative Cold War era charisma to Method acting by making it seem proximate to America’s great geopolitical foe. Scholars of the Method have accounted for its highly fraught status at mid-century in a variety of ways. Nathan D. Allison posits that Stanislavsky’s theories provided an ingenious way of managing post-war crises of subjectivity, agency, and authority. For Allison, though the war had shaken confidence in liberal humanist concepts of the self and the capacity of western aesthetics to address such moral horror, Stanislavsky’s “as if” (a speculative orientation toward the real through concepts like “the given circumstances” of a play) provided a way of simultaneously affirming traditional concepts of subjectivity while also disavowing them. Via Method acting, Allison’s argument goes, one could continue to pretend that humans were three-dimensional beings possessed of interiority and depth—one could proceed largely as before, even while knowing on some level that this was merely a convention, an “as if.” For Allison, it is this quality that gives Method acting its appeal to early Cold War culture:⁶

The rise of the Method can be understood as symptomatic of the sense of perceived loss (of agency, personal identity, and human uniqueness) occasioned by consensus culture. By this account, the Method becomes more than an approach to acting; it functions as a mode of being and understanding the world, creating a space for the postwar subject to cultivate the perception of autonomy and a coherent personal identity, while acknowledging its limits.⁷

In short, Allison argues that Method actors came up with tricks to reassure a shaken world that humans were still human after all, of recuperating lost realness effects, and in so doing, tending to wounds that needed salving.

But it is also important to remember that Method performances provoked as much as they healed, and were not so much at odds with the newly emergent sociological worldview as they were a part of it. And the social meaning of these performances was not just existential. Male Method actors, with their brash attitudes, social contempt, psychological probing, and naturalistic style, were received as a bold generational challenge not just to society at large but also to film industry norms. The new male Method stars, as Steve Cohan and others have noted, played roles that were much more “neurotic” than those of any male stars before them, and were uninterested in taking up the mantle of manhood as it had been left at the beginning of the war. The gap they embodied between pre- and post-World War II generations was often played out in conflicts over acting styles, with Orson Welles, Katherine Cornell, Laurence Olivier, and others speaking for the old guard’s confusion or hostility in the face of the Method’s challenges to the star system and norms of acting decorum (Welles even dedicated himself to making a documentary film about his dislike of the Method).

The Method’s disruptive power was partly a function of its reconfiguration of pre-war aesthetic hierarchies in ways characteristic of late modernism: Marianne Conroy locates its provocation in a “middlebrow disposition” that “[i]n the view of many intellectuals of the period…threatened the orthodox cultural distinctions between popular and prestigious forms on which the entire notion of a national style depended, in that the style combined high cultural purpose with a popular commercial ethos.”⁸ Jacob Gallagher-Ross sees the Method on film’s challenge in its foregrounding of its own technological mediation. Richard Maltby suggests that the erotic, suffering presence of the male Method actor was a spectacle that allowed black-and-white social dramas to compete with other “cinemas of attractions” of the 1950s, from 3D to Biblical and Roman epics.⁹ For Maltby, such displays of emotion had not been seen in Hollywood since the silent era. Shonni Enelow, meanwhile, suggests that the Method’s rocky entrance into American popular consciousness had to do with the way in which it facilitated the mainstreaming of psychoanalysis and raised important questions of race and class integration in post-war American society. Both Enelow and Michael Trask have also suggested that the Method actor’s aversion to “scriptedness” in general stood for a larger impulse to rewrite cultural scripts that foreshadowed the breaking with oppressive structures evident in the civil rights, feminist, and other social movements. Both Trask and Enelow also note that America’s preoccupation with the Method was consistent with a broader turn to performan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Women and the Method
• 2 Kim Hunter’s Feminist Method
• 3 Protest Performances: Actor Rebellion as Feminist Critique
• 4 Jane Fonda: Method Auteur
• 5 Epilogue: Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970)
• Bibliography
• Index