This Month

“We would sigh or let out a great breath from the depths of our hearts, for what we felt was precisely this: can it be possible that there is such a woman in this world?” The novelist Shusaku Endo wrote those words about Setsuko Hara, who is remembered with a day-long tribute in TCM’s annual Summer Under the Stars program. And it strikes me that Endo’s words could apply equally to any number of women also being saluted this August (and men, for that matter).

Over the years, there has been a lot written about the phenomenon of movie stardom. What is it exactly? Acting ability? Good looks? Publicity campaigns? All true, but never any one factor alone. Hara was a remarkable actor, and so were Ingrid Bergman and Gloria Grahame, also being honored this month. They were beautiful, and they were well-publicized. But we can all think of brilliant actors who don’t really work onscreen and heavily promoted actors who were greeted with indifference and faded from view. These artists all developed a kind of magical call and response with the camera and then the viewer, continuing across the years on its own special wavelength.

Director Yasujirō Ozu once said of Hara that it was rare to find a Japanese actress who could play the daughter of a good family, which describes the majority of the work they did together. But Hara is just as compelling in the edgier films of Mikio Naruse, or as the Nastasya Filipovna character in Kurosawa’s The Idiot.

Grahame, alternatively, was “typed” as a “loose woman,” but that doesn’t begin to do justice to her work in, say, Crossfire, let alone the complex characters she played in In a Lonely Place or The Cobweb. (On the other hand, not many actresses of the time would have taken the dive right into the deep end of the pool the way she did in Odds Against Tomorrow—I’m thinking of that great moment when a shirtless Robert Ryan opens the door and she goes wide-eyed and says, “What’s going on in there, an orgy?”) Bergman never allowed herself to be typed, onscreen or off, and she is as believably ethereal in Gaslight as she is believably unnerved and rattled in Voyage to Italy.

Each of these artists was able to go so deep into the subtleties and nuances of their roles that they sometimes harmonized with their directors and took the whole film to a level that was breathtaking and impossible to describe, a level that could only be lived with by the viewer. Sometimes it was expressed in surprising line readings at key moments—Kyōko Kagawa’s question “Isn’t life disappointing?” and Hara’s smiling answer, “Yes, it is” in Tokyo Story; Bergman’s exclamation that “Life is so short” as she and George Sanders wander through the ruins of Pompeii in Voyage to Italy. But more often than not, these women practiced their art in the realm of light and shadow, rhythm, gesture and silence.