From 20th Century Fox
Directed by Henry Hathaway
Starring
Susan Hayward
Stephen Boyd
Theodore Bickel
Dennis Holmes
Barbara Nichols
Ken Scott
Arthur Franz
Of course I was drawn to this one because of its leading actors. I never missed a Susan Hayward film although it took a few years to catch up on the older ones. Regular readers likely recall I've never seen a film of Hayward's that I didn't like. I can't say as I regard her as ever giving a bad performance. You may recall my drooling over her in a prior posting.
I also waxed rhapsodic about Stephen Boyd in a prior posting. I first saw him in The Man Who Never Was in 1956 and religiously followed his work through 1968 by which time the good films were in the past and his career was wilting on the vine.
Mary Sharron (Hayward) has lost her volunteer fireman husband and the father of her seven-year old son in a forest fire. A friend, Fred Carter (Boyd), who fought the same fire with the husband, shows up at the Sharron farm and without even touching base with the widow begins doing chores. Mary checks him out in his tighty-whitie T-shirt and appears to hire him straight away, offering to feed him and provide a room at the side of the barn. She is grieving too much to spend time doing much of anything else. She does take time to notice how her son Robbie (Holmes) and Fred have bonded and she's happy about it.
Eventually Mary and Fred fall in love and decide to make it official (the wedding may have occurred at the time it did partially because the busy-body townsfolk have been gossiping about them being way out there on that farm) but Mary wants her son to approve and she more or less coaxes an approval out of him.
When the kid sees Mary and Fred kiss at the ceremony, he gets bratty. As is sometimes the case, after the marriage Fred and Robbie don't get on so well. Fred unwisely uses the time to try to make a man out of the boy. Of course the boy resists but things come to a dramatic head when Fred insists that Robbie watch him dress a deer that Fred's just shot. The kid freaks out at the killing and the sight of blood and then passes out as Fred cuts into it. Fred tells Mary her son is a coward. She, of course, is furious and whatever harmony has been established on the homestead is seriously impaired.
It's clear the kid wants to kill Fred (there is that pitchfork in the hayloft scene) but the main problem is with Mary who completely turns off to him. He goes from sweet and kind to harsh and physical in a split second. Fred can be scary and suffers terribly from some latent cache of demons surrounding a previous fire where his wife is killed. The details are later revealed to Mary by the good doctor.
One day Mary suffers a miscarriage at a time her son is off playing in his favorite area some distance from the house. A panicked Fred takes her into town, some of it on foot, carrying her, during a fierce storm, to the doctor's home. Mary loses her child and Fred is upset that she didn't tell him she was expecting. He tells the doctor to tell Mary that he will find her son and then he's leaving. He loves her terribly but cannot see a future.
Here is a clip of the scene of Fred finding the boy:
Of course all works out but while one reflects on the film's dramatic passages, I think it's clear there are some tried and true things to be gleaned. This is a story about forgiveness when one thinks it's beyond all possibilities. It looks at a family coping after tragedy. It has something to offer about marrying someone who is virtually a stranger and it depicts an unfortunate side of a stepfather-stepchild relationship.
Both Hayward and Boyd turned in solid performances. I always thought her role was the secondary one. It's also a remarkably restrained performance, not the actress' stock-in-trade gutsy performance, and I suspect that may have disappointed some of her fans. I thought the writing of Boyd's character was full-bodied... a real flesh and blood, damaged man. It is a great role for Boyd-- I would think this was one of his favorite roles-- as he makes the uneasy and frequent transitions between hero and bully and from skittish and inarticulate to earnest and tender.
Hayward, not always in the best mood when making films (she always had a love-hate thing with Hollywood) was in a particularly good mood while making Woman Obsessed. She had wanted to win an Oscar perhaps more than anyone else because it would validate her as an actress in others' eyes... something important to her. And a couple of months before production began, she finally got her Oscar for her spine-tingling performance as murderess Barbara Graham in I Want to Live.
As if this weren't enough, she was in her second year of marriage to a man she was crazy about. (She was decidedly not crazy about her first husband.) Earlier she might have minded being 14 years older than her leading man but it didn't phase her on this one.
She'd seen Boyd around the Fox lot and at one time inquired who he was. She liked being paired opposite manly men (and she wasn't always) and he certainly qualified on that score. Once filming began, the actors got along far better than the characters. She and Boyd shared the same work ethic
This film would help bring about the end of her contract with Fox, something she was anxious to have happen. She said she wasn't going to retire but wanted to work far less often. So keyed up was she to make and complete the film that she agreed to work one last time with her old director nemesis, Hathaway. They had already worked together on Rawhide (1951), White Witch Doctor (1953) and Garden of Evil (1954) and those sets were war zones. Woman Obsessed was not particularly a Hathaway-type film, but they got along the best on this one because of Hayward's cheery mood.Boyd had some issues with Hathaway because he was the director's punching bag on this production. Putting that aside, he was excited to be working with Hayward and had cast aside the warnings he had gotten about working with her. He, too, was on a high because he'd just finished making Ben-Hur and was about to begin a lead romantic role in The Best of Everything. Ben-Hur would be released after Woman and Best. For certain 1959 was a good year for the actor.
The kid, Dennis Holmes, while occasionally too whiny for my tastes, turned in a credible performance. Theodore Bikel, as the country doctor, was the heart of the film, laying into both lead characters for their stubbornness and short-sightedness. He made me tear up with his heartfelt messages.
I loved the outdoorsy feel although the stock footage of all the animals was so obvious. Woman Obsessed is not a perfect film. It was taken in by the public and usually disregarded by critics. I've wondered whether critics missed the deeper meanings and just dismissed it as another Cinemascope confection.
I don't particularly relate to the title. It was originally to be called The Snow Birch which also leaves me pondering. I don't see what it was that obsessed this woman.
While this is about a Saskatchewan family, all exteriors were filmed in Lone Pine, California (near Big Bear), a favorite location of Hathaway's.
Next posting:
From Rome to Hollywood
and back again
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