{"id":23499,"date":"2024-07-02T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-07-02T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=23499"},"modified":"2024-07-03T17:21:31","modified_gmt":"2024-07-04T00:21:31","slug":"a-girl-like-her-celebrating-eva-marie-saints-centenary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/a-girl-like-her-celebrating-eva-marie-saints-centenary\/","title":{"rendered":"A Girl Like Her: Celebrating Eva Marie Saint\u2019s Centenary"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It\u2019s a sad fact of time\u2019s inexorable march forward that the further we get from Hollywood\u2019s golden age, the fewer living legends we have. 2024 alone has already seen the passing of such luminaries as Chita Rivera, Anouk Aim\u00e9e, and, most recently, Donald Sutherland. But this July 4th marks the rare happy occasion when one of the shining stars of the era is still with us to mark a milestone, as Eva Marie Saint celebrates her 100th birthday. Over the course of her seventy-five years onscreen, Saint only appeared in twenty-one films. It\u2019s a judicious career in comparison to many of her contemporaries but it was enough to include at least two stone-cold classics: 1954\u2019s On the Waterfront<\/em> and 1959\u2019s North by Northwest<\/em>. To consider her work in them now is to discover a new appreciation for the full spectrum of Saint\u2019s talents, which often went under-recognized in her time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1924, Saint got her start on television and radio before transitioning to the stage. She originated the role of Thelma in The Trip to Bountiful <\/em>on Broadway in 1953, and it was likely this Drama Critics Award-winning performance that drew Waterfront<\/em> director Elia Kazan\u2019s notice. She made her big screen debut in the film at age thirty, and it may be this later start \u2013 too seasoned to be an ingenue, but not a known quantity to most viewers \u2013 that gives her work as Edie Doyle its spark. Her unusual chemistry with co-star Marlon Brando might have something to do with it as well. Saint has stated in multiple interviews that the first time they met he \u201cput me off balance. And I remained off balance for the whole shoot.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the Waterfront<\/em> is not Edie\u2019s story but the film wouldn\u2019t work without her. Brando\u2019s ex-prize fighter Terry Malloy might be the soul, but Edie is the heart. Set on the docks and in the working class neighborhoods of Hoboken, the big city across the river never more than a fogged-out skyline, it\u2019s a distinctly masculine world of mob rule and retaliation. Those who don\u2019t fall in line with Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), as Terry has, are vulnerable to harsh payback. Such is the case with Edie\u2019s brother Joey, who is thrown off the roof for ratting the gang out to the crime commission in the opening scene. \u201cI thought they were just gonna talk to him,\u201d a complicit Terry says. He\u2019s a bit soft in the head after years of having it batted around, but Edie will soon set him straight. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edie has a thing for wounded animals. She\u2019s also just returned to the neighborhood after years away with \u201cthe sisters\u201d at a school in Tarrytown. As written, she can vacillate wildly between bold action \u2013 like when she shows up at the docks after Joey\u2019s murder and throws herself into the fray \u2013 and damsel in distress as the script calls for. But Saint imbues her with a watchful inquisitiveness, her eyes darting about like a trapped bird, that grounds her as On the Waterfront<\/em>\u2019s moral center, particularly in her scenes with Terry. There\u2019s the glove bit that Brando famously improvised, but every gesture he makes seems to break down her defenses almost casually, giving their halting romance a remarkable authenticity. One gets the sense that Saint was trying to puzzle out her co-star as much as Edie is trying to puzzle out Terry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately On the Waterfront<\/em> doesn\u2019t offer much more for Edie to do than be the angel on Terry\u2019s shoulder, but Saint\u2019s performance was impressive enough to nab her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, one of eight trophies the film won. While its making is inextricable from Kazan\u2019s HUAC testimony, which has understandably tainted its reputation somewhat for modern viewers, it remains a towering achievement of screen acting and a foundational text of the Method movement. It was also a launching point for several film careers, including Saint\u2019s \u2013 who went from receiving a $7,500 payday for it to a $100,000 one in just three years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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By 1959, perhaps looking to break out of the \u201cpretty and blond artisan<\/a>\u201d box she\u2019d been put in, Saint took on the femme fatale role in Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s North by Northwest.<\/em> The casting was something of a surprise, including to Saint, but she put herself in the director\u2019s hands. According to Peter Ackroyd\u2019s biography of Hitchcock, she worked with him to make her speaking voice huskier and wore costumes that he personally selected for her. Saint later recalled in an interview that Hitchcock told her, \u201cI don\u2019t want you to do a sink-to-sink movie again, ever\u2026 It\u2019s drab in that tenement house.\u201d Shot in blazing Technicolor, North by Northwest<\/em> is so far from the grim shores of On the Waterfront<\/em> that it might as well be on another planet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saint plays the glamorous and mysterious Eve Kendall, a character that doesn\u2019t actually appear until nearly forty-five minutes into the film. Before she crosses paths with Roger Thornhill, he\u2019s already been put through the wringer of a classic mistaken identity plot: kidnapped, drugged, and framed for murder under the belief that he\u2019s a spy named George Kaplan, forcing him to go on the run. Though Eve would seem to share little with Edie, she has a similar gift of observation that has allowed her to survive in a man\u2019s world, though she is shrewd where Edie is sincere. She\u2019s also much more acquainted with the uses of her body, and the speed with which she acquiesces to Thornhill\u2019s charms would be more immediately suspicious if he wasn\u2019t played by Cary Grant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The role of Eve is thus trickier than Edie, given all the twists and turns the story takes, and Saint has the difficult task of making her likable even when she\u2019s putting our hero in mortal danger to save her own skin. Like many of Hitchcock\u2019s blondes before, she runs both hot and cold. But this time there\u2019s a sturdy moral compass directing both extremes. Eve, it\u2019s eventually revealed, is an agent working with the U.S. government to inform on her lover Vandamm (a deliciously haughty James Mason), who has been selling secrets to the Soviets. \u201cWar is hell, even when it\u2019s a cold one,\u201d her handler points out, instilling a certain nobility in a ruse that would otherwise seem awfully sordid. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps it\u2019s also forgivable because Saint pings so well off of Grant despite the twenty year age difference. Whereas with Brando she seemed off balance because she was unsure of him, here it\u2019s because she seems unsure of herself. As a woman who has spent the past several years sublimating her emotions for the greater good, Saint plays her scenes with Grant as if she\u2019s discovering her ability to be swept up by love in real time. In the most seductive scene, shot within the confines of a train car, Saint keeps her face largely to the camera. It\u2019s an invitation to the audience as much as it is to him, a plea to come closer, to see more. We\u2019re already forgiving what she\u2019s about to do.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the years following North by Northwest<\/em>\u2019s release, Saint could have chosen major stardom. Instead she opted for family life, appearing on screen sparingly in the 60\u2019s and 70\u2019s including a fourteen year gap between 1972 and 1986. Most of her work in the ensuing decades was on stage or television. Nothing she\u2019s made since had quite the impact of Waterfront<\/em> or Northwest<\/em>, and while that feels like an undeniable loss for movie fans, one also gets the sense that she\u2019s lived the life she\u2019s wanted, which can be a rare gift in Hollywood. What unites her two most famous roles, and her work as a whole, is that same steely resolve, so lightly carried it seems effortless. \u201cHow does a girl like you get to be a girl like you?\u201d Grant quips in Northwest<\/em>. \u201cLucky, I guess,\u201d Saint replies. She was, and so are we.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the oldest living actress of Hollywood’s golden age celebrates her 100th birthday, we reconsider her work in the two stone-cold classics of her career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":636,"featured_media":23501,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1428,1399],"tags":[1429,1422],"class_list":["post-23499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-happy-birthday","category-looking-back","tag-happy-birthday","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/636"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23499"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23502,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23499\/revisions\/23502"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}