1931-32 – Helen Hayes
The Sin of Madelon Claudet
This movie actually took me by surprise and in a good way. It started off as a cookie-cutter typical Hollywood story about a young girl in France who is mistreated by a man, and has to become a single mother. But her situation goes from bad to better, to worse, to much worse, to shameful, pitiful, to just plain sad. To make a long story short, she accepts the help of a wealthy man, only to find that his wealth was based on a criminal lifestyle. She gets unjustly put in jail for 10 years, gets out, and in an effort to anonymously put her estranged son through medical school, she becomes a street walker, a tired old whore.
Helen Hayes was an actress that had an innate sense of frailty about her. There were times in the story where that really worked to her advantage, but there were times when she needed to be strong, and I’m sorry, but it didn’t always work for me. There was a scene where she tells off a man who won’t marry her because of her child. I wanted her to have more strength, more defiance, in that moment, more fierceness on behalf of her son, but it was all under-played.
But later on in the film, as a prostitute, when she is rightly accused of stealing one of her customers’ wallets, she tries to play the meek and innocent card. Her frailty worked well for the act. But they do not believe her, and when she smashes a bottle and threatens to cut someone, I very nearly believed it. There just wasn’t enough crazy in her attitude, her mannerisms, her eyes. Strangely enough, though, one of her strongest and most confident moments in the movie is when she is staying at the rich man’s house, and is giving the manservant common instructions. That was the woman I could believe threatening someone’s life.
And what it all translated to was a kind of timidity that made her look like she was afraid to be in front of the camera. However, the Academy voters saw things differently. Helen Hayes took home the Oscar for Best Actress. I mean, after all that, I’m not saying she did a terrible job. I’m just saying I had a hard time really believing her performance. Unfortunately, I can’t find the two films that were her competition at the 5th Academy Awards, so maybe she actually deserved her win.