1928-29 – Ruth Chatterton
Madame X
My first instinct is to say I really didn’t care for Ruth Chatterton’s performance. But then I have to take a step back and concede that the way she acted the part, the choices she made as a performer, were a product of the times. We were still on the heels of the silent era and her speech patterns and movements reflected that, movements that were as close to ballet as they were to natural movement.
She spoke most of her dialogue in a lofty sing-song sort of tone, like she was trying too hard to sound aristocratic and it came out sounding cartoonish. Maybe she was just trying to be dramatic because they didn’t really know what dramatic meant, except in the practice of live theatre and vaudevillian Shakespeare. The result was that her every word sound so over-the-top that it was completely unrealistic. It was as if she was unaware of how intimate the film camera was, how subtlety of tone and inflection was apt to be more intense, more effective than forced melodrama. Her speaking tone was to normal speech as overdone facial expressions were to silent films.
But as I said, that was a product of the times. Talkies were still only a few years old. So she wasn’t bad. She did a fine job for what was expected of her. And it wasn’t all like that, either. There was one scene in particular that her acting stood out to me as wonderful, no matter what era the movie was filmed in. It was the scene where her character, Jacqueline Floriot, was extremely drunk. Through Chatterton’s impressive acting, I was actually wondering if the actress was a bit soused when the scene was filmed. She was so inebriated that she was on the verge of passing out. Her words were wonderfully slurred, her eyelids were heavy, and her movements were sluggish. She played that entire scene perfectly.
Ruth Chatterton was very well-cast. Though it felt a little manufactured at times, she had that air of haughty nobility that only aristocrats possess. And yet when she was down on her luck, she had the harsh crassness of a guttersnipe. She pulled them both off believably. And the climax of her outburst in the courtroom scene was, though almost too over-the-top, was played well enough.