Films to Love: In Memoriam: Dame Angela Lansbury
Fans of classic film lost a beacon within in the industry with the death of Dame Angela Lansbury. While many of my generation know her exclusively as the voice of Mrs. Potts, Angela Lansbury’s career was extensive and varied.
Today I am sharing with you a few pieces from her filmography that are worthy watches. Together they give you a glimpse into the scope and skill of a woman who was instrumental in changing the landscape of film.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
This 1945 classic brings to life Oscar Wilde’s novel (read more about Oscar Wilde in this Wilde about Oscar post). The casting is superb here with Hurd Hatfield portraying the unchanging youth and beauty of Dorian Gray. How does one actually portray depravity and cruelty while maintaining the face of an angel? Well, Hurd Hatfield figured that out well; he does so with coldness, with aloofness, with a superior minded detachment from those around him. When the slings and arrows of life afflict those closest to him, he seems almost amused by them, as those they aren’t upheavals, but rather frivolities and he considers any serious response to them laughable.
The story begins Dorian Gray is sitting for his portrait in the house of his friend, Basil Hallward. Hallward’s Oxford chum, Lord Henry Wotton, played fiendishly well by George Sanders, arrives on the scene, and momentary captivated by the stellar youth and beauty of Gray, he proceeds to encourage him to enter into a life fully devoted to hedonism, pursue every pleasure, seek out instant gratification, refuse to take anything seriously or to heart. While Gray seems to dismiss this advice, it festers within him, producing an insatiable longing to experience life in ways not customary in the course of gentlemanly pursuits.
This leads him to explore the seedier side of London, visiting public houses in the rougher parts of town to merely witness how different parts of society live. It is in one of these places that he meets the young chanteuse Sibyl Vane, played by Angela Lansbury. Lansbury portrays Sibyl magnificently. Beneath the thumb of her domineering mother who wishes to orchestrate an advantageous marriage for her, Sibyl is a loyal daughter, sweet and virtuous. While she may be a singer in an establishment that caters to the poorer classes, she’s not loose in her morals.
The first night she sees Dorian Gray, she is smitten. And so is he. To her, he is her Sir Tristan, in possession of every virtue, a pure soul. To him, she is his angel. They are each other’s ideal.
In short order, Gray confesses his love to Sibyl and an understanding is reached; they will marry. When Gray invited Hallward and Wotton to meet her, Wotton counsels him to invite Sibyl back to his home, beg her to stay the night with him, and see if she is truly as virtuous as Gray believes her to be. For some perverse reason, Gray feels compelled to take Wotton up on this challenge.
It is this scene particularly where Angela Lansbury shines. When Gray implores her to stay with him, the stark sorrow and betrayal she expresses silently is gut wrenching.
Sibyl Vane’s story is the tragedy that sets off Dorian Gray’s downward spiral into depredation and evil. Angela Lansbury’s performance magnifies that tragedy as she truly does portray the virtuous, pure woman.
If you have not seen The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is one that should not be missed, particularly for the role that Lansbury plays, for which she was nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe.
Blue Hawaii
Blue Hawaii is an Elvis Presley vehicle, complete with rocking music tunes and absurdly endearing plot lines. As you can guess, the film takes place in Hawaii. And, as silly as most Elvis movies were, this one is a great watch.
One of the highlights of the film is the performance Angela Lansbury gives. It’s a minor one. She’s in a handful of scenes. But in each one she is a juggernaut of energy. And, perhaps even more fun, she’s a truly absurd characters. Giddy as the day is long. Silly, too. And, at points, there’s no denying how annoying she is as well.
Lansbury plays Elvis’ mother. She was a debutant from the South. She knows all the proper behavior and comportment; she’s a bit of snob, looking down her nose at the natives that her son has befriended. And she’s also a bit of a lush.
Her husband is a high up mucky-mucky in the Great Southern Hawaii Fruit Company and he wants his son to follow in his footsteps when he comes back from his active service overseas.
Elvis has other things in mind. He wants to build something for himself. So, when he comes home, he does so on the sly, shacking up in a beach hut and laying about on his surfboard all day long. It is finally when his father approaches Elvis’ girlfriend that he realizes his needs to go home.
His mother welcomes him with open arms, enumerating all the expectations that the family has for him. And while he is kind and tender to his mother, there’s no escaping how much it rubs him the wrong way to see his future laid out before him with no say.
So he does something about it. Teaming up with his girlfriend, who works at a travel agency, he pitches an idea to her boss and begins working as a tour guide. His first assignment is a bevy of girls- this should not surprise you if you’re familiar with Elvis movies. And one girl in particular provides him with endless trouble; so much trouble that he finds himself in jail and jobless, even though he is blameless.
Blue Hawaii is a rollicking good time. The location is idyllic. The plot is flat out fun. And the soundtrack happens to be one of my all times favorites from an Elvis movie. It boasts one of his all time greatest hits, too, Can’t Help Falling in Love.
In terms of Angela Lansbury, I selected Blue Hawaii because it is an off the beaten path sort of part for her to take. Keep in mind, she had been nominated for several Oscars at this point in her career. Playing a minor role- a silly role- in an Elvis film is not something one would expect from a person with her illustrious filmography, but there it is. And it’s just so enjoyable.
The Manchurian Candidate
If The Picture of Dorian Gray had Angela Lansbury cast as an angel then The Manchurian Candidate cast her as a demon. These two performances couldn’t be more antithetical. Yet, as a true proficient, Lansbury handles them masterfully.
Every re-watching of this film leaves me unsettled. While the book is far more sordid and explicit, the movie distills the plot to the foundation of horror upon which it is built.
As the movie was made in the 1960s, it is interesting to see how prescient both the novelist, Richard Condon, and the screenwriter, George Axelrod, truly were. Furthermore, those this film is firmly in the ‘classics’ section, complete in black and white, it plays as alive, modern, and relevant as though it were made today.
Korean veteran Raymond Shaw (played by Laurence Harvey) and his US Army platoon are captured by Russian and Chinese soldiers, taken across the Manchurian border, and systematically brainwashed for three days. They are released three days later with a fabricated story that Shaw rescued his men during heavy action. When they are released, Captain Bennett Marco (played by Frank Sinatra) recommends Shaw for the Medal of Honor for saving his entire platoon except for two soldiers killed in action.
When Shaw returns to US soil, his mother, Eleanor Iselin (played by Angela Lansbury), exploits the conferring of this honor on her son as a means to further her husband’s political career. Shaw’s step-father, John Iselin, is a senator in the United States’ Congress with aspirations to the White House.
In rebellion to his mother’s wishes, Shaw takes working for a newspaper in New York City. In the interim, Captain Marco has a recurring nightmare in which he and his army platoon are seated in sedated silence before a tribunal of foreign officials- chiefly Russian and Chinese. In the dream, he sits silent and complacent as Raymond Shaw is commanded to kill two men from their platoon.
This is the tipping point for Marco, who begins to wonder if he is losing his mind. However, when he discovers that another member of their platoon is also having the same sorts of nightmares, Marco realizes that there is more than meets the eye. He begins a covert operation to find out if more happened to them during their three days missing in action than has been perpetuated to the press.
What he discovers is chilling; Raymond Shaw has been brainwashed to be a sleep cell within the US. Through a series of commands and cues, his operator is able to put him in a trance and then command him to perform certain actions of which he himself is unaware.
Now the race is on to find out who his American operator is and what the plan is that Shaw is supposed to fulfill.
Angela Lansbury’s performance as the driven, unscrupulous senator’s wife is terrifying. From the start, she is cold and cruel; you don’t like her. But the depth of her depravity and machinations are horrifying. While watching the movie, I completely forget that I’m watching Angela Lansbury. While I have seen her play stinkers in the past (Harvey Girls, National Velvet, etc.), Eleanor Iselin is a departure even from those performances. It is the essence of evil, and to be able to convey that so vividly on screen is a testament to a worthy actress. Lansbury was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in numerous award venues, including the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes.
If you want to see the versatility of Lansbury, you MUST watch this movie.
Death on the Nile
One of the hallmarks of a great actress is her ability to take on any number of disparate roles with aplomb. As Salome Otterbourne, the overly sexual lush of a romance author, Lansbury is top notch.
Death on the Nile is based on an Agatha Christie novel, which I read many moons ago and recall little of because I’ve watched this film so much. I can’t tell you the differences between the book and the film. But I can tell you that this 1978 film is one of my all time favorites.
To begin, the cast is littered with heavy hitters. Bette Davis, David Niven, Maggie Smith, Peter Ustinov, Mia Farrow, Olivia Hussey, George Kennedy, and, pertinent to this post, Angela Lansbury. Any one of these people could carry their own film. Yet, this ensemble cast provides a cornucopia of talent with which to drive this intricate tapestry of a plot.
What’s not to love about this movie? I’m a huge buff of all things Ancient Egypt (see Down the Nile to Ancient Egypt post), so a movie that’s set in the 1920s that takes a cast of characters on a river cruise down the Nile to see all the fabulous Egyptian temples, pyramids, and ruins is just the ticket for me. Couple that with a tightly woven, suspenseful plot, and it’s completely my cup of tea.
Being that Death on the Nile is an Agatha Christie novel, it’s a heavy movie. It’s dealing with murder, first off, which means that it’s not easy, either. But, as any true storyteller knows, a good story requires moments of levity in which to allow you listener/viewer to breath and process all the things which have transpired. In Death on the Nile, that levity it provided by Angela Lansbury.
Obviously, Salome Otterbourne is an educated woman; she is a writer, after all. But, she’s a writer of lurid romance novels. Salome writes of the liberated woman, the woman who is not afraid to embrace her sexuality, the woman whose heart- as she says- ‘beats to the primordial drum.’
This desire to liberate the prudish, repressed woman of her era gets Salome into a bit of trouble, particularly with Linnet Doyle, lately Ridgeway. It seems that Salome, in a desire to compliment a young woman awakening to her sexual self, wrote a novel that named names, one of which was Linnet Ridgeway. Disgusted to be included in a such a salacious piece, Linnet is suing Salome for libel.
When you meet Salome Otterbourne, you know that she didn’t libel Linnet. She truly meant all her depictions as compliments. Furthermore, she’s at a loss that she’s getting in any sort of legal trouble for it.
What lends humor to this whole performance is the extravagance of Salome Otterbourne. Over the top doesn’t quite touch her; she garish and gaudy. Add some alcohol and she makes ostentatious seem sedate.
One scene that I just love her in is when the river boat has docked at the Temple of Karnak in Luxor. As she perambulates down the Road of Rams, she goes over to one of them, embraces it and says,
“Oh, yes, rams. Lickerish, priapic, erotic rams! How noble they are! With their proud flanks, flared nostrils, and unashamed curled horns.”
This is a soupçon of the sort of lines she has thorough Death on the Nile. They are absurdly wonderful, as is Angela Lansbury’s performance.
Murder, She Wrote
My Nana loved Murder, She Wrote. Never missed an episode. Having recently been gifted the entire 12 seasons on DVD from my brother, I can see why Nana liked them so much. Not only is Angela Lansbury feisty, friendly, and funny as Jessica Fletcher, the plot lines are engaging.
I’m slowly making my way through all the episodes. What I enjoy the most is the versatility that Jessica Fletcher allows Angela Lansbury to have. Whether she’s sleuthing in disguise or playing the part of Jessica’s cousin- who looks very much like Jessica herself- Angela Lansbury never misses a beat. She can play a prudish frau, a saucy wench, a loathsome shister all at the same time as the keenly observant and perilously curious murder mystery writer from Maine.
Jessica’s adventures take her far afield- from coast to coast and abroad. She meets the most interesting people and ferrets out the most detestable secrets.
My father always used to joke that you should never invite Jessica Fletcher anywhere because someone always ends up dead. And while I find that statement hilarious, it’s eerily true.
One episode to definitely check out if you’re a classic film buff is Truck Stop from the Fifth Season. It’s a fabulous homage to the Film Noir classic The Petrified Forest staring Humphrey Bogart, Lesley Howard, and Bette Davis.
Also, another boon to this series is the bevy of actors who find their ways into the plots. YOu’ll encounter Roddy McDowall Anthony Quinn, Jim Caviezel, Jeff Conway, Jerry Orbach, Shirley Jones, Jean Simmons, etc.
Beauty and the Beast
It’s impossible to overlook one of Angela Lansbury’s hallmark parts, that of a little animated teapot in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Within her voice, she conveyed maternal compassion for a whole generation of children. And, it was her voice that sang THE song Beauty and the Beast.
In many ways, the voicing of the animated Mrs. Potts provides the basis of what I think Angela Lansbury was really like: warm, maternal, and generous. There’s a spot of the ole drill sergeant about Mrs. Potts, too. She’s no nonsense, but not a martinet about it. At other times, she’s indulgent. Always, she possesses a compassion that is necessary for all the characters that she is surrounded with. This is how I chose to see Angela Lansbury as a woman.
Regardless of whether this is an accurate picture or not, what I can safely say is that Angela Lansbury is one of the figureheads within the actor’s pantheon of Greatest of All Time. The movies I have shared with you today are only a glimpse at her long and illustrious career.
Narrowing this list down was actually rather hard. However, here are a few other movies with Angela Lansbury that are ones you should watch, too:
Angela plays the singer and head ‘girl’ in a tavern in a Western town along the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe railway. You get to hear her singing voice when she was young and also see her playing the jilted lover.
This whole film is a brilliant study in absurdities and comedic timing. Angela plays a princess in a castle circa Robin Hood. She’s betrothed to a loathsome man and will seek out any means by which she can avoid that marriage. She is a minor character, but lots of fun, as is the movie at large.
The Long, Hot Summer (see Sultry Summer Cinema post for more details)
Angela is amazing in this movie. Again, it’s a supporting role, but she is opposite of Orson Welles and matching his acting chops, chop for chop. She also provides some levity in the midst of a rather heavy storyline.
The Love She Sought (also known as The Green Journey)
This made for TV movie has Angela playing a spinster Catholic school teacher who is devote and sincere. While she may appear severe, she possesses a true Christian compassion for humanity. You meet her taking in a teenage who finds herself pregnant and in need of help. She also has a male pen pal who lives in Ireland who is one of her only true confidants. Through their letters, they exchange their thoughts and feelings on every subject, but dwelling particularly on their faith and how it frames their outlook on life.
Skip ahead several years and Angela finds herself with an opportunity to travel to Ireland with her church. She’s going to finally meet her pen pal. However, her heart is nearly broken when he doesn’t show up to the meeting. What could be the reason? Well, you should definitely watch this movie to find out.
Based off of the book by Paul Gallico, this movie takes place in the 1950s in England and follows Mrs. Harris, a char woman who cleans houses for the affluent. While cleaning one such house, she find two beautiful Dior creations hanging in the bedroom. These dresses become a dream for her, she will save her money, go to Paris, and buy a Dior dress. This movie follows the wonderful story of how this dreams turns into the adventure of a lifetime.
