Shelley Winters Top and Bottom

Georgia Lea

Shelley Winters (1922-2006) had a colourful way of misremembering her movies. ‘I was drowned by Montgomery Clift and Robert Mitchum, run over by James Mason ...’ But even when she got the plot a little wrong, she had the logic perfectly right: men were always taking her to her doom. That could be taken as a depressing lesson about patriarchy and cinema, save for the fact that Shelley Winters is, for many viewers, what most stands out in their memory of A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951), The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955), Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962), or countless other movies. In fact, it is an astonishing testament to Winters’ power as a performer that she seems, in retrospect, to have commanded so many movies where she was really only a secondary player, in and out of the plot in twenty or fifty minutes.

Winters was a supremely physical actress. Maybe these were the lessons she learnt from the much-abused Method training: how to find a gesture that summed up a character, and how to listen, really listen, to whomever she was acting alongside. (Her and James Mason are a study of contrasts in Lolita, and their starkly different acting styles are cleverly exploited by Kubrick: Mason is always narcissistically self-absorbed, as if acting in a mirror, while Winters fixes on him totally.) And those directors who were attune to the cinematic possibilities of such physical acting knew exactly what do with her: put her in a scene, situation or frame where the shifting power dynamic is played out in terms of positioning, who is at the top and who is on the bottom.

Shelley Winters could play both top and bottom – and she could show the lightning-fast movement between those poles, too. She will forever be associated with that great, melodramatic mise en scène characteristic of the 1950s where people do a shifting dance of power, yelling and hurling objects, on staircases, front porches, between floors ... In The Night of the Hunter, Laughton created a woman whose identity is quickly deflated, her power easily sapped, or rather swiftly sublimated – into religion (her ‘testimony’ scene in church is almost a trance). In her scenes with Mitchum, she see her humiliated, drained, cowering – ready to obey her evil master. Laughton, accordingly, gives us unforgettably Expressionist diagrams of her submission.

She has more room to move and stretch (at least until the car, off-screen, hits her) in Lolita. In a brilliant mise en scène construction that rivals the saloon in Johnny Guitar (1954), Kubrick and his collaborators constructed a house-set seemingly designed to show off (in elaborate, highly mobile long takes) Winters’ extravagant, pushy, predatory body-language, in all its states and moods: crestfallen at the bottom of the stairs as her daughter resists her from above; frustrated when her hands (normally given to the most remarkable arabesques while holding a cigarette holder alight, or dancing) are suddenly stuffed full of objects by a fleeing Mason. But nothing beats the clinches when Winters (as Charlotte Haze) moves in on Mason as Humbert Humbert: as she leans forward, from above, he cringes into an excruciating, leaning-away posture, leaving the frame free for her to dominate, as she throws back her head and laughs her fruity, theatrical laugh.