A Star is Born

Ingrid Bergman in CASABLANCA

In 1945, some wag cracked a soon-to-be-popular joke: he'd actually seen a movie which didn't feature Ingrid Bergman. For a joke like that even to have existed, the star had to have made a breakthrough of seismic proportions, Bergman had.

From the moment producer David O. Selznick imported her from Swedish films and introduced her to America in 1939's Intermezzo, audiences embraced Bergman as something the likes of which they had never seen before. Tall, fresh-faced and big-boned, she radiated a warmth and approachability along with wholesome carnality. She was, in fact, the antithesis of that other great Swedish import, Garbo. By the time of the afore-mentioned crack about her omnipresence in the movies, Bergman was drawing sell-out audiences at New York theaters simultaneously showing Spellbound, Saratoga Trunk and The Bells of St. Mary's.

But the movie that brought her to that place had come three years earlier. Constantly threatening to return to Europe if producers and directors misused her the way they did other female imports, Bergman was longing to act, and her instincts led her to masochism: she played a governess in love with her much-older employer in Adam Had Four Sons, the saintlike wife of a nutcase in Rage in Heaven, the whore ravaged by Spencer Tracy's eponymous Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Suffering seemed to burnish her beauty. When she fought for and lost (to Vera Zorina) the role of Maria opposite Gary Cooper in For Whom the Bell Tolls (even though Hemmingway himself favored her), she had to content herself with a shady lady/martyr role in a routine, modestly budgeted project that was to pair her with Humphrey Bogart. That film was Casablanca, one of the swooniest romances Hollywood ever concocted.

Luminously photographed, Bergman literally shines in Casablanca, whether she's being slandered as a tramp by her old flame Bogie, or being buffeted by her own conflicting memories, loyalties and desires. No wonder Casablanca, a smash hit, turned her into the definitive wartime icon. She was the archetypal innocent blown to hell by the winds of war.

Bergman's breakthrough was so dramatic that she ended up taking over the role of Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls when the dailies showed that Vera Zorina wasn't performing up to snuff, and she made a hit of that movie too. She became the nation's biggest female box-office attraction, able, ultimately, to weather huge personal scandals and dubious career choices. Bergman was that rare thing, a bona fide movie star and beauty who could really act. And her break-through film, Casablanca, was a rare thing, too--a classic that lives up to its own gigantic reputation.

Keanu Reeves in SPEED

Whoever Keanu Reeves may be when he's not before the cameras, he spends less time being that creature than most actors spend being whoever they are. It's long been blood sport among critics to dis Reeves for his acting. But he has done, for better or worse, what he set out to do from the first moment he set foot in Hollywood: work. Reeves launched himself with five TV movies in 1986, and he's kept up a pace none of his peers can match. The quantity has been matched by variety: In 1989 he followed up his role as Uma Thurman's paramour in the period film Dangerous Liaisons with his delirious turn as late 20th Century Ted in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. We rest our case. The quantity and variety of Reeves's work have been matched by the sheer nerve of some of it: if critics were lambasting you for such fundamental acting sins as woodenness, would you tackle Hamlet on stage?

By the time Reeves happened on his breakthrough, he'd been in town for nine years, had made many movies of all kinds, had worked with every sort of director (e.g., Coppola, Van Sant, Frears, Bertolucci, Howard), and had built such a large audience that many people probably thought he'd already broken through. But the truth is that before Speed, millions of people who knew who Keanu Reeves was were still pronouncing his name "Keenoo"; after Speed, we all knew at least one word of Hawaiian.

Unlike most breakthroughs, which reveal a core element of a star's persona and connect it with a core element of the public's desire, Speed didn't present any core of Keanu or do the siren-song thing on audiences, either. It was a matter of Reeves pushing the physical aspects of his performance--something he's very good at-- to the exact pitch the material required, and then not acting too much. The movie is, after all, called Speed, not Leaving Las Vegas. Reeves knew he had a well-engineered, clever script. And though he couldn't have known he had a good director in first-timer Jan De Bont, he just put his faith in the project, did his job--and bingo. Johnny Mnemonic and Feeling Minnesota are proof that Keanu Reeves will keep doing exactly what he did before his breakthrough--choosing projects with a logic not available to someone who is not Keanu, then immersing himself in those projects with the dedication, if not the resources, of Robert De Niro. But every Keanu Reeves movie will now have a spotlight on it, and when a remotely Speed-like Reeves film turns up, the opening weekend will go berserk.

Gene Tierney in LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN

With her valentine-shaped face, the faintly Asian cast of her features, the mesmerizing gaze of the Wedgwood-hued eyes, the sexy overbite, and those astonishing cheekbones. Gene Tierney ranks high among the screen's all-time visual wonders. She had a look that could not be missed, and 20th Century Fox snapped her up for a long-term contract and cast her as exotic in Belle Starr, Tobacco Road and China Girl.

The movie that "got" her ravishing, somnambulistic allure was Laura, and that, following on her turn as the steadfast wife of a restless Don Juan in Heaven Can Wait, put her on a roll. But the performance that for the first time knocked out not just ticket-buyers, but critics as well, was her turn as the dementedly manipulative, possessive and deeply strange wife of Cornel Wilde in Leave Her to Heaven. It's one of the memorable bad-girl breakthroughs in Hollywood history.

Tierney nails every one of the flat-out stunning scenes she's handed in this lurid, noir-tinged Technicolor poison. Whether she's hurling her dead father's ashes to the four winds, throwing herself down a stairwell to deliberately miscarry her unborn baby, or impassively sitting in a rowboat as her husband's brother drowns (or just plain staring at Cornel Wilde), Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven is a creepy, shockingly beautiful stalker, far more plausible and frightening than Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.

Leave Her to Heaven became one of Fox's biggest Technicolor hits of the '40s, and Tierney's performance won the film one of its four Oscar nominations. It was a full-fledged breakthrough that opened the door for serious dramatic roles. No longer considered merely decorative, Tierney was cast as the aristocratic odalisque in The Razor's Edge, the lonely widow befriended by a long-dead sea captain in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and the rich kleptomaniac in Whirlpool. Sadly enough, her story is proof that breakthroughs solve only certain kinds of problems. She suffered mental illness and was institutionalized; she gave birth to a retarded child; and she had a disastrous romantic life. All of which slowed her momentum and altered her looks. But watch her in the train sequence of Leave Her to Heaven just staring and staring at Cornel Wilde. Madness has seldom looked so breathtaking.

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