{"id":1897,"date":"2013-04-29T16:02:59","date_gmt":"2013-04-29T20:02:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/?p=1897"},"modified":"2013-10-21T10:57:09","modified_gmt":"2013-10-21T14:57:09","slug":"the-heiress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/?p=1897","title":{"rendered":"‘The Heiress’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Original<\/a>

Original poster. A truly pretty good motion picture and an awful poster.<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

When Jane Greer was cast as the femme fatale<\/em> in “Out of the Past,” director Jacques Tourneur explained what he wanted from her: “First half of film, good girl; second half of film, bad girl. No big eyes!” \u00a0In “The Heiress” (Paramount, 1949), Olivia de Havilland pulls essentially the same trick, though she uses big eyes from first to last. \u00a0For two thirds of the picture, she plays Catherine Sloper as a ninny, almost a mental defective; she pitches her voice up high and speaks her dialogue like a child reciting “The boy stood on the burning deck.” \u00a0Then she gets her heart broken good and hard, whereupon her voice drops an octave and she is instantaneously transformed into a shrewd, cynical, hard-bitten spinster with steel in her spine and ice water in her veins. \u00a0She won the Academy Award for her performance. \u00a0Taken as a whole, what she does is little more than a parlor trick, but there are individual scenes that she plays beautifully.<\/p>\n

\"Olivia<\/a>

Olivia de Havilland, Montgomery Clift<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

Catherine is an unattractive, painfully shy young woman who lives at 16 Washington Square with her imposing father, Dr Austin Sloper (Ralph Richardson) and his recently widowed sister Lavinia (Miriam Hopkins). \u00a0Catherine’s late mother was a great beauty; Dr Sloper cannot conceal his shame and irritation that their child has grown up to be so untalented, awkward and brainless.<\/p>\n