Eleanor Parker

Shoot the Works

Eleanor Parker’s Baroness Schraeder in The Sound of Music (1965) seems like a villain even though she is actually a fairly decent person, and that is partly because a blonde Parker plays her in her breathiest, most artificial style. The classy Baroness is a Joan Fontaine sort of part, and if Joan Fontaine had played her we would probably feel more sympathy for her as she loses out romantically against Julie Andrews’s fresh-scrubbed nun, but several of Parker’s most notable roles prior to The Sound of Music had been as women who were made bitter or who had been revealed as vividly bitter and hateful, and that colors a lot of what she does on screen. Parker was very beautiful and usually red-headed, and she could have just coasted on her looks, but she was a leading lady who always seemed to want to be a Mercedes McCambridge or an Eileen Heckart.

Parker spent ten years at Warner Brothers in the 1940s as an ingenue, taking what she could get and turning down what she felt was unsuitable. Her big break seemed to come when she was cast as Mildred in a remake of Of Human Bondage (1946), a role that had made a star of Bette Davis in 1934, but that movie had problems and didn’t work out for her. Somewhat fed up, Parker retired for a bit to have a child, and when she came back it was for the talent showcase of Caged (1950), a camp classic about women in prison where part of the fun of her performance is how obvious her character’s arc is from frightened young innocent to hardened criminal.

Parker got an Oscar nomination for Caged, and she got a second nomination the following year for Detective Story (1951), where director William Wyler harnesses the intensity of both Kirk Douglas and Parker for deeply felt scenes where Douglas’s cop character reacts badly to his finding out that his wife once had an abortion. Wyler was famous for making his actors do many takes, which had the effect of paring down their performing mannerisms and getting at something of their essence, and this had worked for Bette Davis in several Wyler movies just as well as it works for Parker in Detective Story. She is not on screen much in this film, but every moment counts, and every one is impressive. The arc of this character is similar to the arc Parker played in Caged, from innocence and panic to hardening of the heart, but in Caged this process was so underlined that it was clearly acting and attention-getting whereas in Detective Story it seems to be happening for real. Wyler keeps Parker’s nervous vitality on a low flame throughout and strips away her instinct to hyperbolize everything.

A name now, Parker signed with MGM but got put into several unexceptional movies with Robert Taylor before getting another showcase part as Australian opera singer Marjorie Lawrence in Interrupted Melody (1955), for which she received her third Oscar nomination. This plum role came to Parker only because MGM had lost most of its contract stars by 1955, and she seems determined to make an impression in it, so much so that she chooses to play in a style that is so physically over the top that it nearly feels deliberately absurd.

Parker learned the many arias she would be lip-synching to as Lawrence (Eileen Farrell dubbed her singing) and reportedly sang them full out on the set. She opens her mouth so wide to sing that it looks like she is screaming, not so much chewing the scenery as inhaling it whole, and Parker sometimes bends her back to such an extent here to get a high note out that it looks crazy; even the camera seems stunned by her antics in this picture and keeps her in long shot as the uninhibitedly exaggerated mannerisms of her overacting regularly rise and fall like enormous waves at the beach.

In the second half of Interrupted Melody, Lawrence is stricken with polio and loses the use of her legs, and so Parker goes the Susan Hayward route of strenuous suffering, which is capped by a very campy montage of Lawrence entertaining troops in her wheelchair and then a final triumph back at the Met in Tristan and Isolde where she manages to pull herself across the stage at the very end.

For sheer outrageousness, nothing can top Parker in Interrupted Melody, and she chewed even more scenery in a wheelchair that same year as the awful wife in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), a would-be realist movie where Parker’s overplaying does not land her safely in the realm of camp and looks abhorrent by contrast to the restrained work of Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak. The part she is playing is a very bad part that no one could have redeemed, but Parker’s excessive hyperventilating makes it far harder to take than it should be.

She sank her teeth into a split-personality role in Lizzie (1957), a Hugo Haas potboiler where Parker shamelessly transforms from a mousy museum worker into a hard-boiled temptress with the aid of heavy make-up. If Parker’s career has a theme, it’s how drastically different one person can be or become at different times and under different circumstances, and this is made into a false psychoanalytic category in Lizzie, which features a breakdown scene in front of a three-way mirror that must be seen by any connoisseur of overripe acting. Joan Blondell’s competitive and very funny performance in Lizzie as her drunken aunt can be counted as a sizable bonus in this same vein.

Parker settled down then for a few movies where she is relatively restrained like Vincente Minnelli’s Home from the Hill (1960), in which she uses the low notes in her voice and a slight southern accent as a high-toned and embittered wife to Robert Mitchum who describes herself as “a good hater.” Once Parker turned 40, she started moving into TV work before getting the role of the Baroness, and she followed that up with two of her most flamboyantly colorful performances: as lovelorn talent agent Sophie Cantaro in The Oscar (1966), one of the most enjoyable bad movies of all time, and the deliriously hateful, stoned wife killed off at the beginning of An American Dream (1966), an adaptation of Norman Mailer’s novel in which Parker moves so far out into overplaying that she finally seems to be speaking in tongues. No one ever sliced the ham thicker than Parker.

There was one more memorably campy part in a feature for her after that, the rich aunt in a wheelchair in Eye of the Cat (1969), which has a hilariously “suspenseful” scene where she is caught in her chair on an incline street that wouldn’t be out of place in a Mel Brooks comedy. In both The Oscar and Eye of the Cat she is referred to as an “old lady” even though she was just in her forties, and so after that Parker took what she could get on television.

She had one more camp turn up her caftan as the dipsomaniacal fashion designer Regine Danton in the TV movie She’s Dressed to Kill (1979), in which Parker’s voice has lowered to a Tallulah Bankhead growl, and she turned up as a phony actress on an episode of Murder, She Wrote in 1986 before retiring after a TV movie called Dead on the Money (1991) in which she was unflatteringly photographed and coiffed but still managed to look very beautiful. She was married four times and had four children, and this makes sense because with Parker on screen more is always more, and there might even be more where that came from.