*Many of these are part of a Shelley Winters tribute.
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**The Naked Spur **(1953)
My review from The Scarecrow Video Movie Guide *The Naked Spur *is a Western in setting and in context–the verdant, rolling landscape of Colorado gives a performance that almost overshadows the work of the human actors—but not in spirit. It’s Greek drama; it’s Shakespeare. It’s a tale of backstabbing greed, with a Maguffin that just won’t shut the hell up (Robert Ryan, as Ben Vandergroat, a bad guy worth $5,000 dead or alive). James Stewart is Howard Kemp, the Tortured Man with a Past, who needs that money to buy back his old ranch and stanch (he thinks) an old wound. Kemp meets up with a failed prospector (Millard Mitchell) and a shady soldier (Ralph Meeker, at his snaky, silky best), who help him capture Vandergroat, along with his hellcat travel companion and frontier masseuse (Janet Leigh). What follows is a peripatetic chess game of manipulation and deceit, with Vandergroat, the rope-bound frontier Iago (placed atop a burro with the other provisions, lest we forget that he’s just a package to be redeemed for cash) making the most trouble without a weapon, but with a sly wink and and a mean whisper. The Naked Spur is one of the great “anti-Westerns.” None of these people is innocent, and the inevitable redemption is hard won and well earned. Directed by Anthony Mann.
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The Young Savages* (1961)John Frankenheimer directed Burt Lancaster and Shelley Winters in a gritty urban drama about a savage group of juvenile delinquents.
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Lolita* (1962)One of Winters’s most memorable performances, as the naïve widow who thinks she’s a woman of the world. Winters is fearless, and gives the brash, embarrassing Mrs. Haze a sympathetic depth that earns the audience’s pity. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, with a bravura performance by Peter Sellers.
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Winchester '73* (1950)Another truly great Western. The first of eight classic collaborations between Jimmy Stewart and director Anthony Mann. Stewart broke his everyman mold to portray a man bent on vengeance, a theme he and Mann would visit again and again. Shelley Winters plays, get this, a “dance hall girl” with a heart of gold.
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**A Patch of Blue **(1965)Shelley Winters walked away with this movie (and an Oscar) for playing the unsympathetic mother of a blind white girl who falls in love with (oops) Sidney Poitier. Wonderful performance from Winters; otherwise a dry polemic.
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A Place in the Sun* (1951)For many people, the essential Shelley Winters performance. She plays a middle class frump to Elizabeth Taylor’s uppercrust debutante, both vying for Montgomery Clift’s gorgeous heart. Guess who wins? More importantly, guess who loses? Based on Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.
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**The Night of the Hunter **(1955)My personal favorite Shelley Winters Movie. Once again she’s a widowed mother whose choice of a new husband proves fatal to her and dangerous to her children. The shot of her final demise si among the most hauntingly beautiful images ever captured on film. A tragically overlooked masterpiece, the only movie directed by Charles Laughton. In my personal top ten.
*Many of these are part of a Shelley Winters tribute.