The Goddess (1958)

 

The Goddess traces the life of Emily Ann Faulkner, a poor young woman from Maryland who becomes Rita Shawn, a Hollywood movie star famed for her sex appeal. It’s told in three main sections, following her life chronologically from 1930 to 1957. Emily Ann (played by the acclaimed stage and television actor Kim Stanley in one of her rare film roles) first appears as an unloved, unwanted child whose mother tried to dump her on relatives. As a young woman, she’s flirtatious and talkative, and she dreams of being a movie star. She marries and then leaves her first husband, and she abandons her daughter, saying that she didn’t want to have her, another generation replicating bad parenting behavior. After Emily Ann becomes a movie star and becomes Rita, she marries a retired boxer named Dutch Seymour (played by Lloyd Bridges, who looks pretty good in just the bottom half of his pajamas, to be honest), but their marriage is unhappy. He always thinks she’s cheating on him, and she always seems to be looking around for someone else better. The middle section of the film is tough to watch as the marriage dissolves, but the final act of the movie is truly quite painful. Emily Ann/Rita has had a nervous breakdown on a film, and her mother has arrived to help take care of her. When her mother, now a devout (almost fanatical?) Seventh Day Adventist, plans to leave, Rita first begs her to stay and then yells at her mother when she decides to go anyway. The film’s ending, set around her mother’s funeral, finds Emily Ann/Rita hysterical at the gravesite and almost suicidal. The screenplay, written by one of the most talented screenwriters of all time, Paddy Chayefsky, builds in intensity. Allegedly, it was based loosely upon the life of Marilyn Monroe, but only broad strokes of her life could connect to the film’s events. It seems more like it might have been inspired by some of the key moments of Monroe’s life rather than an attempt to be a faithful biography. Regardless of how closely it hews to the life of anyone “real,” The Goddess is most useful as one of the few film documents of the talents of Kim Stanley, a remarkably talented actor who only appeared in five films. She was not nominated for Best Actress for this role—she was nominated just a couple of times for Oscars throughout her career—and as a result, few filmgoers may be familiar with her talents, perhaps only knowing her as the off-screen narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Oscar Nomination: Best Story and Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen