New Picture

The Goddess (Carnegie Productions; Columbia), as Playwright Paddy Chayefsky has incautiously informed the public, is an attempt to create "a major work of art." For the attempt, Playwright Chayefsky wrote his own script, formed his own production company, gave the big part to Kim Stanley, a Hollywood newcomer who has made a name on Broadway (Bus Stop), shot most of the picture in New York and Maryland. Total cost: $740,000. Needless to say, the film is not the promised masterpiece. Chayefsky at his best is a significant moralist of manners, a considerable poet of appearances, but he does not see much more than meets the average shrewd eye. Nevertheless, what he sees he sees clearly, and in The Goddess he has sketched a ferocious caricature of the American Way of Life.

The Goddess of the title, Playwright Chayefsky protests, is no particular movie queen. The Goddess is really William James's Bitch Goddess: Success. And the heroine, Chayefsky declares, "represents an entire generation that came through the Depression with nothing left but a hope for comfort and security. Their tragedy lies in that they never learned to love, either their fellow humans or whatever god they have."

Love was never a part of the life of Emily Ann Faulkner (Kim Stanley). Her father killed himself when she was four, and a few weeks later she heard her mother (Betty Lou Holland) begging some relatives to take the kid. "I don't want her!" she screamed. "I still got my figure. I want to have a little fun."

So she had her fun, and then she had her religion, but she never had time for little Emily Ann. Nobody paid attention to the kid until she turned 16, and then suddenly every man and boy in Beacon City, Md. was gaping at her, and some of the boys were doing more than that. Emily Ann hated them and hated herself for letting them, but she was just a counter girl in the five and ten, and they came from some of the best families in town. Afterward, though, she thought, "I'd just as soon be dead, and that's the truth." She kept herself alive by dreaming of Hollywood and how it would be when she was a famous movie star.

One day Hollywood came walking down the main drag of Beacon City--and fell down drunk in the gutter. John Tower (Steve Hill) was just the bright brat of a Hollywood star, but to Emily Ann he was the chance of a luckless lifetime, and she took the chance. She got him to a hotel; she persuaded him to marry her. Months later he was off to the wars, and Emily Ann had a baby. "I don't want her!" she screamed. "I got a good figure. I want to have some fun."

So she left the baby with her mother, went to Hollywood, changed her name to Rita Shawn, got a divorce, married the first big fish (Lloyd Bridges) who took the bait. He was an ex-light-heavyweight champion. All he ever did was sit around and watch television while she filed her nails. Pretty soon they started quarreling because they had nothing else to do, and when they got tired of that they called the lawyer. But Emily Ann saved her pride. "I've never cheated on you once, Dutch." she told him. "Not in eleven months of marriage."

Then she clicked. The public liked her in a small part. The producer decided she had something: "A quality of availability." The executive producer asked her for a date. She: "Shall I dress?" He: "What's it matter?"

And so a star is born. Before long, she has everything--$4,000 a week, a villa with retractable ceilings over the indoor pool, a nervous breakdown. She tries religion for a while, decides she likes whisky better. After that, she just stumbles along from drink to drink, sedative to sedative, picture to picture. "Life really is a fraud, isn't it?" she sighs one day through the barbiturate haze to the "companion" who is now in constant attendance. "I'm 31 years old, and I look back on it, and all I can think of to say is--so what."

So much, says Chayefsky, for Success. If he means to imply (and evidently he does) that Success is all there is to the American Way of Life, then he had better send telegrams to several million moviegoers, because otherwise they are not going to get the message. But there are compensations. In scene after scene, thanks perhaps principally to Director John Cromwell, the audience looks into the screen as through a window into life. And Cromwell deserves much credit for the acting. As the mother, Betty Lou Holland is painfully good. And Actress Stanley triumphs over heavy odds. She is a full-bodied woman who shows every one of her 33 years, and never for an instant looks anything like a 16-year-old girl or a sensuous cinemama; but her playing is so intense that the sense of her physical presence seems to dissolve in the shimmer of creation, and the spectator again and again forgets to believe his eyes.

Chayefsky is of course the prime mover in the whole work. His satire is sometimes crude, but it has bigness and generous anger, and his too physical sense of reality is a limitation that helps to concentrate his force and sharpen his impact. At his best he has an earthy weight and vigor that suggest a more amenable Von Stroheim, a pocket Zola.

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