Susan Hayward, My Foolish Heart

as ELOISE WINTERS

By now it's been a few weeks since I first watched My Foolish Heart, and for some odd reason I've really struggled trying to find the words to describe my feelings towards it. I elected to watch it first amongst 1949's batch of Best Actress contenders because I didn't think I'd like it and wanted to get it over with. My suspicion proved to be correct -- twas a severely dull film, an exercise to maintain engagement. So why then, has it been so tough to summarize how I felt about it?

I suppose the short answer is: there's nothing to summarize. Both My Foolish Heart and Susan Hayward are so incredibly dull and forgetful that it bears little else to be said. The storyline, a Hollywoodized handling of J.D. Salinger's Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, is insanely conventional as it is uninspired, its points of drama too antiquated and contrived to bear any sort of impact on me. (Perhaps the issue here is that, even looking at a synopsis of Salinger's Uncle Wiggily, this is a story that's more meant for the stage than it is the cinema.)

In the film's opening scenes, we see a drunk, bitter Eloise, which brings to mind a watered down version of the Hayward's Angie Conway. Shortly after, as the film focuses on a college-aged Eloise, we're witness to a 31 year old Hayward play giddy and girly. And then, perhaps most crucially, we watch as Eloise falls for Dana Andrews' Walt; however, the chemistry between the two is lacking, and Mark Robson's direction of the film does little to stimulate the trajectory of this relationship. So essentially what we have is an hour and a half of Hayward playing along to a script that, at its seams, just doesn't really work. Hayward and the film aren't "horrible" -- but just supremely bland and middle-of-the-road. She has a heavy dramatic moment or two in the film's last act that are above average, but compare this to Smash-Up and you'll notice a stifled actress with much less fire to share. The fact of the matter is: there's too much mediocrity here, far too much for the performance to be anywhere near a "Best" shortlist.