Susan Hayward, With a Song in My Heart

To watch With a Song in My Heart is to be fed a two-hour tale of an impossibly saintlike (and horribly basic, if you ask me) individual. This ought not come as a surprise to me or you by now, as biopics, especially those of the classical Hollywood variety, are often semi-fictionalized and scrubbed of its subjects' imperfections, revealing little to us about said subjects aside from the fact that they may have had to endure something traumatic once, and/or they may have been faced with a difficult decision they had to make. Jane Froman herself had a heavy hand in the production of With a Song in My Heart, perhaps an acting influence on the film's insignificant narrative weight.

That said, it isn't Susan Hayward's fault that her character is quite dull. I'd go as far as to say that I think Hayward does her very best to elevate the subject matter given to her, and she succeeds at doing so. This is due to her seemingly innate gift of channeling genuine warmth, both in the way she carries the Jane Froman character and in the way she communicates to the characters around her. Jane is portrayed as an exceedingly amiable character in this film -- which I imagine can be emulated by many an actress -- and complementing this is Hayward's ability to play up warmth and kindness. When expressly leveraged, it is forceful and potent on screen. One moment that comes to mind is when Froman is reunited with a now shell-shocked soldier, whom she had previously met and sung a rousing number to before he went off to war. He makes the request that she sing "I'll Walk Alone," to which Hayward nods and says, "I love that song, it's one of my favorites." The moment is brief, easily overlooked given With a Song in My Heart's aggressive cadence of back-to-back musical numbers, but Hayward's verbal delivery is rich with authenticity, a nice foil to the picture's hokey tendencies.

Profound moments like these are so few and far between in the film, which struggles to communicate anything interesting about Froman until nearly an hour in, once the plane crash hits and its ensuing drama unfolds. Up until that point, Hayward is essentially reduced to being a composite sketch of what might be considered a man's "ideal woman," that being one who is always smiling, always positive, always gracious and perhaps a smidge naive. There's an awkward scene around this time when the character of Don Ross, gunning to marry Froman, asks if she'd mind if he fixes himself a drink. She auto-replies, "of course not, I'll fix it for you," proceeding to do so, before very reluctantly accepting his proposal of marriage minutes later, even asking "do you really want me to do that?" when he suggests they get hitched at City Hall. And even as Don gets increasingly volatile as her star rises, Froman is incredibly understanding and courteous during their rows.

Was Froman truly this pleasant in real life? That I can't confirm. But given that the film omits the fact that she struggled with a stutter all throughout her adult life, and that she became addicted (and eventually overcame her addiction) to painkillers and alcohol after the crash, I've a hunch that the highly agreeable yet Stepford-Wifey Froman we see on screen was a stylistic decision made by the singer and/or the powers that be at 20th Century Fox.

If this is the case, I wonder how much more compelling the material would have been had it not been so "clean." As mentioned, Hayward does a solid enough job with what she's given, though more often than not she's a tediously prim and proper lady, one with an inability to develop an opinion of her own. The one time she does do so, in a nicely acted scene in which she bitterly tells her nurse sidekick (played by an also okay Thelma Ritter) that she wishes her leg were amputated so that she can rid herself of the endless surgical cycles she's endured, she is promptly reprimanded by Ritter for not "having what it takes" to remain positive (because damn it, her beautiful face and voice ought to be enough to keep the hope alive!)

While it's unfortunate that Hayward is largely limited in breadth of characterization, the film makes up for this by providing her with a shit ton of screen time to perform ultra-glam musical numbers. I don't say "shit ton" to demean the value of these numbers -- Hayward has a very comfortable, controlled stage presence whenever she's performing -- but the film could have cut about five and it'd have stood up just the same. After the umpteenth performance, the prospect of yet another Jane Froman number begins to grow stale, such that the only surprising element is that brief wardrobe malfunction (see: nip slip) Hayward suffers in the film's eponymous number. Blink and you miss it, the malfunction was removed from some of the existing prints of the film; it's the single unrefined moment of a picture that tries much too hard to demonstrate perfection, and it's just about the only unexpected moment the film and performance has to offer.