Claudette Colbert, Since You Went Away

as ANNE HILTON

As a viewer who adored Claudette Colbert's pre-code turns in the likes of It Happened One Night and Honor Among Lovers, and as one who has always felt Colbert to have a fluid, interesting sexiness in her on-screen persona (even when she's stuck in ho-hum pictures like Private Worlds) imagine how taken aback I was to watch her play such a tame, stifled and boring housewife in Since You Went Away. Point blank: Since You Went Away is one immobilizing picture, clocking in at three(!!!) long hours in which a lot is said yet nothing really happens. Colbert is pretty much the strongest performer in this movie, but her strengths can't balance out such banal material.

Claudette Colbert, Private Worlds

as DR. JANE EVEREST

The reigning Best Actress of Hollywood came back again in 1935, this time with a more serious and weighty picture. I had a raging suspicion prior to my viewing that I wouldn't like Private Worlds. I was right. Hollywood filmmaking was awfully cheesy during this time, and about to get cheesier now that the Production Code was now strictly in place. Thus, if a film of this era were to tackle a heavy social issue, you know that it'll end up a little ridiculous. And Private Worlds is just that--it's a sugar-coated and idealized treatment of mental illness which tries so hard to cram "the mentally ill--they're people too!" message down our throats early on, only to throw all of that out the window in the second half to instead focus on terribly written and forced melodramatic story lines. At the heart of this picture is Claudette Colbert, whom I can only assume managed to get this particular nomination because there was still residual heat left from her recent Oscar-win, and perhaps the industry was still overly besotted by her because of it (sound like anybody we know from this year?).

Claudette Colbert, It Happened One Night

as ELLIE ANDREWS

Won: Academy Award - Best Actress

Claudette Colbert really didn't want to make It Happened One Night. The first picture she had ever made was directed by Frank Capra and it ended up being a complete failure. She had initially rejected the role of Ellie Andrews, but when Capra was told by Columbia head Harry Cohn that the "French broad likes money," Capra went to Colbert with the promises of doubling her salary and getting it all filmed within a month so that she could haul her ass off for a vacation. She agreed. She was allegedly difficult to deal with throughout the entire shoot. She told her friends right after production ended that she'd "just finished making the worst picture" she'd ever made. Colbert's relationship with It Happened One Night is almost as entertaining as the picture itself, but I'll be damned if you could clock any of that off-set bitterness in her performance. Because the woman is nothing less than an utter delight in the film, and despite everyone being so enraptured by Bette Davis' work and snub that year, it was really all about Claudette Colbert the entire time.