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.

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?

Susan Hayward, Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman

as ANGELICA "ANGIE" EVANS CONWAY

The Los Angeles Daily News called Susan Hayward's Oscar nomination for Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman "the most spontaneous nomination of the lot." That makes complete sense, given that the film comes off as extremely creaky and cheap. The B-movie quality of it all certainly doesn't help in Hayward's favor, though it's fairly obvious that she gives the part her all.