Word: shrike
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...loyal, adoring girlfriend or wife in such films as Two Girls and a Sailor, with Van Johnson, and The Glenn Miller Story, opposite Jimmy Stewart; in Ojai, Calif. Allyson was upbeat about her Hollywood reputation, but it doomed her efforts to take on grittier roles. The Shrike (1955), in which she played a harsh wife who drives her husband mad, was a flop. But she claimed she couldn't live up to the hype. "In real life," she joked, "I'm a poor dressmaker and a terrible cook." More recently, Allyson became known to younger viewers as the spokeswoman...
...loyal, adoring girlfriend or wife in such films as Two Girls and a Sailor, with Van Johnson, and The Glenn Miller Story, opposite Jimmy Stewart; in Ojai, California. Allyson was upbeat about her Hollywood reputation, but it doomed her efforts to take on grittier roles-1955's The Shrike, in which she played a harsh wife who drives her husband to a nervous breakdown, was a flop. She once claimed she couldn't live up to her image. "In real life," she joked, "I'm a poor dressmaker and a terrible cook...
...That was one of the few times when Allyson's prim allure as a movie wife was questioned. (The Shrike, 10 years later, was the other big critique.) Mostly, her job was to talk sense into her men. Football star Peter Lawford, say, in Good News - she wanted him to hit the books so he'd be eligible to win the big game. Her only severe competition came not from the script but on the screen. Her sweetness might get upstaged by a flashier femme, as she was by Joan McCracken in Good News. Sometimes Allyson lost to a rival...
...meatiest role, and the meat was deliciously rancid, was opposite Jose Ferrer in The Shrike, where she's the harridan who nearly drives her husband to suicide. Her performance was both stark and nicely judged - "good (and nasty)," Thomson says, approvingly - but it didn't vault Allyson into the realm of Serious Actress. It didn't set her on a new, thornier path, paving the way for her to play roles suitable for the decades to come, when the Wife role would be replaced by the Woman With a Past. Casting directors thought only of Allyson's past...
...wrote a famous text on swordplay (A Book of Five Rings) and reputedly killed 60 swordsmen before his 30th birthday; he then gave up killing in favor of painting and calligraphy. One of his ink paintings is in the show, a swiftly brushed image of a shrike balanced on a branch above a caterpillar that is crawling upward, presumably to its doom. It is a graphic masterpiece. You feel the tension in the body of the bird as it balances before striking, and every flick of the brush bespeaks alertness...