Country Girl

An Oscar for a Future Princess
The year 1955 proved a memorable one for Grace Kelly in a number of respects, two of which involved winning an Oscar and meeting a prince who would ask her to marry him and share a kingdom with him. It sounds like the grist for a romance novel, but it all actually happened in the kingdom of Hollywood cinema.

It was the glamorous Grace Kelly that Prince Rainier of Monaco would meet on the French Riviera when she was playing a rich heiress in Alfred Hitchcock's "To Catch a Thief". The irony is that in her other film that was released that same year, "The Country Girl", she won a Best Actress Academy Award by playing the only role of her short but illustrious career that was decidedly against type.

Whereas Kelly, the Philadelphia girl who became a glamorous fashion model in New York, played her natural image in every respect in two Hitchcock classics, "Rear Window" and "To Catch a Thief", she was challenged in the film in between by director George Seaton, who...

An excellent film
"The Country Girl" is certainly a superior drama, one that has everything necessary to make a classic film: excellent performances, directing, script, etc. The film tells the story of an alcoholic has-been actor (Bing Crosby) who is given a chance to star in a new show by a no-nonsense director (William Holden). The actor's dowdy wife (Grace Kelly) is bitter and hard towards her husband, but has suffered and continues to suffer with his drinking after years of marriage. Soon it appears that the wife is dragging the husband down, and the director must force her to leave... when only she can stand her husband up again.

The film makes for a taut, intense drama, with a superb Oscar-winning screenplay. Crosby was nominated for an Oscar (one which I honestly feel he deserved, for his unsettling, sobering portrayal of the has-been actor). Crosby is brilliant in his role, battling the demons of his past, having a drunken fit of violence, or even lying cunningly- Crosby runs the...

BETTER THAN AVERAGE TRANSFER FOR THIS COUNTRY GAL
"The Country Girl" is one of the finest films in Paramount's illustrious catalogue of library titles; a poignantly tragic love story with a show biz background, it stars Bing Crosby in a decided departure from his usual light-hearted form. Crosby is Frank Elgin, a one time musical comedy legend now barely holding it together between drinks and his guilt-ridden angst over a dark secret. Georgie (Grace Kelly) is Frank's emotionally prostrated wife and the only ray of hope in his life. Bernie Dodd (William Holden, is the parasitic director of a new Broadway play that affords Frank his last chance at the big time. Believing that Georgie is the cause of Frank's loneliness Bernie deliberately keeps her at bay, the net result; a burgeoning and not so unlikely romance brewing between the two.

Though outstanding in the pivotal role of Georgie, Grace Kelly's lacks what Judy Garland gave Esther Bloggett in 1954's A Star is Born or Gloria Swanson's maniacal rampages in Sunset Blvd. -...

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