Almost There: Joanne Woodward in "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds"
Tuesday, June 15, 2021 at 11:00AM 
In anticipation of the upcoming 74th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, the next few weeks of the Almost There series will be dedicated to performances that won big at the Croisette and went on to some Oscar buzz. That being said, the first entry in this quasi-miniseries didn't convert Cannes plaudits into industry awards attention. The opposite happened. After opening commercially in the USA at the end of 1972, Paul Newman's third directorial effort, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, got slotted into the main competition of the following year's Cannes Film Festival. By the time Joanne Woodward won the festivities' Best Actress prize, her new Oscar dreams were already busted…
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Paul Zindel, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds tells the story of a dysfunctional household in 1970s America. Beatrice Hunsdorfer is a middle-aged widow struggling to raise her adolescent daughters while indulging in fruitless dreams of one day owning a fancy tea room where she might sell cheesecake. But, as the hilarious tag line of the movie indicates, life's been a real bitch to Beatrice and vice-versa. Her belligerent and curiously needy personality makes her into something of an overbearing presence in her daughter's complicated lives. The oldest, hormonal Ruth, seems destined to grow up into another version of Beatrice, but introverted Matilda is something else entirely.
Focused on her pets and school projects, the Hunsdorfer's youngest girl floats through life in a cloud of youthful melancholia. While they don't fight like many an antagonistic mother-daughter pair in film history, the relationship between Beatrice and Matilda proves to be the film's most complicated dynamic, the aching heart at the center of a messed-up organism. It was Woodward's own daughter with Paul Newman, Nell Potts, who took on the role of Matilda, playing the girl as a resilient flower suffering and mutating through the radioactivity of her family environment. It's incredible how Potts' fragile downplayed characterization can coexist with Woodward's harridan explosiveness. Their characters' conflict is thus woven into the very fabric of the picture's cinematic reality, in their essentially complementing acting incompatibility.
The way Beatrice lends her belligerent support to Ruth on the occasion of the girl's nightmares and epileptic fits is strangely heartbreaking compared to how she handles Matilda. There's nothing outwardly wrong with her behavior in these scenes, but one senses a patina of nastiness about them, like grease and tobacco smoke over the celluloid. The mother can recognize herself in one daughter, forging shaky complicity while rejecting the other she cannot understand. Something as innocuous as a bad joke can reverberate through the household in fractious ways. When her awful homophobic humor doesn't get a laugh from the youngest daughter, Woodward plays notes of scary irritation in the matriarch's petulant reaction.
She's constantly defensive, walking into every conversation as if expecting it to break out into a fight, even when the person she's talking to is her little girl. One often feels that Beatrice would be more comfortable accepting our disgust than our pity, and Woodward plays to the audience accordingly. Her every gesture soaked in defiance. Other filmmakers might have downplayed the venom of Beatrice or refused to find humor in her eccentricity – painting her as a unidimensional funny weirdo/pathetic monster. However, Newman and Woodward chose the tricky approach of presenting Beatrice as both extremes, daring the audience to look away, to reduce this chaotic personality to any simple thing. It makes for a challenging viewing experience, though not an unrewarding one.
Take, for instance, the scenes in the aftermath of Ruth's public parody of her mother. Beatrice is such a living caricature that it doesn't take much exaggeration for the kid to come up with an uproarious impersonation. Regardless, the mother's reaction couldn't be more heartbreaking. There's genuine hurt in Woodward's questioning of her daughter after the disrespectful lark. One would expect shouty aggression at this point, but there's something more potent in the cocktail of cold fury and choleric sorrow Woodward comes up with. Later, as she shares high school memories and middle-aged remorse with a former schoolmate, we again see Beatrice subsumed by disappointment at herself and her bad luck. Expressive body language further betrays a searing need for comfort, for someone's reassurance, maybe a simple hug.
Like in the scene with Beatrice's eldest child, the actress surprises by choosing a path of introspection and demonstrative brokenness, contradicting what the viewer has grown accustomed to with the character. The entire performance lives in these rug-pulls and brilliantly mercurial inconsistencies. They make the anti-heroine more human and more emotionally dangerous from her vulnerable daughters' point of view. Joanne Woodward's acting in this role can be very broad, but such precise aspects of tonal variation keep the thunderous work from becoming too one-note. That's never more apparent than in the build-up to the ending and its bruising climax. The matriarch's insecurities spill forth when she discovers she'll need to be on stage during Matilda's science fair presentation.
The fear she'll be laughed at, humiliated, is so tangible it's like Woodward has summoned heretofore hidden demons of her character's past, materializing them before us with a terrifying visceral quality. Something cracks inside her, and it's only a matter of time before Beatrice completely shatters. When she does so, it's an ugly spectacle, far greater than any casual indignity Beatrice might have anticipated. Boozed-up and festering inside a pool of fermented self-hatred, her only consolation is the pride for Matilda's success. Bellowing an obsessively rehearsed line with manic zeal, Woodward's Beatrice appears in the picture's climactic moments as someone imploding into themselves. She repeats her words, maybe trying to impress her maternal warmth unto others, perchance trying to convince her daughters or herself that there's tender love within in this mother's broken heart.
As previously stated, Joanne Woodward won the Cannes prize after the 1972/3 American movie awards season had drawn to a close. Even without the festival's honors to recommend her for, this erstwhile Oscar-winner did get a fair bit of attention for her abrasive performance. Critics lauded her, and the HFPA nominated her for the Golden Globe. Additionally, she also got a Golden Moon Award from the Faro Island Film Festival and the Best Actress trophy from the Kansas City Film Critics Circle. AMPAS, however, looked elsewhere for their Oscar lineup. The nominated actresses were Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues, Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, Maggie Smith in Travels with My Aunt, Cicely Tyson in Sounder, and Liv Ullmann in The Emigrants.
Even without Woodward's vinegary tour-de-force, that's one hell of a magnificent lineup. Minnelli won the Oscar, and it's pretty difficult to ascertain who was the weakest link in the quintet, voting-wise. Usually, I'd say Ullmann's non-English-speaking performance would be the most vulnerable. Still, The Emigrants was a smash-hit with Academy voters, nabbing four additional nods, including Best Picture. At the end of the day, I guess Maggie Smith was the fifth-placer on nomination morning, taking the spot Woodward might have hoped to get. Still, while The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds did not win its leading lady an Oscar nomination, it indeed established that she was on the hunt for awards gold. The following season Woodward got her third Best Actress nomination for Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams.
The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds is difficult to find, but there is currently an upload of the entire flick on Youtube. In addition, Twilight Time has also put out a Blu-Ray of the film.
Reader Comments (16)
The Effect of Claudio on audiences lucky enough to read him.
First: It's Liv Ullmann in The Emigrants, not Immigrants. I think her nomination was pretty strong. She had won the Golden Globe and New York Film Critics Award, the latter for both this and Cries and Whispers, which even though not eligible till next year, was still out there and making a big impression.
Maggie Smith was clearly the fifth place. I think she was chosen over Woodward and Carol Burnett for Pete and Tillie.
Woodward is very good, but it's the two girts, Nell Potts and Roberta Wallach, who steal the movie for me. They're both incredible and they should have been nominated, especially considering how weak the Supporting Actress field was that year.
I respected Joanne Woodward's performance in this and her willingness to be an unlikable woman, though she does show the layers underneath that hint at why Beatrice is who she is but I really, really did not enjoy this film.
It is a complex piece of work, where Joanne Woodward is concerned that's standard, but I wouldn't have nominated her for it. The lineup in '72 was very strong excepting Maggie Smith, love her but she's terrible in Travels with My Aunt so she could have been plucked out however I would have replaced her with Tuesday Weld in Play It As It Lays or Susannah York in Images before Woodward.
I can't wait to see this one, though it seems really hard to find. It looks like it's only available on Blu-Ray?
I really love Joanne Woodward. During the 1973 season, across her two films, she won the NYFCC, Cannes, and the BAFTA.
I've always been amazed that she was never welcomed into the 2-timers club.
Amy Camus -- Thanks for the correction. I've fixed the mistake.
This is a great performances and Woodward deserved more recognition The way she plays such an awful character but very human at the same time.
Smith was the weakest, Woodward or Susanah York (Images) gave better performances.
This was an obscure but interesting choice and the write up is spot on.
Oscars list beyond Diana and Liza is uninspired,I don't get the Cicely Tyson love all she does is fret so she's out,Smith is miscast but fun but not worthy of nominating,i'll keep Ullman as she is strong but those films are 1 big slog to sit through.
I'd add Woodward and Weld as others mention plus Carol Burnett in Pete and Tillie.
In 1968, Paul Newman directed his wife Joanne Woodward in Rachel, Rachel. Both won their respective categories at NYFCC and the Golden Globes. When Oscar snubbed Newman, Woodward was apoplectic. She gave interviews condemning the Academy and announcing her refusal to attend Oscar ceremony. Newman did manage to calm his indignant wife who supported their film and attended the televised ceremony. However, Woodward’s tantrum effectively trashed her front runner status, clearing the path for that landmark Best Actress tie for Streisand and Hepburn.
Gamma Rays, also directed by Newman, tanked at the box office. To think that Woodward would nominated by the voters she trashed a mere three years earlier is optimistic, at best.
Woodward did return to the Best Actress line up the following year in Summer Wishes, Winters Dreams, a movie that was not directed by her husband and made a profit.
Summer Wishes Winter Dreams is also on YouTube.
Agree with everything joel6 said.
Talking about The Emigrants. The Oscar rules were different back then. The film was nominated in the Foreign-Language Film category for 1971. The following year it was released in the States and received 4 nominations corresponding to 1972: Picture, Director, Actress and Screenplay. To add to the confusion, also in 1972 The New Land (The Emigrants' sequel) was nominated as Foreign Language Film.
This film is occasionally on TCM; if you don't want to buy the blu-ray or watch it on youtube, that's probably your best bet (in the US). Cláudio gives an apt description of it here. I think Smith was the obvious weak link in the line-up (I could barely get through Travels with My Aunt) and would easily have nominated Woodward over her.
I love the Emigrants and Ullmann in it but I do find it funny that her two Oscar nominations came IMO for performances to do IMO take a decided back seat to other un-nominated work during that same period. I actually think she’s pretty weak in Face to Face and it’s disappointing that was her one Bergman nom. I actually think she was probably second after Minnelli. She was very much in Vogue and I think people thought she might become a “thing” in Hollywood. I don’t think Tyson (my pick btw, and I love love love Minelli in Cabaret) was never going to win, ditto Maggie Smith in her worst ever performance (there was no love for her or the movie at the time, either. Her nom is very odd). And I don’t really buy that Ross had much of real shot against Minnelli. Ullmann's nomination seems odd in retrospect because of how unshowy it is but I think it was seen as an obvious thing at the time.
I’d definitely have preferred Woodward over Maggie Smith and probably Diana Ross, who I think has some great peaks but is also very variable as whole. But I haven’t seen Gamma Rays in a very long time and honestly don’t remember being blown away, or at least didn’t remember thinking it matched up to either Summed Wishes, Winter Dreams (a very underrated nomination) or Rachel, Rachel.
This post reminded me Joanne is still with us, she turned 91 this year!
I remember watching this movie in the middle of the night and I LOVED it. I can't believe Joanne Woodward wasn't nominated for an Oscar for her brilliant work.
One of the reasons why I love the Golden Globes so much. I love these obscure nominations for under the radar movies.