Best Actress in a Supporting Role 1940: Barbara O'Neil in All This, And Heaven Too

Barbara O'Neil received her first Oscar nomination for her performance as the Duchesse de Praslin in All This, and Heaven Too.

All This, and Heaven Too is a rather unremarkable melodrama about a woman who becomes the governess of the children of a Duke and the turmoil caused by the Duchess' irrational jealousy due to her arrival. Though it is watchable enough, I found the movie to be an extremely standard and forgettable melodrama that often sugarcoates a potentially interesting, fascinating and nuanced story. The chemistry between the two leads, Bette Davis and Charles Boyer, is rather lacking and their performances don't rank among their best. The cinematography is actually rather impressive and brings a rather gloomy and melancholic air to the movie that the direction fails to the establish, but that's really the only thing about the movie I found remarkable in any way.

The Duchess is perhaps the movie's most interesting character: she's an overbearing, temperamental, selfish woman willing to do everything not to lose her husband - the kind of character the viewer can despise but also pity just because of how miserable her emotional state is. The problem though is that both the movie and Barbara O'Neil have a very clear (and narrow) opinion regarding the character: she's an irremediably evil, completely deranged person that isn't supposed to be understood nor someone to feel sorry for. The result is a very shallow and unexciting performance that oversimplifies what could have been a great, complex character. 

As portrayed by O'Neil, the Duchess is utterly two-dimensional: she's either glacially cold or completely hysterical and unhinged. I would say the scene in which she is the former are the ones that work best but even there she leaves a lot to be desired: mostly her performance feels like posturing - she acts cold but O'Neal never suggests anything that goes beyond the Duchess' surface. There is no subtlety or subtext in her performance and therefore she comes across as wooden more than anything else. Her physical stillness does work for the part but her vocalization is monotonous and colorless. On top of it, she does some pretty awkward facial acting, often twisting her face into overdone expressions that are supposed to appear malicious but only appear forced and out of the place. There are a few moments in which the camera indulges on O'Neil's face in which she just fails to convey much of anything. Nor the movie nor the actress seem to be interested in making the audience empathize with the character: there are many moments in which she could have addressed her character's plight due to her unhappy marriage but she often just stands there - in the few moments in which she is supposed to look happier, she looks vaguely bored and when she gets to express her character's desperation she is stone-faced and emotionless. 

If in my opinion her quiet moments are unconvincing, the loud ones are even less so. In those scenes, O'Neil is showboating to the maximum - constantly screaming, nervously walking around the scene with showy and overcooked gestures. It's scenery-chewing at its worst as she does indeed dominate the screen but in the worst way possible, often coming across as an unbearably grating presence. But what's worse is that with all of her overacting she brings absolutely nothing to the character: she yells and she cries but it all feels so utterly empty and superficial. Even in the moments in which the Duchess is emotionally bare O'Neil's performance feels so distant and artificial - her desperation is completely unmoving because O'Neil always seems more focused on portraying the Duchess' hateful nature rather than giving her a little bit more depth and complexity. Her chemistry with Charles Boyer in particular is rather weak as the two of them never really manage to convey the history between the two characters or to suggest the reason why they got married in the first place. It's just a very one-dimensional portrayal of a character that never resembles a true person: even if she gets a decent amount of screen-time, I never felt like I knew the Duchess and that's because O'Neil's portrayal is a one-note of venomous hatred. I could have been a little more lenient on the performance if she had been at least somewhat entertaining, but she's not even that. Her performance starts to wear thin very quickly and in spite of being so larger-than-life it never becomes even remotely interesting. Even as a standard villain O'Neil doesn't quite succeed as the Duchess never becomes that threatening as a character as it borders so often on being a parody.

This performance was a huge disappointment for me as I was actually looking forward to see it but I found almost nothing to like about Barbara O'Neil's work here. Her quieter moments are wooden, her louder scenes are overwhelmingly hammy, her silent reactionary shots fall flat: it's just a very one-dimensional performance that squanders a potential scene-stealer of a role and turns it into an unremarkable, bland villain. A very misguided performance and one of my least favorite out of those I've reviewed.

2/5