The Goddess (Carnegie Productions, Columbia Pictures, 1958)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, December 6) I watched an intriguing if not great movie on Turner Classic Movies: The Goddess, co-produced by Columbia Pictures and something called “Carnegie Productions” in 1958. Written by Paddy Chayevsky and directed by veteran John Cromwell (his first film in seven years, since he and two other directors – Tay Garnett and Mel Ferrer – worked on Howard Hughes’ remake of The Racket in 1951; his son James Cromwell, actor best known as the human lead in Babe, told The Progressive that his dad had been blacklisted), The Goddess is about a troubled young woman from Tennessee, Emily Ann Faulkner (Patty Duke as a child, Kim Stanley as an adult), who goes through two troubled marriages after her mom Laureen (Betty Lou Holland) palms her off on her aunt and uncle, both hard-core Seventh-Day Adventists, to raise. Ultimately she settles in Hollywood and becomes movie star “Rita Shawn” (though we don’t see the name in print during the film, so I’m not sure that’s the correct spelling, though that's what’s listed on the film’s Wikipedia page) after literally sleeping her way to the top. The Goddess was widely rumored to be a film à clef about Marilyn Monroe – who was originally suggested for the female lead until Monroe’s then-husband, playwright Arthur Miller, made it clear to the studio that she wouldn’t be interested – though there were certainly enough other troubled movie stars of the period, including Judy Garland and Rita Hayworth, on whom Chayevsky could have been drawing. Emily’s first husband is John Tower (Steven Hill, whom I’d known from his role as the original D.A. on Law and Order in the 1990’s and it wasn’t until the recent TCM screening of the 1955 film noir Storm Fear that I’d ever seen him young!), son of a major movie star and a troubled young alcoholic whom Emily literally picks up off the street. It’s 1942, he’s a World War II draftee training in Tennessee before he’s sent off to combat, and he tells Emily that he’s already attempted suicide at least twice and he hopes he gets killed in the war.

John and Emily get married and have a daughter, but Emily isn’t exactly one of nature’s mothers (symbolized by a scene in which her baby daughter is crying uncontrollably and nothing Emily does, including bottle-feeding her, can stop her). Eventually she signs a document giving up her parental rights so John can raise the kid as a single father – and doing so gives him a purpose in his life and turns him around, though we don’t learn that until the very end. Emily’s second husband is former light-heavyweight boxing champion Dutch Seymour (Lloyd Bridges out of his wet suit; at the time he was most famous for playing a deep-sea diver in the syndicated TV show Sea Hunt) – it’s pretty obvious Chayevsky was thinking of Marilyn Monroe’s second marriage to retired baseball great Joe DiMaggio. Unfortunately, as “Rita”’s career rises Dutch becomes a self-pitying mess; he briefly contemplates returning to his home town, St. Louis, and joining his older brother’s contracting firm, but he decides not to when she refuses to give up her burgeoning film career and move with him. In the film’s third act, “Portrait of a Goddess,” Rita Shawn is a major movie star but has just come back from a nervous breakdown which cost her studio $150,000 because of the delay in production. She’s living under the iron rule of a caregiver, Harding (Elizabeth Wilson), who doles out her pills to make sure she doesn’t kill herself with an overdose. When her actual mother dies, Emily a.k.a. Rita returns home for the funeral (at which she’s predictably surrounded by paparazzi – even though the term wouldn’t exist for another two years until Federico Fellini coined it for his film La Dolce Vita) but has another wing-ding of a nervous breakdown at the gravesite. John Tower shows up with Emily’s daughter, who understandably wants to meet her now-famous mom, but Emily is too much of a space case to handle it. Harding takes the now responsible John Tower aside and explain that “Rita” will continue to make movies because there’s nothing else she can do, but she will always be the way she is.

If there’s a problem with The Goddess, it’s that it’s way too negative. We never see “Rita Shawn” at work making movies, and it’s hard to believe that someone who’s such a total basket case off screen could be a convincing actress on screen. Chayevsky and Cromwell even miss the obvious irony of having the small town movie theatre advertising a “Rita Shawn” movie when the real Rita, t/n Emily, returns there. Ultimately The Goddess is a movie that dies from its own misanthropy. Emily’s character is depicted as a woman so hungry for love she puts up with being exploited sexually, first by the local young men (even as a teenager she’s attracted the reputation of being “easy”), then by her Hollywood producers (it’s as clear as Chayevsky could make it with the dying embers of the Production Code still in effect that she got her contract with studio head Lester Brackman [Bert Freed] by having sex with him and at least one other man who might be another executive or her agent. One could readily imagine The Goddess being remade today as a propaganda piece for the #MeToo movement) and finally with a series of anonymous tricks in out-of-the-way motel rooms. At a time when Paddy Chayevsky was mostly known for his live TV scripts, which were generally about emotionally wounded characters who ultimately achieve at least a degree of fulfillment, The Goddess was written directly for film and was just too negative and misanthropic to reach a mass audience. It’s a film you want to like, especially since the acting is fine all around and Stanley, Holland, Wilson and Hill particularly stand out, but ultimately it doesn’t let you in – and it also doesn’t help that the filmmakers got Virgil Thomson to write the musical score, and he did so in his most all-out “folky” vein that works to set the scene of rural Tennessee where Emily grows up but plays totally against the dire emotions of the rest of the film. And Cromwell’s direction is workmanlike but hardly inspired, though he and cinematographer Arthur J. Ornitz do get in a few vaguely noir-ish compositions when they’re called for in the script.