Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1952

The Contenders:

Shirley Booth: Come Back, Little Sheba (winner)
Julie Harris: The Member of the Wedding
Bette Davis: The Star
Joan Crawford: Sudden Fear
Susan Hayward: With a Song in My Heart

Singin' in the Pain

Film: With a Song in My Heart
Format: DVD from Mokena Community Public Library through interlibrary loan on rockin’ flatscreen.

Unlike when I watched Goodbye, Mr. Chips a few days ago, I knew going into With a Song in My Heart that there would be a great deal of singing. This is, after all, the story of singer Jane Froman. Like many a film of this sort, we start at the end, with Jane being given an award for her tremendous courage. Courage? For a singer? Well, for that we’ll need to dive into the movie itself, won’t we?

Jane Froman (Susan Hayward) starts out life as a young woman studying singing and looking for a job on the radio. She manages to get an audition, but when she goes in, she encounters not the man she expected but Don Ross (David Wayne), who doesn’t tell her that he’s just failed an audition. She sings, the real manager for the station hears her and he hires her on the spot. Jane is a real talent (the singing in the film is voiced by the real Jane Froman, after all) and is soon skyrocketed into a real career. Don becomes her manager and lives on her coattails, working as a smaller warm-up act in many of her shows and managing her professional life. Eventually, the two decide to get married despite the fact that Jane doesn’t really love him. It’s more a marriage of convenience for her career than anything else.