Shirley Booth in "Come Back, Little Sheba", 1952 Oscar-Winner

This is not a review.  It's not even a true analysis.  It is a discovery...how the work of one actress in a performance from 1952 has meaning for one viewer in 2011.

As part of  it's annual "31 Days of Oscar", Turner Classic Movies screened the domestic drama "Come Back, Little Sheba".

Shirley Booth...Wow.  Her performance here is essential viewing to anyone who cares about great movie acting, and who appreciates those times when Oscar got it completely, marvelously right.

Booth reprises the role of Lola, the disheveled and unhappy wife of an alcoholic, a performance that also won her a Tony award. This was Booth's first film, and, at age 54, was the oldest person to date to win the Oscar for Best Actress.  (So unforgettable was her portrayal, that she was also honored by the Golden Globes, New York Film Critics, National Board of Review, and the Cannes Film Festival.)

Lola--"pretty Lola" as she was known before life diminished her--pines for her lost dog Sheba, and yearns to return to happier days with her husband "Doc" (or "Daddy" as she affectionately calls him).  Booth successfully paints a portrait of a desperately lonely woman who is unaware of how unhappy she is.  She smilingly, tentatively, tries to connect with anyone around her--anyone who will listen.  Her neighbors..her mailman...the college girl who rents a room in her home as the film begins.

See how Booth carries her arms, her hands...bent askew, her thumb smoothing her dress, as though she instinctively must protect herself from blows...physical ones, or the more painful, verbal ones she endures from her disappointed, resentful husband in a drunken rage at the film's climax.

Booth learned how to temper her expressions for the intimacy of the camera.  Watch her struggle to maintain a loving and "normal" countenance, a look of naive contentment. Notice how she unwittingly opens her husband's old psychological wounds, forcing him to recall painful memories of giving up his dreams, reminding him of his alcoholism and his year in AA, destroying his coping mechanisms even though she means to encourage him,  probing him with an innocently pleading expression.  Notice the panic register on her face as she realizes that Doc is in trouble again.

Her tears of worry and regret are sincere, real.  Her resolve to improve herself and her life with Doc are heartbreaking.  Her dreams, in which she finds the lifeless body of her little white dog Sheba, and not being able to tend to the animal because she is told she must "move on",  hit me deeply...

I knew instinctively that the image of the lost dog represented a lifetime of missed opportunities. Even as a literal plot point, it moved me so much....I identified with it profoundly.

Abandoned even by her own mother, to whom she finally admits on the phone how unhappy she is, she tearfully promises Doc that she will never leave him because he is all she has.  The many levels of meaning are communicated by her halting delivery, and a look of resignation--or is it hope?  We want to comfort this woman.

And here's where it gets real personal...

Except for the accent, Lola, as embodied by Shirley Booth, a woman so worn down by life that she can't face getting dressed, so desperate for human connection that she reaches out inappropriately and says too much, is a touching reflection of someone I actually know...an uncanny representation of someone whom I have known since the day I was born. 

And Lola's characteristics, concentrated in Shirley Booth's potent and very moving performance, helps me appreciate and strengthen my emotional connection to this person, her "well-meaningness" and simple carelessness, her attachment to a past that was kind to her, and her emptiness because of the things she lost: almost all of her loved ones, a lifetime's worth of "Little Shebas", and, most of all, her youth.

I think true art is a thing of beauty that can help one come to terms with life's unanswerable questions.  Shirley Booth's Lola to me is cinematic art.