Barbara's World

 

Barbara Barrie is a strange and comforting angel to me.  Her face exudes light somehow, no matter what character she's playing, and she has played a lot of them in movies and TV for the last half century.  (She's still at it, at age 90, God bless her.)  You automatically and gratefully recognize her as soon as you spot her:  Barney Miller's wife, Michael Steadman's mom, the ironic but loving moms in Breaking Away and Private Benjamin -- even Lou Grant's girlfriend in a two-part episode.  The list goes on.  She occupies a beautiful space in my head, a familiar sleepy-eyed queen doing her son's laundry and smiling ironically at having to do these stupid wonderful chores.  

Her resume is so exhaustive in fact that I missed her first starring role as a divorcee who marries a black man and loses the custody of her daughter.  The movie's title is One Potato, Two Potato, and it offers a bleak, spare, black-and-white vision of 1964 race relations.  When I stumbled across it yesterday on TCM (making the bed on Martin Luther King Day), I first thought it was Night of the Living Dead.  But then there was Barbara, angelic and broken, but trying to maintain her dignity and her smile throughout, as her young daughter is taken away from her on a drab summer afternoon, outside an old house in the middle of nowhere.  I haven't seen the whole movie, and I probably won't because just witnessing that last moment has scarred me for life, thanks to Barbara.  She's able to be full-on emotional without one speck of melodrama, and commands the atmosphere by working her eyes and forehead into a sort of quizzical muted horror as she watches the little girl hastily get into a cab with her father.  

The scenery is all grass and woods and gray sky, the dust stirred up by the cab's tires on the dirt road.  It almost felt more like a painting than a motion picture.  Like a reinvention of Christina's World, with Barbara in that back yard all alone.  I sat down on the bed and just soaked in her genius at being that woman, expressing her feelings but without any effort or strain.  Just empathy expanding from brain to camera, eyes to light.  It crushed me for like 10, 15 seconds.  And all the memories of her other characters came flooding at me, and it was, well, you know:  bliss.