The stars (1962)

The new breed SHIRLEY MACLAINE One magazine called Rock Hudson a "stolid gold investment," and as a kind of least-common-denominator hero he achieved, late in the decade, a steady place as the films' top box-office attraction. But the decade produced more interesting phenomena than Hudson and his ilk. There was, for instance, a marvelously kookie girl named Shirley MacLaine, a sometime chorine and understudy in Broadway musicals. Replacing an ailing star, she was spotted by Alfred Hitchcock, who cast her in a hilarious shaggy-dog story called The Trouble with Harry (1954), very likely the best film Hitchcock did during the decade. It was, to put it mildly, a picture for people of special tastes, but Miss MacLaine's totally distracted, deadpan performance was a wonder. Inside of five years, her salary went from $6,000 to $250,000 per picture. Possessed of a beautifully leggy form and a childlike, remarkably expressive face, she is a direct, spontaneous and completely natural actress. "In front of the cameras I have to be careful what I think," she has said, "because it all shows." In a button-down age, she is completely — though not insistently — uninhibited, and it may be a measure of the time's repressiveness that a woman who is simply herself should come to seem something of an eccentric. Miss MacLaine's appeal was best summed up by a producer who said, "Everything she does is real, the way she picks up a pen or a cup of coffee, the way she eats a sandwich." "She has," adds a director, "the honesty of a person living each moment as it happens." Not Grauman s Chinese, just a publicity stunt for the Indianapolis Speedway. Right, as she appeared in Hot Spell.