A soprano hired to sing who turned out to be better at watching. Shirley Jones does her best work when the film is about someone else and she is the one person on screen who has noticed what is going on.
Fi1m perspective
The scene we keep going back to in The Music Man (1962) is not one of hers. Ron Howard's Winthrop, a small boy who barely speaks, gets a song and cannot stop singing it, and Morton DaCosta's camera finds Shirley Jones watching him. She does nothing. Her face does the rest, and it told us more about Marian Paroo than any of the librarian's own numbers. That is her habit, if it is a habit: she is at her best when the film has its attention on someone else, and Robert Preston's Harold Hill takes most of the attention in that one.
She was hired to sing. A small part in the Broadway South Pacific in 1953 won her a Rodgers and Hammerstein contract, and her screen debut came in 1955, as Laurey, opposite Gordon MacRae, with Carousel (1956) following. The studios saw a clean voice and a kind face and cast her as wholesome, again and again. She has put the problem plainly herself: "I was a singer, and when you were a singer you weren't thought of as an actress."
Elmer Gantry (1960) is the exception, and it is a real one. Richard Brooks's film belongs to Burt Lancaster's grin, and for long stretches it says everything twice. Then Jones arrives as Lulu Bains, a woman with a claim on Gantry's past, and the film hardens around her. We had expected the girl from Carousel and got someone who had been hurt and had decided what to do about it; she is better than anything else in that part of the picture. It is the performance that proves the face in The Music Man was not luck.
Two years later she was back in a library, singing "Till There Was You" straight while everyone around her winked, and after that the film work thinned. The Partridge Family (1970–1974) made her Shirley Partridge to a generation that had never seen Carousel, with David Cassidy alongside her, and her agents had warned her what a hit series does to a film career. They were right. What she left on film is small and mostly good: the ballads in The Music Man, and a stretch of Elmer Gantry that suggests a different career was available. Watch the two back to back. The gap between them is the interesting part, and nobody in Hollywood at the time seems to have looked at it.
Biography
Shirley Jones is an American actress and singer. Born on 31 March 1934 in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, she studied drama at the Pittsburgh Playhouse and performed with the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera before auditioning successfully for Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.
She made her film debut in Oklahoma! (1955) and appeared in other musicals including Carousel (1956) and The Music Man (1962). In 1960 she played Lulu Bains in Elmer Gantry, for which she received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Jones starred as Shirley Partridge in the television series The Partridge Family (1970–1974), which also featured her stepson David Cassidy.
