The Ann-Margret obsession

One of the oddities in the new season of Brockmire is that, in the 2030s, Jim Brockmire's pornographic fantasy includes Ann-Margret. Brockmire seems too young to have connected with the singer-actress who is a major element of '60s iconography in the Mad Men Season 3 episode "Love Among the Ruins." Her performance in Bye Bye Birdie (some of which is above) was so ... invigorating that even the closeted-gay Sal recalls seeing a Broadway actress in the role who, when compared to Ann-Margret, "didn't have that."*

And Ann-Margret did have that: a sexiness that was not coy and coquettish; she was unabashed, hungry, eager -- and knowing. One of the flaws in her casting in Bye Bye Birdie is that she seems too smart for some of the fan-girl excesses in the part. Consider her instead in Viva Las Vegas, nominally a cornball Elvis Presley movie but one where attention diverts to Ann-Margret whenever she is onscreen, no matter how badly a sequence itself has aged. Even when Elvis breaks away from his cool disengagement to try to light an audience's fire, it seems meek in comparison to his co-star.

While it's easy based on these clips to sum up Ann-Margret as a Sixties bombshell, that undervalues her work as an actress. I am still mesmerized by what she did in Carnal Knowledge, the movie meditation on misogyny, which starred Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel as men who were clueless about women -- and Ann-Margret as one of the women Nicholson failed to understand. Here's a scene that is mostly Nicholson but sold by what A-M is doing,
      

There are other fine performances, for example in The Cincinnati Kid. She also did good work on TV, such as The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, which yielded one of her six Emmy nominations. (She won for a guest appearance on Law & Order: SVU.) So maybe it's OK to have Jim Brockmire's anachronistic admiration. Hey, it's Ann-Margret and she had that.


*For more, see Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion, by Matt Zoller Seitz,

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