Far rarer than films that rely on a sole significant performance, or those elevated by a scintillating team, are movies borne aloft by three equally tremendous performances at their centers. I don’t mean films with ensemble casts, such as All About Eve (1950), The Godfather Part II (1974), or Shakespeare in Love (1998), in which it would be easy to pick out three, or more, outstanding performances. I’m talking about instances in which three performers take charge of a film, play off and inspire each other, and raise the bar of each scene’s potential with their instinctive gifts and refined techniques. It’s there in the Clark Gable-Myrna Loy-Spencer Tracy tragi-comic trio of Test Pilot (1938) and the glimmering Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn-James Stewart threesome of The Philadelphia Story (1940). A quintessential example is Lolita (1962), a film in which James Mason, Shelley Winters, and Peter Sellers are each so extraordinary that I’m sure one of them is stealing the movie, but I keep changing my mind about who it is that’s doing the stealing. This is a highly pleasurable predicament, and it also happens to me every time I see Rambling Rose. It stars Laura Dern, Robert Duvall, and Diane Ladd (Dern’s real-life mother), and just one of their splendid performances would be enough for this, or any, movie. Thanks to their glorious three-ring show, the independent Rambling Rose is one of the best-acted movies of recent years, a patchwork quilt to wrap snugly around you. Calder Willingham wrote the screenplay, based on his 1972 novel.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
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