The Talkies/Bette Davis, RIP
Bawer, Bruce
THE TALKIES BETTE DAVIS, RIP by Bruce Bawer T o view, in quick succession, a half dozen or so of the movies that Bette Davis made during what we may call her Golden Age—during the decade, in other...
...Many of these spinsters are women who—to borrow a phrase from Davis's eponymous character in The Nanny (1965)—take care of "other people's children": Charlotte in The Old Maid runs a nursery school...
...Arriving in Hollywood in 1930, Davis began her movie career with a string of thirty-odd pictures, mostly quite forgettable, in many of which her roles were extremely small...
...It's as if somebody forgot to turn on all the lights...
...and Heaven Too (1940) is a governess and later a schoolteacher...
...In not one but two movies—A Stolen Life (1946) and Dead Ringer (1964)—Davis plays twin sisters, one of whom loves the other's husband and (after her death) masquerades as her in order to possess her husband...
...unable to acknowledge her parenthood as she watches the child grow to maturity, Charlotte turns from a sweet young woman into an embittered, misanthropic old spinster...
...In Now, Voyager, The Old was in the role of a stage actress, Margo —a first-rate Hitchcock-style thriller Yet what makes Bette Davis worth Maid, Mr...
...Got that...
...T t was not ever thus...
...this happens at least three times...
...Throughout this period, she played tough, even shady types: gangsters' widows, lowlife flirts, hard-boiled nightclub hostesses...
...One is surprised, for one thing, to realize how exceedingly narrow an acting range Davis possessed...
...Editor-in-Chief, The American Spectator and author of The Liberal Crack-up ISBN: 0-944273-04-1 332 pp $22.95 Journey to Freedom by Nicholas Dima Yes, please send me the best in foreign policy perspectives from the Selous Foundation Press Qty Each Total Pinstripes and Reds $17.95 Red Star Over Southern Africa $18.95 Death in the Desert $24.95 Journey to Freedom $22.95 Postage & Handling Domestic ($2.50 each book) Overseas ($5.00 each book) TOTAL Name Address City State Zip Telephone Check payable to: Selous Foundation Press 325 Pennsylvania Ave., S.E...
...Norval demonstrates a thorough grasp of the flow of events in that region of utmost strategic significance in the free world—must reading for all concerned with the future of freedom...
...Editor, National Review ISBN: 0-944273-03-3 364 pp $24.95 "For those who think glasnost and perestroika are infecting every Marxist-Leninist paradise, Nicholas Dima provides an eye-opening account of the enduring despotism that is Ceausescu's Romania...
...It is no context for extreme immoderation on for both of which Davis pulled out a wise (as a reviewer suggested of Dark coincidence that her best work after the her part...
...At the same time, however, one is struck by how engrossing these films remain a half-century later, by how sympathetic Davis's heroines are, how compelling their often inane predicaments seem...
...It is especially valuable as it exposes the harmful consequences of the U.N.'s meddling in the situation—adding to Namibia's agony...
...Charlotte Vale responds in like fashion when Jerry poses her a similar question: "When Tina said she wanted to come home and stay with me it was like a miracle happening—like having your child, a part of you—and I even allowed myself to indulge in the fancy that both of us loving her and doing what was best for her together would make her seem actually like our child after a while . . ." These are women for whom devotion to children is, in large part, a form of sublimation...
...and it is no secret that Davis did not always succeed entirely in this regard...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...these stories grab one's attention in the opening moments and don't let go until the final credits...
...Charlotte Vale in Now, Voyager takes Jerry's troubled daughter Tina into her house and mothers her...
...Indeed, while she played very few mothers, Davis portrayed quite a few spinsters (including—twice—the most eminent one in all history, Queen Elizabeth I...
...William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Washington, DC 20003 AMSPEC89 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989 45 deserved any better from her...
...Skeffington, the shallow, self-indulgent belle Fanny Skeffington is given a chance to redeem herself as a loving helpmeet when diphtheria robs her of her extraordinary beauty (and of her legion of admirers), and fate brings to her doorstep the still-adoring but now penniless ex-husband (Claude Rains) whom she cruelly neglected throughout their marriage, and who has (conveniently) lost his sight and therefore will always see her as beautiful...
...Skeffington, one laughs at the idea of Bette Davis being the most ravishing woman in New York.' But at the same time one is hooked...
...Davis plays an equally despotic matriarch, incidentally, in the bizarre 1968 film The Anniversary...
...part of the point of the movie is that Fanny is an absurd creature, and part of its achievement is that it manages to make her at once a joke and an object of pathos...
...a lively if diplomatically selective account of [Ambassador Funderburk's] 'Cassandra' years in Bucharest . . . (His resignation) dramatized the hostility that often arises between political appointees . . . and the State Department career cadre...
...She gives the curious feeling of being charged with power which can find no ordinary outlet...
...The queen of the so-called women's picture, she specialized in melodramatic heroines who were either outrageously blunt and headstrong or pathetically meek and self-sacrificing or some remarkable combination of the two...
...Part of the strategy in such movies, of course, is to win our sympathy for heroines who are big on sacrifice and who, as Henriette says, "must be content with picking up a few crumbs of happiness from other people's tables...
...After the late 1940s she grew more and more prone to self-parody, seemingly reveling in her broad trademark gestures, and sometimes offering little more by way of a performance than stiff comportment, tart and halting line readings, and periodic rolling of those protuberant Bette Davis eyes...
...A year later came Dangerous, which won Davis the first of two Academy Awards, and which inspired one reviewer to comment that "Bette Davis would probably have been burned as a witch if she had lived two or three hundred years ago...
...but the characters and stories that she burned into our memories are far less varied than those for which Hepburn did similar honors...
...To be sure, she performed capably enough in an urbane romantic farce like It's Love I'm After (1937), in which she played half of a jealous, competitive Lunt-and-Fontanne-type Broadway acting team (Leslie Howard played the other half)—but from a 52-year distance she seems oddly misplaced in the role...
...46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989...
...While Hepburn, for instance, moved smoothly—and without losing any of her authority and allure and presence—from screwball comedy (Bringing Up Baby) to sophisticated comedy (The Philadelphia Story) to Tennessee Williams (Suddenly Last Summer) to Eugene O'Neill (Long Day's Journey Into Night), Davis excelled only within a strictly confined territory...
...They even carry themselves differently: the spinster schoolteacher Miss Moffat in The Corn Is Green (1945) treads firmly and resolutely, without a wasted motion, while the spinster heiress Charlotte Vale in Now, Voyager (1942) strolls with a graceful sweep, vivacious and self-confident...
...Self-control, alas, apparently became increasingly hard for Davis...
...But an actress who aims always for bigger-than-life performances must exercise consistent and rigorous self-control to avoid becoming merely flamboyant, garish, histrionic...
...A s her performance in a role like Regina Giddens demonstrates, Davis believed unapologetically that motion-picture characters should be at once lifelike and bigger than life...
...it is no coincidence, surely, that this actress, who at times reminded one a bit too forcefully that she was indeed acting, played more than her share of actresses, from Joyce Heath in Dangerous and Joyce Arden in It's Love I'm After to Margaret Elliott in The Star (1952) and Baby Jane Hudson in the incredibly goofy Whatever Happened to Baby Jane...
...Skeffington, and half a Channing, who had a decidedly theatri- about an unobtrusive English gover- remembering is not the failings of her dozen other movies she leaves us a col-cal manner, and that part of the reason ness bent on murder—it seems almost weakest work but the high caliber of lection of supremely captivating diver-for the success of Davis's other most miraculous, coming as it did between her strongest...
...There's no getting around the fact that these are soap-opera stories about soap-opera characters...
...Even in her finest performances she could not completely avoid gratuitous mannerisms and moments of hamminess...
...For, though they're mostly variations on a handful of familiar types, there's no mistaking Davis's most renowned heroines for one another...
...That power found its first major outlet in Jezebel (1938), for which Davis 'One must add, however, that Davis leaves the distinct impression that she's laughing, too...
...Granted, there is a camp element to these pictures: watching Now, Voyager, one smiles at the famous business with the cigarettes (as you may remember, Henreid lights two of them in his mouth, hands one to Davis, and they blow smoke into each other's faces while staring deeply into each other's eyes...
...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989 won her second Oscar...
...Her talent is there, but she isn't—or, perhaps one should say, her distinctive personal magnetism isn't...
...Julie was succeeded, in The Old Maid (1939), by Charlotte Lovell, a Civil War-era Philadelphia woman who allows her child, born out of wedlock, to be raised by her vengeful cousin Delia (Miriam Hopkins...
...Julie Marston—the antebellum Southern belle whose neurotic willfulness destroys her hopes of romantic happiness—was the first of many remarkably intense, passionate heroines...
...The Wall Street Journal ISBN: 0-944273-01-07 226 pp $17.95 "Red Star shows the how and why of Soviet policy towards southern Africa...
...Henriette Deluzy in All This...
...belle-of-the-ball Fanny Skeffington in Mr...
...THE TALKIES BETTE DAVIS, RIP by Bruce Bawer T o view, in quick succession, a half dozen or so of the movies that Bette Davis made during what we may call her Golden Age—during the decade, in other words, between the late 1930s and the late 1940s—can be a rather startling experience...
...Skeffington (1944) glides coquettishly, while belle-of-the-ball Julie Marston in Jezebel (1938) moves with every step as if she's trying to pull away from someone's grasp...
...They're full of people going blind, of letters that destroy people's lives, of mothers who keep their motherhood secret over decades (with, needless to say, disastrous results...
...She is far more believable when playing an indifferent mother like Fanny Skeffington, or a substitute mother like Charlotte Vale or Maggie Patterson in The Great Lie (1941), or a mother, like Charlotte Lovell, who is made vicious by her inability to tell her daughter that she is her daughter and not her niece...
...Bruce Herschensohn KABC news commentator ISBN: 0-944273-00-9 218 pp $18.95 Red Star Over Southern Africa by Morgan Norval Death in the Desert The Namibian Tragedy by Morgan Norval "Death in the Desert penetrates the liberal's fog over events in southern Africa by providing an illuminating history of the Marxist SWAPO's war of terror in Namibia...
...Implausible transformations abound (making possible a tour-deforce Davis switch from meek to headstrong or vice-versa): in Dark Victory (1939), the frivolous, fun-loving heiress Judith Tkaherne learns she's suffering from a fatal brain tumor, and (after marrying her doctor) dies with selfless stoicism...
...Like her contemporary Katharine Hepburn (whose striking looks she always envied), Davis specialized in "independent" women...
...1961...
...and in Mr...
...But if one is surprised by the narrowness of Davis's range, one is surprised, too, to notice how masterfully she worked within that range, how skilled she was at making each of her Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...
...When Henriette's employer, the Duc de Praslin (Charles Boyer), with whom she shares a deep but unconsummated love, asks about the lack of fulfillment in her life, she replies: "I have the children and even though they're not mine I sometimes imagine they are...
...To watch Davis's best movies is to be fortified in one's judgment that theyare decidedly not art—but it is also to come away with the conviction that nobody else in the history of the medium has ever been connected with a series of films that so superbly embody the idea of pure screen entertainment...
...watching Mr...
...Among her few plum roles was that of the crass, licentious waitress, Mildred Rogers, to Leslie Howard's sensitive, lovesick medical student in the widely admired but rather dull Of Human Bondage (1934...
...Lilly Moffat in The Corn Is Green (1945) is a schoolteacher in a Welsh mining town who, at the end of the film, agrees to raise her prize student's bastard child while he attends Oxford on a scholarship...
...And without those lights on, the talent seems astonishingly run-of-the-mill...
...And at her best, she was capable of giving an appearance of magnitude and depth —and even of intelligence—to characters whose actual lack of dimensionwould, in other hands, have been painfully manifest...
...certainly one of the most memorable mother-daughter relationships in any of Davis's films is that in The Little Foxes (1941) between her ruthless, tyrannical Regina Giddensas monstrous a character as ever filled a movie screen—and Teresa Wright's meek, defenseless Alexandra...
...It's not surprising that in those few films in which Davis does play a quietly loving mother—in Watch on the Rhine (1943), for example—she seems oddly passive and unconvincing as such...
...heroines utterly distinctive...
...Then again, most of her vehicles of the past couple of decades were tawdry TV movies and gruesome horror flicks with titles like Scream, Pretty Peggy, none of which New foreign policy perspectives from the Selous Foundation Press Pinstripes and Reds by David B. Funderburk it...
...Consequently, they're ideal characters for Davis, who was a natural at embodying fervent devotion, a not-so-naturalat quiet fidelity...
...Charlotte was hardly Davis's only old maid...
...claptrap...
...they approach young people not with a mother's equipoise but with the outsized ardor of women who lack any alternative object of passion...
...in Now, Voyager, the shy, sexless, mother-dominated Back Bay heiress Charlotte Vale is changed by a psychiatrist (Claude Rains) and by a married man named Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid), whom she meets and falls in love with on a South American cruise, into a model of poise, conviviality, and romantic passion...
...At her best, she sions that, for what they have managed celebrated later role, in Baby Jane, was the grisly Hush . . . Hush, Sweet mesmerized, lending a semblance of for so long to do so well, have rarely that the film provided a sound dramatic Charlotte (1964) and The Anniversary, urgency to material that might other- been surpassed...
...As for her wonderfully great many more stops than was prob- Victory) be dismissed as "emotional late 1940s—in All About Eve (1950)— restrained performance in The Nanny ably advisable...
...One is struck, too, by how contrived the stories of Davis's best films are...
Vol. 22 • December 1989 • No. 12
