Bette Davis (Great Stars)
David Thomson
Language: English
Pages: 144
ISBN: 0865479313
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"She could look demure while behaving like an empress. Blonde, with eyes like pearls too big for her head, she was very striking, but marginally pretty and certainly not beautiful . . . But it was her edge that made her memorable--her upstart superiority, her reluctance to pretend deference to others."
Bette Davis was the commanding figure of the great era of Hollywood stardom, with a drive and energy that put her contemporaries in the shade. She played queens, jezebels, and bitches; she could out-talk any male costar; she warred with her studio, Warner Bros., worked like a demon, got through four husbands, was nominated for seven Oscars, and--no matter what--never gave up fighting. This is her story.
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the actual role of wife is breathtaking in what it suggests: that emotional truth takes precedence over form. And so the bitch becomes a strange kind of saint; as she makes the transformation in herself she is all the more admirable and iconic. In other words, her world view is not just endorsed, but celebrated – and thus her emotional temperature becomes like the film’s norm. That is why Pres’s illness hardly matters; it simply leaves her in charge, reigning alone, or on his behalf. We feel
conviction that Bette Davis ‘was a great, great untapped talent’. Far from an ideal ingénue, Davis struck Robinson as a looming star in a genre Warners were almost unaware of. Consciously or not, he became determined to find her suitable material, and he fell upon an old love – the play, Dark Victory. This had been a Broadway flop (by George Brewer and Bertram Bloch) in 1934, with Tallulah Bankhead playing the heiress who discovers she has a fatal brain tumour. Others had planned to do it as a
can see Jack Warner’s alarm, that Dark Victory was really about nothing except death – even if you threw in the extra that Judith will fall in love with her doctor, Dr Steele (George Brent), and marry him. There’s a clue there, I fear: for marrying one’s doctor is a marked concession to fantasy, and so much less challenging than the belated attempt to find a purpose in life. Judith Traherne is a rich young woman, living on Long Island. She’s not a nitwit (as the film says at one point), but she
But then, one day in a quiet country hotel in New Hampshire she meets a new kind of man. His name is Arthur Farnsworth. He is handsome, urbane and he is from an old New England family. Or so it seems. He stirs Bette in ways she cannot explain: ‘Farney’ is the real thing, and a salutary corrective after all the mirror-gazers in Hollywood. You see, Bette doesn’t really approve of that place in southern California. On an impulse she buys land and a house nearby. She becomes closer with Mr
territory of a real star, Margo, apparently overwhelmed by admiration and reverence, but driven to take over her position. Or rather, that is the pretext for the game. In fact, as Pauline Kael observed, it’s hard to credit that this Eve is a threat to Margo. In writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s screenplay it was stressed that Eve and Margo looked alike, and the nice thing about Claudette Colbert and Anne Baxter was their resemblance. Mankiewicz was foreseeing ways of capturing it on film.