At the Height Of Her Powers

The usual critical line on Bette Davis reminds me of Stephen Colbert’s hardball question concerning the commander in chief: “Great president or the greatest president?”In the many documentaries and featurettes included in “The Bette Davis Collection,Vol. 2,” the talking heads palpitate with platitudes – eyes welling, voices shivering, cheeks reddening as if in communion with Baby Jane Hudson herself. In “All About Bette,” for instance, Jodie Foster pitches her entire narration on the verge of tears.Great actress or the greatest? That’s the least of it. Davis is portrayed as a combination of Mother Courage, Athena, Edith Cavell, and Sarah Bernhardt on one stump, defying the gods and the brothers Warner not to give her better parts. Had she not walked out on her contract in 1936, she would never have won the right to shrivel away in pancake and bald wigs. Worse, today’s film actresses might not be luxuriating in a ready supply of powerful scripts and ennobling roles.At the time she stormed off, Davis had been relegated to a diet of generic trash, often cast as a gangster’s moll or gutter trash. So it was quite a triumph to return in 1937 (she lost her suit) and win the lead in “Marked Woman,” the earliest film included in the Warner box. She plays a prostitute who brings down the mob – nursing a grievance because the gang lord killed her sister and carved a crucifix in Davis’s cheek.Directed with uninspired efficiency by Lloyd Bacon, “Marked Woman” is notable as the one picture in the Warner gangland cycle centered on women; the men are invariably scurrilous, cowardly, or pious. But the film is rarely as shrewd as its closing shot, in which Davis and the other “hostesses” disappear into a fog bank, leaving the prosecutor, based on Thomas Dewey, to nurse his dreams of Albany.Loosely based on the Lucky Luciano trial, it has a smashing performance by Eduardo Ciannelli as the reptilian mob boss and a memorable turn by Lola Lane as a disconsolate hostess who also sings. Humphrey Bogart, shackled by sanctimony, does what he can with the thankless Dewey role. Davis’s part is based on Cokey Flo Brown, whose testimony put a crimp in Luciano’s plan to launch the A &P of brothels. Of course, she does it without the coke and the prostitution. Indeed, she is so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed that we don’t gag at learning that she’s putting her kid sister through college.The next year (1938), Davis enjoyed a genuine breakthrough in the first of her three films with William Wyler, “Jezebel.” Wyler seemed to recognize her for what she was: a magnificent gorgon, a whirlwind of short-fused energy, and a bow string waiting to be plucked. In their subsequent films,”The Letter”and “The Little Foxes,” the material is almost as taut as Davis.“Jezebel” is Southern-fried hooey, but never dull or smug or as racially oblivious as “Gone With the Wind.” From the moment Davis whirls through a ball in an inappropriate dress, even Henry Fonda is outclassed – and forget George Brent, though he has the best line: “I like my convictions undiluted, same as I do my bourbon.” The rest is Bette Davis opera. She lands a vigorous slap, goes into seclusion, emerges to instigate a duel, and ultimately gives her all to fight yellow fever. If Davis gave no sense of the soiled dove in “Marked Woman,” she replaces the idiocies of “Jezebel” with diva largesse, a commitment verging on devotion.“Jezebel” kicked off the great period in Davis’s career, which lasted a mere seven years, notwithstanding two superb reprieves. This was the era, from 1938 to 1944, of the “woman’s picture” – multi-generational sagas in which Davis torments others and is tormented in turn. When she isn’t killing and betraying, she is succumbing to age, disease, and death. Too bad Warner didn’t include such examples as John Huston’s underrated psychodrama cum social critique, “In This Our Life” (1942), or her initial championship bout with Miriam Hopkins, Edmund Goulding’s “The Old Maid” (1939). Instead we get her glorified supporting role (though top-billed and built-up) in a tiresome adaptation of Kaufman and Hart’s “The Man Who Came to Dinner.”William Keighley directed this faithful if weirdly expurgated version of the play, in which “a Joan Crawford fantasy” becomes “a Ginger Rogers fantasy,” “a brassiere worn by Hedy Lamar” becomes “a sweater worn by Lana Turner,” and “lavatory” becomes “locker room,” among a thousand other minor alterations. What matters here is the belief that if the action appears fast, funny, and irreverent it is fast, funny, and irreverent. Not even a crate of penguins and Jimmy Durante, who brings much-needed energy to the third act, can cut through the self-satisfied cleverness, emphasized by Monte Wolley’s enchantment with his every line reading. The only surprise is that dazzling Ann Sheridan, with her well-timed eruptions of temper, steals the film from Davis, who – except for her one big speech and her one close-up of girlish laughter – is reduced to furniture.Miriam Hopkins similarly won her rematch with Davis in Victor Sherman’s “Old Acquaintance” (1943), which is about two friends who write novels and inexplicably love John Loder, the dullest actor of his generation. (Where is George Brent when you really need him?) Hopkins’s character is so loathsome that generations of audiences have cheered the scene in which Bette finally throttles her and says “sorry.” But whereas Hopkins entertains, Davis relentlessly telegraphs her character’s decency and genius with one misjudged gesture: She plays the entire film casting her eyes down with an air of thoughtfully patient superiority. She’s so bloody superior you wish someone would throttle her. “Old Acquaintance” is a very bad yet engaging antique.The end of the war coincided with Davis’s decline, which she halted in 1950 with “All About Eve” (Fox). A decade of inferior work followed, before she grabbed hold of the title role in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962). This is the best film in the box, and its one example of the nuance, insight, originality, and humor that define Davis at the height of her sacred-monster powers.“Baby Jane” was greeted as a horror film in its day, but it is consistently witty in contrasting the torturous relationship of the Hudson sisters (Jane and her crippled sister, Blanche, played by Joan Crawford with hand-wringing masochism) with those of a dull suburban mom and daughter (Anna Lee and Davis’s real-life daughter, Barbara Merrill) and a lumbering bottom-feeder and his tiny cockney mom (played to perfection by Victor Buono and Marjorie Bennett). Adapting the eerie sensationalism of “Sunset Boulevard” at a time when talkie queens had reached the age of battle-ax madness and murder, it was directed by Robert Aldrich with an unerring eye for everyday Grand Guignol.The film wastes too much time with repetitive horrors and suspense; its heart is in its scathing portrayal of vaudeville (“I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy”), television (“Iliad, the classic dog food”), and movies (the next two hours). The pitiless puncturing of age and delusion is whetted on masterly comic timing, as in the exchange between Davis and Buono: “I wonder if you can guess who I am,” she says. “Can you give me a hint?” This new addition has an energetic commentary by Charles Busch and John Epperson, and a clip of Davis on the “Andy Williams Show” singing the instrumental rock ‘n’ roll theme heard in the movie – an effort so humiliating that it outgrotesques the movie.The Warner box is completed by the fine TCM documentary, “Stardust: The Bette Davis Story,” a generally sober assessment that makes the case for Davis’s larger-than-life aura without quite defining the nature of her art. Her admirers often remark that Davis displayed an admirable lack of vanity in her willingness to look ugly and incarnate evil. What her vanity could not abide was playing small. In Baby Jane she found the perfect alter ego: a dragon-slaying gargoyle for the ages.

At the Height Of Her Powers

At the Height Of Her Powers

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