Marked Woman

A good example of the kinds of fun roles actresses got to play in the 1930s: Bette Davis is a hostess at a popular nightclub that's just been taken over by a mobster named Johnny Vanning (played by Eduardo Ciannelli). She lives with four other women who work at the nightclub, and there's an early shot of them walking home from work in their fancy cheap coats. They're tough and they've weathered a lot of storms. Something about their camaraderie makes Marked Woman memorable, even though the film isn't all that great. The uninspired plot involves Humphrey Bogart as an assistant district attorney trying to pin Vanning to several unsolved murders. The courtroom scenes are rather pedestrian. But that Bette Davis fire is certainly here. She's so good, even when her performance is overwrought and over-the-top, that you can't take your eyes off her. (When Vanning smacks her, she looks back at him with contempt, never even flinching.) Davis and the other girls are a formidable team of tough-as-nails broads (and I use the term affectionately). They're played by Lola Lane, Isabel Jewell, Mayo Methot, and Rosalind Marquis. With Jane Bryan and Allen Jenkins. Directed by Lloyd Bacon. 1937.

The Star

Bette Davis is arguably the best actress of the old Hollywood era. Even bad movies are bolstered by a Bette Davis performance, even a bad Bette Davis performance. Davis dominated the screen in the 1930s and early 40s, but by 1950, her career seemed to be over. All About Eve and its writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz "resurrected me from the dead" she once said. All About Eve remains one of the great studies of an actor's neurotic sensibilities, and it signaled a new sub-genre of Hollywood films about Hollywood films and their troubled people. They were generally dark movies, like Sunset Boulevard and In a Lonely Place. All About Eve's heroine, a fictitious Broadway star named Margo Channing, feels threatened by a hot young thing--a seemingly devoted fan named Eve Harrington--and is all the more self-conscious about her career because she's just turned 40. But watching Bette Davis in All About Eve is like watching a fireworks show that has been perfectly paced and brilliantly executed. She gives the best performance of her career in All About Eve, and yet its success led to a lot of rather crummy pictures, like The Star (1952) which is the dark side of Margo Channing. Here she plays Margaret Elliott, a fading movie star who can't get her life together.

Bette Davis was always at her least appealing when she played it pathetic, and her Margaret Elliott--with the exception of a few blowsy, blustery sequences where she shouts at the top of her lungs and that old Davis fire comes back for a moment--is a concoction of camp and mock-tragedy. Watching Bette Davis, you always get the feeling she's being put on display. That only became problematic when it no longer seemed like she was in on the joke. In The Star, it's not clear if she is or isn't. It's quite clear, however, that she's pandering to the audience in a new way that her Margo Channing never did. The Star is fascinating, particularly in its depiction of dead Hollywood acting careers (particularly for actresses, whose beauty/sex appeal has faded). But it's never fun seeing someone like Bette Davis being so defeated by life. When Margaret finally gets a shot at another movie and she ruins it by trying to make her feeble, aging character appear sexy and appealing, it's a new low for the movie and the star. (And that last-minute redemption scene at the end is pure garbage.) Even in movies like Dark Victory, where Davis's character was beautifully terminally ill, she rallied, and we rooted for her. The Star was directed by Stuart Heisler. With Sterling Hayden as a hunky actor that takes Davis's character under his wing. (She helped him start his career years back.) Also with Natalie Wood, in a truly bad performance as Davis's daughter, Warner Anderson, and Fay Baker.

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, longtime foes in real life, finally crossed paths onscreen in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). This bizarre psychological thriller about the hostile, combative relationship between to sisters--both has-been actresses--was a big hit, and ushered in a strange new subgenre of macabre thrillers that revitalized the careers of a number of Hollywood's golden-era leading ladies (including Davis, Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyk).

There's something horribly undignified about seeing Bette Davis doing self-parody. The thing I most admire about Davis as an actress is her fiery strength. She always had the upper-hand (I'm thinking particularly of Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes or Margo Channing in All About Eve). In Baby Jane, she plays the titular character: a former child star whose career faded into the past about the same time her sister, Blanche, became a popular film actress. Now they're both retired and living together in an old house that allegedly belonged to Rudolph Valentino. It's sort of Sunset Boulevard meets Cinderella, and Baby Jane is the wicked warden who keeps her invalid sister under lock and key, playing all kinds of sick mind games on her (and cackling with unhinged glee at the idea of Blanche's finding her dead bird in the lunch dish).

Bette Davis is made to look grotesque and insane, and this certainly rekindled the embers of her career. Throughout the 1960s, she appeared in one demented-old-broad picture after another. In fact, the first Bette Davis film I ever saw was the 1964 Dead Ringer, about twin sisters, one of whom murders the other. (Sound familiar?) When you start at the end of a great actress's career and work your way backwards, it puts you at some kind of chronological disadvantage, but I'm grateful that Dead Ringer gave way to All About Eve and Now, Voyager and all the other inferior but still grandly entertaining vehicles. Baby Jane is sort of the kookoo icing on the cake, except I think I prefer Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte, the one where Davis played yet another crazy old lady, this time opposite Olivia de Havilland.

Joan Crawford shows a fair amount of restraint in Baby Jane. She had spent so much time with over-the-top performances, that it's sort of ironic to find her being collected, almost subtle, in perhaps the most nuttiest of all her movies. (All her mainstream ones, that is.) Crawford, who was a few years older than Bette, looks a lot nicer than her counterpart in this (partly because of all that make-up that turns Bette into the harridan she was always capable of playing.) And she balances out the histrionics for the most part.

But still, Baby Jane is an uneven, overlong affair that's been overly praised by some as a great horror-thriller. It's too perversely obsessed with bringing out old relics from Hollywood's glory days and exposing their wrinkles. It takes pleasure in that masochistic manipulation of two of our most iconic screen actresses. I won't be so naive as to defend their work on the grounds that it's pure art--most of it is camp, or schlock even--and it's because of this that we still remember, and love, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. They're not made to be very endearing in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. (Although I still laughed out loud when Bette called Joan a "bitch" and they muted the sound. And there are a number of funny--some intentional, some not--moments.) Directed by Robert Aldrich. With Victor Buono, Maidie Norman, Anna Lee, and B.D. Merrill (Bette's real-life daughter). 138 min. ★★½

Jezebel

Pre-Gone With the Wind Antebellum South drama, set in New Orleans in 1852-3, in which Bette Davis plays Julie Marsden, a passionate, unconventional, complicated Southern belle who tries to win back her ex-fiance (Henry Fonda) after he's remarried and moved to Boston. Because its story is set before the Civil War, Jezebel (1938) provides some interesting insight into the pre-war clash between Southern and Northern culture. Granted, it's a Hollywoodized insight, but it doesn't seem as rosily nostalgic for the glory days of the Old South the way Gone With the Wind is.

Instead of war, the big scare--the thing that tries to lend this movie some big, epic-style, overarching dramatic weight--is the impending yellow fever that paralyzes New Orleans. But this movie doesn't feel like a lumbering epic, because it's just over 100 minutes, and the director, William Wyler, manages to keep the picture from being self-important. He doesn't go for the overdramatic close-ups too often, and keeps the swelling music in check, and keeps his camera moving to give us multiple points of view, rather than turn this into a stuffy stage play that fixates too long from one angle. (It was based on a play by Owen Davis).

Wyler is much more interested in character than plot. Julie is selfish, but it's her independence of mind for which she's punished by losing the man she loves. When she refuses to wear a white dress to the big ball--donning a red one instead--all of New Orleans society is scandalized by her bucking of the custom. (Those dresses are like little cages draped in decadent muslin. There's a funny scene where Wyler shows us the ugly steel hoops that serve as the structure of the dresses, and you feel really sorry for the ladies who had to war them all the time.) This breaks up her engagement, and eventually he finds another lady to marry.

Bette Davis is of course a legend, but she was also known for her histrionics. In Jezebel, however, Davis exercises masterful control of herself, and her performance is stronger as a result. She lets us see her character flaws in subtle facial expressions rather than big dramatic gestures and screaming voice. Her voice hasn't yet attained that deep, sharp, bellowing quality that would so marvelously serve her Margo Channing in All About Eve. Here, Bette's voice is soft, and she's at her most beautiful. She looks soft and vulnerable, but she's a fighter. Moreover, she's more complicated than you might expect. It's hard to pin her down as a vixen or a heroine--she falls somewhere in the middle, but then her morality spills over into each side at varying times in the movie. She doesn't explain her motivations away, and she doesn't rely on sympathy to get what she wants. In the end, Julie is punished for being too independent, but Davis makes it believable. Julie takes everything that comes at her with a certain degree of calm, as if she knew about it all along. 

Jezebel holds up well. Wyler doesn't marinate his drama in excess--too much. The gaudy Southerners aren't reduced to caricatures; they aren't proffered up cavalierly as cartoons. There's a certain humanity in just about everyone, and yet the movie doesn't sly away form showing how silly some of their customs were. With George Brent, Margaret Lindsay, Fay Bainter, Richard Cromwell, John Litel, Donald Crisp, Spring Byington, Eddie Anderson, Henry O'Neill, and Irving Pichell. Music by Max Steiner.

All About Eve

All About Eve (1950) is just about the bitchiest movie ever made. It's chock full of delicious dialogue (including the famous "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night.") and features Bette Davis in top form. She plays an aging Broadway star named Margo Channing. Anne Baxter plays Eve Herrington, an adoring young fan who cons her way into Margo's inner-circle in order to foster her own acting ambitions. She wants to be the new Margo. It's smashing good fun: overdramatic to the point of self-parody, but also a clever critique of Hollywood culture and the double-edged sword that is Fame.

Written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, All About Eve's impact on pop culture cannot be underestimated. Countless movies and television shows have borrowed its theme of the star being manipulated by a young and devious imposter, but none of these has ever come close to equaling it. 

Bette Davis had been the Queen of Warner Bros. in the 30s and early 40s, but in the years following Now Voyager (1942) her career sagged, and she had just about been written off as a performer. Her performance as the volatile, vicious and vulnerable Margo is perfection, and it briefly revitalized her career. And it's the performance you think of when you think of Bette Davis (unless it's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, but that role moves beyond self-parody into something positively uncanny and even undignified).

With George Sanders, who won an Oscar for his performance as a witty, acerbic drama critic, Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill, Hugh Marlowe, Thelma Ritter, and, in a small role, Marilyn Monroe. Based on the short story "The Wisdom of Eve" by Mary Orr. ★★★★