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.

The Searchers

The Searchers (1956) has often been cited as a great Western, particularly because of the spare Texas vistas captured by Winton Hoch's camera and the surefooted, straightforward yet thoughtful direction of John Ford. In The Searchers John Wayne spends a good many years trying to track down his two nieces, who were captured by the Comanches. In most Westerns, the cowboy is a kind of active agent that affects everyone and everything around him. In The Searchers, we watch how the cowboy copes--or doesn't cop--with being rendered a passive failure for much of the film. It's an interesting twist, and yet the movie feels like nothing much happens. It is entertaining and funny up to a point, but I don't see the brilliance that people claim is there. John Wayne shows his usual adeptness at dishing out the one-liners, and he runs circles around his charmingly befuddled sidekick, Jeffrey Hunter (who may have the most piercing blue eyes in cinema history, perhaps even bluer than Paul Newman's). Hunter is prominently featured in one of the film's most memorable (to me at least) shots, in which he runs toward his family's ravaged homestead and we the audience see the look of terror mixed with grief and fear in his face. It's such a powerful little moment. The supporting cast includes Vera Miles (who overacts somethin' fierce), Ward Bond, Natalie Wood, John Qualen, Olive Carey, Henry Brandon (as Scar), Ken Curtis, Harry Carey, Jr., and Hank Worden, who steals every scene he's in. I could never tell if he was crazy, kidding, drunk, or a combination of all three, but he makes for good comic relief. ★★½