There isn’t much subtext to Davis’s characterizations she lays everything out for you, but her smaller grace notes are what you remember.ĭavis’s devotion to the concept of platonic love in Old Maid and many other films served as a link to her most avid fans, frustrated gay men of the period, and she continued her Queen of Thwarted Romance mode in the resplendent All This, and Heaven Too, playing a repressed governess caught in the middle of a family nightmare. The way Davis rations the glimpses of the younger girl peeping from this grim old maid signals her consummate control of her effects, which would be meaningless without the sheer soul that guides her every move. Whereas co-star Miriam Hopkins never really ages, Davis relishes coming up with the severest middle-aged look possible: stiff-backed, heavy-lidded, dried-up.
Over the course of this modest, handsome film, Davis turns from a charming, self-effacing girl into a tight-lipped spinster, the sort of transformation she loved because it emphasized that she was an Actress. Or better, the humorous way she touches her gray hair when her daughter (Jane Bryan) pays her an insincere compliment. I’ve always see-sawed back and forth between those two judgments, but watching the first film in this set, The Old Maid, it seems clear that she was definitely a great artist whenever she bothered to rein herself in.Įdmund Goulding’s direction brings out something soft and even shy in her character details just watch the naked, purely adolescent way she confesses her love to George Brent at the beginning of Old Maid. No one before or since has had her level of intensity on the screen, and it’s up to the individual viewer whether her more manic exertions represent a unique, old-fashioned style of overacting or the larger-than-life flourishes of a great artist.
Davis is the auteur of all her movies, and during this star period her scripts were mostly high-flown, novelette-ish trash that she transfigured with the power of her epic-sized technique. All six are lavishly produced star vehicles though they are not her best films from this time, they contain some of her most characteristic work. The six films collected in this third Bette Davis DVD set are all from her golden period at Warner Bros., which lasted from Jezebel in 1938 to Beyond the Forest in 1949.
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