Hollywood Studio Magazine (1977)

‘ That Certain Woman, which cast a be mused, young Henry Fonda opposite Davis, was aremake of Gloria Swanson’s old weepie, The Trespasser. She played the wellworn role of the girl from the wrong side of the tracks, who loves married man lan Hunter, but marries Fonda, whose father then has the marriage annulled. Davis goes back to being Hunter’s secretary and has Fonda's child in secret. Fonda marries Anita Louise, who becomes hope Bette Davis and Henry Fonda in That Certain Woman, 1937 lessly Crippled in an accident on her honeymoon. Hunter develops a fever from a disease known only to Hollywood scriptwriters and dies, leaving Davis and her son very well provided for. There’s more. .. . Hunter's widow assumes her husband had been the father of Davis’s child when the press makes a sensation of the affair. Fonda's father, realizing thatthe childis his grandson, tries to have the boy taken from Davis on grounds that she is unfit. So Davis nobly has Fonda and his crippled wife adopt the child, and she goes off to Europe to sulk and suffer alone. There’s more... . When Louise expires, Davis and Fonda finally get together for the simple reason that nobody else is still alive. There would not be another tawdry potboiler likethis in Davis’s career until Beyond the Forest, twelve years later. Bette Davis and Errol Flynn in The Sisters, 1938 Anatole Litvak directed Errol Flynn and Davis in The Sisters, atale of turn-of-thecentury San Francisco, climaxed by the great earthquake. Based on a popular novel by Myron Brinig, itwas manufactured as a vehicle for Warners’ King and Queen. But Davis despised Flynn because she thought him an indifferent actor, and because he was billed before her in deference to the enormous popularity of his swashbucklers. Otherwise, the movie was simply the story of three sisters—Anita Louise and Jane Bryan were the others—and how they grew, loved, and suffered between two inaugural balls. twas minor Davis, but she had almost reached the stage where she could dono wrong. Bette Davis and Henry Fonda in Jezebel, 1938 she flirted outrageously, sent men offto their doom, and behaved, generally, as ifthe Civil War was merely ameansto coalesce all of the havoc she had so carelessly wrought. And one had to wait until the eighth reel for stern spinster aunt Fay Bainter to bring Jezebel Davis to her senses and add up her follies. Bette Davis and George Brent in Dark Victory, 1939 Dark Victory may be the quintessential Bette Davis movie. Based on a play in which Tallulah Bankhead had lasted only a few weeks, the film featured Casey Robinson's juiced-up Jezebel! was Bette Davis's answer to losing Scarlett O’ Hara. Based on a flop play by Owen Davis, which Miriam Hopkins had done on Broadway four years earlier, itwas alchemized with a scalding screenplay by several writers, including John Huston, and directed with the customary sharpness and finesse of William Wyler. It won Davis her second Oscar. As a belle ofthe antebellum South, she marches into the Cosmos Ball inscarlet, whereas all of the other simpering virgins are wearing white. The film was shrewdly crafted to display Davis ina variety of moods and passions as 8 HOLLYWOOD STUDIO Magazine Davis would atone in altogether magnifi cent fashion: She persuades the insipid young Margaret Lindsay, whom Henry Fonda had married simply to escape the Jezebel’s clutches, that she is too tender and inexperienced to be much good to Fonda, who has caught yellow fever. As Fondais carried offinacartto dieona quarantined island, Davis goes in her stead, tenderly mopping Fonda's face, as drums roll and torches flare. But nobody, nobody could everholda candle to Davis in those great final scenes when she was marching up a staircase, strolling into a fog, quietly dying of prognosis negative, or simply slouching along the street of regrets. screenplay. Edmund Goulding, who knew how to make women look almost as good as George Cukor did, directed it to display Davis as agleeming diamond, surrounded by a Tiffany setting of worshippers, the ubiquitous George Brent, and Geraldine Fitzgerald, Humphrey Bogart, and a Ronald Reagan long ‘before he dreamed of being governor of any place. Davis, aspoiled, rich girl, learns she is going blind, whichis symptomatic of her fatal illness—another rare one known only to Hollywood writers. She decides she is going to live to the hill before she dies, but she is brought to her senses by Dr. Brent and best friend Fitzgerald, and she dies with a grace in the final scene that most actresses would happily have given their own lives to play.