Hollywood Studio Magazine (1977)

Our Life with Olivia de Havilland. Now, Voyager cast Davis as a New England spinster, dowdy, neurotic, and repressed by her dowager mother, Gladys Cooper. Thanks to psychiatrist Claude Rains and sister-in-law Ilka Chase, Davis goes toa beauty salon, gets some smart clothes, goes abroad, and gets Paul Henreid. As this is still a Davis vehicle, Henreidis necessarily married, and has atroubled daughter who seems incipiently to have all of the symptoms Davis had before she discovered Elizabeth Arden. The kitsch was so well done, Davis so fine, her supporting Cast so superior, thatthe film remains fun to see even now. Claude Rains and Bette Davis in Mr. Skeffington, 1944 Mr. Skeffington, adapted from the story by “Elizabeth,” gave Davis and Claude Rainsa marvelous opportunity to display their histrionics, as they enacted what seemed like the entire gamut of human emotions, ina story set over the first half of the twentieth century. Davis was the willful, selfish, beautiful daughter ofan aristocratic but impoverished New York family; Rains was the Jewish banker for whom her scapegrace brother worked. When her brother's embezzlement could no longer be covered up, Davis coolly 10 HOLLYWOOD STUDIO Magazine Bette Davis and Paul Lukas in Watch on the Rhine, 1943 When Lillian Hellman’s Broadway play, Watch on the Rhine, was transferred tothe screen with its original cast virtually intact— Paul Lukas, Lucile Watson, George Coulouris—Davis agreed to take a secondary role to Lukas because she believed inthe playwright's warning to an isolationistminded America that fascism might exist under its very roof. She further realized that her powerful name was needed to bolster the box-office value of a film of this kind. In return, Hellman and Dashiell Hammett somewhat bolstered the role of the American wife of a European intellectual (Lukas) who has become an anti-Fascist fighter. The story is somewhat dated today, but Hellman’'s clear, fine speeches and the excellent work of the cast remain as sharp as ever. married the banker, who adored her, and she blithely continued her career of love affairs. She was so beautiful (and rich) that as she got older, the young men got younger, and Rains finally got the point and returned to Germany. He had the unfortunate judgment to still be there when Hitler took over, and was sentto aconcentration camp. Meanwhile, his glamorous wife was having some trouble of her own. She contracted diphtheria, and suddenly her looks and youth were gone with her hair. When Rains returned from abroad, wrecked and blind, he still thought his wife must be young and beautiful. This enabled Davis and Rains to play the greatest staircase scene of them all. Miriam Hopkins and Bette Davis in Old Acquaintance, 1943 Davis and Miriam Hopkins co-starred again, in John van Druten’s wryly amusing Old Acquaintance, inthe roles Jane Cowl and Peggy Wood had done on Broadway. They played schoolgirl chums whose friendship is broken up when Davis goes to New York to become a novelist and Hopkins marries and raises a family. Davis's success sparks Hopkins to writea trashv. commercial novel that is so popular it encourages her to write novel after novel, while husband John Loder is given up in favor of her career. She becomes rich and famous and has everything but the prestige, which, to her fury, Davis has. The film is vastly entertaining as the two old pros—who didn’t much like each other off camera either—go at eachother, across the years, in designer qowns. Bette Davis and Mildred Dunnock in The Cornis Green, 1945 By now, at thirty-seven, Davis was not only the Queen of Hollywood, but its undisputed grande dame, who could do whatever she liked. She chose Emlyn William's The Corn is Green as her next vehicle. Init she played Miss Moffat, the elderly British schoolmistress who comes to a small Welsh village and sees the genius in a poor young student, nurtures it, and sacrifices so that he will have a great career, thus justifying her own barren existence. Davis was aged and padded but there was something a bit theatrical about the movie, perhaps because John Dall offered no strong plausibility as the boy.