I posted this a week or so ago at New Critics, and I like it so much, I'd like to make sure you had a chance to see it. People often - mostly because of Baby Jane, lump Davis and Crawford appreciations into the same "gay, movie star" bag. Anyone with a sense of nuance will tell you... not so. Love of Davis is a different animal altogether; Davis was a different kind of star. Which is why I love her, too.
Given that I started this gig at New Critics off of Joan's 100th (or, more likely 103rd), I suppose one ought to consider Bette.
Edward Albee tells this wonderful story - and while it's been everywhere, it's somehow more meaningfulthat he told it to me, and only me, over dinner in a fast food
restaurant on North Avenue in Baltimore - about the fact that Davis
wanted to do Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf on film, and that
she was his first choice. Albee thought it spectacular - and who
wouldn't - that Davis would walk in at the start and say "What a dump.
Who said that, George, 'What a dump'?"
When, of course, it was her.
My Davis initiation came early, and in the best way - the string of films from 1933 to 1941 that virtually define both her and some of the best of Hollywood - Now Voyager, The Letter, Jezebel... some of the best acting, best direction, finest writing that one can see in the Golden Age. Her perch atop the Warner Brothers star system was tailor made - the naturalistic actress paired with the studio most interested in realism, such as it was presented in Depression era film.
I recently recommended - again - All About Eve to a friend, and as I talked about it, I was reminded of how it stands the test of time in the way few films do. The story, the performances, the acting, really could be done tomorrow, and still work in about the same way. People forget that what's stunning about the "Fasten Your Seat Belts" line isn't her delivery of it, but the scene it caps off - a confrontation between Margo and Bill in which Margo veers from wounded tenderness to vindictive jealousy, pulling various strands of things she's heard, and been told, and rearranging them to suit. I could (and do) bow down before the genius of Joe Mankiewicz (for the true triptych, bookend it with A Letter to Three Wives and Suddenly Last Summer), but the work of breaking our hearts belongs to Davis, and she does it, calmly, and effectively. For my money, though, the speech of the film, the one that rarely gets repeated, is later, when Davis and Celeste Holm are stuck in the country in the car that Karen - Holm's character - has rendered inoperable to allow Eve to go on in Margo's place in New York. Margo ruminates on her career and says:
Funny business, a woman's career, the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. It's one career all females have in common - being a woman. Sooner or later we've got to work at it no matter how many other careers we've had or wanted. And in the last analysis nothing is any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed and there he is. Without that you're not a woman. You're something with a French provincial office or a book full of clippings but you're not a woman. Slow curtain, the end.
Frankly, there's little left to be said about Bette Davis; indeed, one wonders how many of these "Centennial celebrations" of dead Hollywood luminaries are in our cards - the list is long, and the excuses getting pretty slim. It's to Davis' credit that we don't just get dusty, outdated, timebound pieces when we look back at her, but vibrancy, and skill, and quality, even now. I know I can recommend a Davis film as a rental not because it's significant to knowing the history of American film, but because it's a damn good, satisfying entertainment. In the end, though, to me, it's that "being a woman" thing that gets me. Davis was feminism before feminism had a name for it; the notion that a woman could decide for herself, live as she chose, bound by nothing and no one. But lonelier, if you can't share it with someone. Davis is parodied, often, for the line "I adore cheap sentiment." But in fact, the line is in Eve, and it's the opposite; in the scene with Holm, switching off the radio, she says "Oh, I despise cheap sentiment." We should. Celebrating Davis doesn't need an excuse as flimsy as her centenary. Just go rent one of her films. You'll get it.
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