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Dames with masculine names and their weak men, a controlled forest fire provides the evocative image. The Virginia patriarch (Frank Craven) is "soft," the family seal is torn down and engulfed by the ruthless business partner, his wife's brother (Charles Coburn). The arrangement is mirrored via dueling sisters, sensible (Olivia de Havilland) and wanton (Bette Davis), who trade fellows, the tippling surgeon (Dennis Morgan) and the progressive attorney (George Brent). The scandalous elopement and its aftermath are briskly stated, the camera pans from a Victrola playing a rumba to a pair of dancing shoes manipulated like puppets, then tilts up to reveal the pleasure-seeker's bored deadpan in her new Baltimore home. "Married? I'd never have guessed it. You look too happy." A certain truculence can help bring out the perversities of feminine melodrama, John Huston has it in spades ahead of Aldrich (Autumn Leaves). One heroine is an interior decorator and the other is pure reckless motion, the former cautiously pieces her life back together and the latter is welcomed back into the nest only to promptly hit on her old suitor. "Just think what you escaped." "Just think what you missed." A low angle on Coburn gives the shadow of Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, his quasi-incestuous doting on his niece dissipates in the face of his own mortality. The jilted Davis runs over a little girl and blames the Black law clerk (Ernest Anderson), the truth prevails after a fashion, the incendiary stretto depicting the sinner in full flight is most definitely an uncredited Raoul Walsh sequence. "Out of everywhere into nowhere. Is that a poem... or is it a wish?" Huston chills the hothouse in Reflections in a Golden Eye, an oblique companion piece. With Billie Burke, Hattie McDaniel, Lee Patrick, Mary Servoss, and John Hamilton. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |