|
Bette Davis back in 1800s Theater of Cruelty, with Edmund Goulding's grasp more merciful than Wyler's. As in Dark Victory, her speed is the key—the bounce of a debutante congealing into a spinster's glide, a movement reversed in Now, Voyager. Her cousin (Miriam Hopkins) is about to marry into "a life of elegant boredom," her old beau (George Brent) returns on the morning of the wedding only to be turned away, a night with the bridesmaid is his consolation before heading off to the Civil War. Cue montage of battlefields and graveyards, and Davis running a nursery for war orphans and doting on one little girl with suspiciously maternal care. Once the truth comes out, Hopkins gets her revenge by dissipating her cousin's own nuptials, and then inviting her into her home and adopting the illegitimate child (who grows into Jane Bryan). Davis' best lava-spilling moment is a wrathful dart of the eyes as she learns from her ex-groom (Jerome Cowan) about the scheming, but soon she's desiccated, corseted and powdered, playing meddlesome "aunt" to her own daughter. "What else can she ever call me?" Edith Wharton twice removed (Zoe Akins play, Casey Robinson scenario), the weight of social rules still suffuses the characters' self-lacerations. A meticulous assembly of tender betrayals, vendettas and motherly passion plays, aging and memory and the tragedy of "tenacity to a fixed idea." A chilling happy ending: The daughter's position in high society is made "unassailable" while the two divas are left to each other in the mausoleum, "with Heaven knows what thoughts to keep us company." (The affinities with The Magnificent Ambersons and Gertrud are clear.) With Donald Crisp, William Lundigan, James Stephenson, Louise Fazenda, and Cecilia Loftus. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |