Classic movie site with rare images, original ads, and behind-the-scenes photos, with informative and insightful commentary. We like to have fun with movies!
Archive and Links
grbrpix@aol.com
Search Index Here




Sunday, January 30, 2011




Bette Runs The Show









A Stolen Life (recently out from Warner archives) was the first Bette Davis melodrama revisited in maybe a year, so I'd forgotten how compelling best of her stuff could be. Did any star make a worse mistake leaving her/his place of employment? Cagney when he split Warners, perhaps. Errol Flynn too, for that matter. Davis minus WB machinery won't float for me. Much of what's good about A Stolen Life is so because they'd perfected the brand and knew what pleased. Bette's great, but I want Warner wrappings with her. Take those away and you're left with Payment On Demand, The Star, or (worse) Another Man's Poison. I've said before how crucial Max Steiner's music is to a Bette Davis experience. She realized and acknowledged as much in talks with historians. Pics from leaving WB onward were one-woman shows on what seemed a bare stage (All About Eve an obvious exception). Davis was aging and that too accelerated decline. I remember reading somewhere of Cagney admitting (if grudgingly) Warners' efficiency with sets they'd built for his comeback-to-the-fold Angels With Dirty Faces, this after JC's Grand National defection and vehicles to demonstrate that even dynamos like Jim could not bake cakes without flour.





The record's replete as to Davis being difficult, rolling over directorial authority toward her way and dispatching theirs to highways. A Stolen Life's helmer Curtis Bernhardt lived long enough to get his version of events on the record. Bette took that dispatch and answered back, but firm. It was a he-said, she-said thirty years past anyone but late show mavens caring, but illustrates vividly how pride is a final faculty to go. Davis was a great interview resource for having a memory like elephants, not forgetting detail down to costumes and even poster art Warners bungled on shows dating to ingénue years. Somebody or other had good ideas for A Stolen Life, its New England setting off-usual recipe for Davis, but congenial to backgrounds she favored when not working (Yankee-land being BD's natural habitat). Having her play twins is a device I'm surprised wasn't consulted long before 1946. It would be again, far more nastily, twenty years hence in Dead Ringer, otherwise an effort to do things an old-fashioned way. I'll bet crowds gasped when Stolen Life's BD # 1 lit BD # 2's cigarette ... effects this convincing were possible at majors with their $ and technical expertise ... where or who else could pull it off? Bette might (should) have consulted that reality before stepping off Beyond The Forest a few years later and saying goodbye to support essential for putting over her kind of star vehicle.












A Stolen Life was special for being produced, at least on paper, by Bette Davis (A B.D. Production, reads credits). Biographers suggest it was a tax dodge, A-list salaries going mostly to gov'ment coffers at the time, necessitating devices like hers and fellow WB'er Errol Flynn, who'd recently whipped up Thomson Productions to avert onerous duties to his adopted Uncle Sam. Davis, however, seized the label at face value to ramp up creative input already a prerogative on shows she headlined. Script revision was this time done in front of shooting rather than as outcome of fierce on-set argument, and despite her claiming later to have had no more producer control than a man on the moon, I'd like thinking A Stolen Life reflects BD's how-to for a vehicle finally rendered her way. If in fact she labored beyond producer in name only, then regret is A Stolen Life being one-off it was, for Davis in charge of her own unit might have kept stardom's lamp burning for at least a few more Warner seasons.










BD and columnists she spoke with usually got round to her pet peeve of censors bowdlerizing scripts and product emerging from said weakened tea. It was worse after the war when audiences began nixing movie romance shorn of reality. A Stolen Life's set-up amounts to this: Bette loves Glenn Ford and it looks like he's on board, until saucy twin (also BD) lures him to the altar. Sailing mishap that follows leaves twin dead and means of Bette assuming her identity and place in the marital bed ... a socko construct you could remake today ... but in 1946? No way could you pay off on tantalizing possibilities here, Davis knowing A Stolen Life's strongest meat would be deemed unsafe for Code consumption. Letdown and compromise was part/parcel of moviegoing experience then. Patrons learned to translate dissolves, a tie loosened where it was not in a previous scene --- whatever got across offscreen coupling that Junior wouldn't detect. Bette Davis films got closest inspection because they dealt with events leading to sex, even if it was cancelled-on-arrival. Censor-mandated necessity in A Stolen Life is keeping faux-wife Bette out of conjugal harm's way with unknowing Glenn Ford, denying us consummation the whole improbable business has led up to. As Jerry Colonna used to say, I can dream, can't I?, and indeed, mere suggestion and imagination taking it from there might have been enough to satisfy fans who knew from experience what they couldn't see in this or any other Bette Davis show.

























Trouble was teeth baring in noirish mellers Joan Crawford was now generating at Warners. Mildred Pierce preceded A Stolen Life and showed what a woman's picture with guts looked like. Maybe I should say gats, for Crawford packing heat in designer handbags lured male patronage till now indifferent to love travails among stardom's sorority. Murder as a feminine pursuit widened appeal of Crawford and free-lancing Barbara Stanwyck. Bette Davis as twins or no was hard put competing with that, A Stolen Life's best ever BD-profit attributable more to record year 1946 than increasing interest in her (the next, Deception, initiated a boxoffice falling off). Crawford at WB would run out of steam too, but not so soon as Davis, and the former's embrace of woman-in-peril themes for a 50's spike put JC ahead of BD during seasons wherein both worked hardest at staying relevant. Pitting them against one another in Baby Jane's mansion of horrors was natural outcome to all this and must have been long-awaited satisfaction for customers longing to see gloves finally off both Davis and Crawford.

12 Comments:

Blogger Dugan said...

My compliments on a very good post.

"A Stolen Life" is a very good Bette Davis picture.

10:15 PM  
Anonymous Jim Lane said...

You raise an interesting point, John. For all their carping and whining about what a dreary factory Warner Bros. was, Jack L. a vulgar penny-pinching slavedriver, etc., did anyone besides Darryl F. Zanuck ever go on to bigger and better things after leaving there? Davis? Flynn? De Havilland? Curtiz? Mervyn LeRoy? Tab Hunter?

5:12 PM  
Anonymous Lee said...

A favorite Davis picture, and one that spawned a favorite Carol Burnett parody of a Davis picture, Burnett's version bearing the title "A Swiped Life."

9:22 PM  
Blogger VP81955 said...

Where special effects were concerned, Roy Seawright at Hal Roach Studios could hold his own with anyone, as witness his work on the "Topper" films.

9:38 PM  
Blogger Scott MacGillivray said...

Jim said...
Warner Bros. ...did anyone besides Darryl F. Zanuck ever go on to bigger and better things after leaving there?


Sure! Ronald Reagan! (Couldn't resist the setup.)

11:32 AM  
Anonymous MarcH said...

I think Davis had tremendous range as an actress. In all honesty, think about this: the woman in THE LITTLE FOXES, IN THIS OUR LIFE, NOW VOYAGER, EX-LADY and OF HUMAN BONDAGE is the same person!

I cant think of any of her contemporaries with that kind of range.

12:22 PM  
Blogger Mike Cline said...

A STOLEN LIFE in my county:

July 31-August 1, 1946 - ROCKWELL Theatre - Rockwell, N.C.

August 25-28, 1946 - CAPITOL Theatre - Salisbury, N.C.

October 28-29, 1946 - SPENCER THEATRE - Spencer, N.C.


December 19-20, 1946 - LANDIS Theatre - Landis, N.C.

2:24 PM  
Anonymous Jim Lane said...

To Scott M.: Touche! Of course Reagan did, and I'm ashamed I didn't think of it. How much cleverer I'd have looked if I'd said "...did anyone besides Darryl F. Zanuck and Ronald Reagan..."

5:31 PM  
Blogger Scott MacGillivray said...

Seriously, Jim did ask a valid question and it's only natural that Reagan would not immediately come to mind, because Jim listed only Warner's elite, A-pictures-only personnel.

If we leave out A pictures, I might make a case for John Wayne (of Warner westerns, who went onward and upward); the Dead End Kids in general and Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall in particular, who kept going for another 20 years; and any number of actors who started at Warners but made more of an impression elsewhere: Dick Foran, Robert Paige, Burns & Allen, Warren Hull, John Payne, and Veda Ann Borg are some examples.

11:55 AM  
Blogger MDG14450 said...

"the Dead End Kids in general and Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall in particular"

They kept going, but I wouldn't necessarily say to "bigger and better things."

BTW, TCM has been showing Bowery Boys on the weekends sometimes--Only caught pieces, but these were standard saturday and Sunday fillers on NYC TV

12:47 PM  
Anonymous r.j. said...

Well, while I absolutely agree with your general premise that certain stars just seemed to "belong" and shine far better on their respective home-lots (Gable, Tracy, Ty Power, Claudette Colbert, one could go on and on) certainly one can make the possibly singular exception for Ms. Davis with "All About Eve", perhaps her finest hour.

We had a girl working in our office who thanks to my evil influence became an old movie "nut" like the rest of us, only she had trouble keeping titles straight. She was particularly fond of Davis and Joan Crawford, and told me she was excited about that night's offering on TCM, "Poison Another Man". (Maybe SHE should have been working at the studio!)

Best, R.J.

5:08 PM  
Blogger John McElwee said...

Hey RJ, maybe she was anticipating a TCM showing of "Another Man's Poison," though I must say, I like HER title better!

6:34 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home

grbrpix@aol.com
  • December 2005
  • January 2006
  • February 2006
  • March 2006
  • April 2006
  • May 2006
  • June 2006
  • July 2006
  • August 2006
  • September 2006
  • October 2006
  • November 2006
  • December 2006
  • January 2007
  • February 2007
  • March 2007
  • April 2007
  • May 2007
  • June 2007
  • July 2007
  • August 2007
  • September 2007
  • October 2007
  • November 2007
  • December 2007
  • January 2008
  • February 2008
  • March 2008
  • April 2008
  • May 2008
  • June 2008
  • July 2008
  • August 2008
  • September 2008
  • October 2008
  • November 2008
  • December 2008
  • January 2009
  • February 2009
  • March 2009
  • April 2009
  • May 2009
  • June 2009
  • July 2009
  • August 2009
  • September 2009
  • October 2009
  • November 2009
  • December 2009
  • January 2010
  • February 2010
  • March 2010
  • April 2010
  • May 2010
  • June 2010
  • July 2010
  • August 2010
  • September 2010
  • October 2010
  • November 2010
  • December 2010
  • January 2011
  • February 2011
  • March 2011
  • April 2011
  • May 2011
  • June 2011
  • July 2011
  • August 2011
  • September 2011
  • October 2011
  • November 2011
  • December 2011
  • January 2012
  • February 2012
  • March 2012
  • April 2012
  • May 2012
  • June 2012
  • July 2012
  • August 2012
  • September 2012
  • October 2012
  • November 2012
  • December 2012
  • January 2013
  • February 2013
  • March 2013
  • April 2013
  • May 2013
  • June 2013
  • July 2013
  • August 2013
  • September 2013
  • October 2013
  • November 2013
  • December 2013
  • January 2014
  • February 2014
  • March 2014
  • April 2014
  • May 2014
  • June 2014
  • July 2014
  • August 2014
  • September 2014
  • October 2014
  • November 2014
  • December 2014
  • January 2015
  • February 2015
  • March 2015
  • April 2015
  • May 2015
  • June 2015
  • July 2015
  • August 2015
  • September 2015
  • October 2015
  • November 2015
  • December 2015
  • January 2016
  • February 2016
  • March 2016
  • April 2016
  • May 2016
  • June 2016
  • July 2016
  • August 2016
  • September 2016
  • October 2016
  • November 2016
  • December 2016
  • January 2017
  • February 2017
  • March 2017
  • April 2017
  • May 2017
  • June 2017
  • July 2017
  • August 2017
  • September 2017
  • October 2017
  • November 2017
  • December 2017
  • January 2018
  • February 2018
  • March 2018
  • April 2018
  • May 2018
  • June 2018
  • July 2018
  • August 2018
  • September 2018
  • October 2018
  • November 2018
  • December 2018
  • January 2019
  • February 2019
  • March 2019
  • April 2019
  • May 2019
  • June 2019
  • July 2019
  • August 2019
  • September 2019
  • October 2019
  • November 2019
  • December 2019
  • January 2020
  • February 2020
  • March 2020
  • April 2020
  • May 2020
  • June 2020
  • July 2020
  • August 2020
  • September 2020
  • October 2020
  • November 2020
  • December 2020
  • January 2021
  • February 2021
  • March 2021
  • April 2021
  • May 2021
  • June 2021
  • July 2021
  • August 2021
  • September 2021
  • October 2021
  • November 2021
  • December 2021
  • January 2022
  • February 2022
  • March 2022
  • April 2022
  • May 2022
  • June 2022
  • July 2022
  • August 2022
  • September 2022
  • October 2022
  • November 2022
  • December 2022
  • January 2023
  • February 2023
  • March 2023
  • April 2023
  • May 2023
  • June 2023
  • July 2023
  • August 2023
  • September 2023
  • October 2023
  • November 2023
  • December 2023
  • January 2024
  • February 2024
  • March 2024