C/D: Bette Davis

seeing "whatever happened to baby jane" on the big screen tonight !

xpost - ...and every other kind of nonsense besides

Hmmm...when will the 1940s film poll results be published?

"I Killed Bette Davis," by Larry Cohen (part 1)

http://filmcomment.com/article/i-killed-bette-davis

so Bondage on DVD this week

http://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/review/of-human-bondage

Only found out today she's 'Bette' because of Balzac

heartily recommend the trashy and daring In This Our Life, whether you read James Baldwin's praise for it or not. Her eyes are huge in this one, and man when she tickles uncle Charles Coburn to get money out of him...

Her character is named Stanley, and Obama's mother was thus named Stanley, wtf!

heh – I watched it years ago thanks to Baldwin.

John Huston and Davis both thought it was a stinker; they're wrong.

https://hollywoodbibliotheque.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/inthisourlife1.png?w=570

Saw The Whales of August at MoMA yesterday; at least it's (somewhat) better written than On Golden Pond. Lillian Gish is adorable, perhaps a tad too, and Davis, her face and movements altered by a stroke, is very Davis. When she's thrashing around in bed having a nightmare, she's very wraithlike; something out of A Chinese Ghost Story.

http://www.wearysloth.com/Gallery/ActorsD/4286-21021.gif

what struck me when I saw it years ago is how Davis looked older than Gish.

Yeah, she had more health problems; died 3+ years sooner.

Vincent Price was charming. The movie's pace was on Geritol though.

Price's stagy Russian accent came and went.

I watched a weird one from 1956 the other night: Storm Center. She's a small town librarian who refuses to remove a pro-communism book from her shelf and gets caught up in a red witch hunt. Co-starring Brian Keith and Good Ol' Mister Wilson from Dennis The Menace, Joseph Kearns. Overwrought and not very good, but kind of fascinating nonetheless.

I rewatched Baby Jane, and in addition to being funny, frightening and in total command of her body language, the early scene where she's dazily singing "Letter to Daddy" and then crumbles in grief when she looks in the mirror is genuinely crushing.

also, the Self-Styled Siren had some things to say about Feud, Baby Jane, camp, Davis and Crawford:

"A lot of the story about [Davis and Crawford] goes back to a book by Shaun Considine called Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud. It's written in a very lively manner — and it's very erratically sourced.

"The TV series is going with the worst stories about what went down on that set. As far as I know, [director Robert] Aldrich later said that they were really very well-behaved on set. They didn't like one another, but they both needed a hit. They weren't going to endanger that with diva-ish tantrums....

"(What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) was meant to be a commercial hit, but I do think it was meant to be taken seriously. Both of those women were taking it intensely seriously. They're playing it at a very high pitch of emotion and drama, but that does not mean that they're camping it up. Quite the opposite. I've never regarded this movie as camp."

http://www.mtv.com/news/2988210/feuds-sacred-monsters/

Terrific interview. I had a problem with the Bass-esque credits too (I got distracted and didn't watch last week's episode and indeed have seen none of them).

Interesting write-up of The Scientific Cardplayer, mentioned upthread: https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-forgotten-beating-bette

This is how you introduce a star!!! pic.twitter.com/GQzMsSyeqZ

— Peter Labuza (@labuzamovies) November 3, 2019

Was glad to catch her bad girl bit in Fog Over Frisco, especially the breezing through the nightclub scene that follows the intro above.

Jamie Lee Curtis:

Bette Davis! So, I lived in a building in Los Angeles called the Colonial House, and it was referred to as the Dakota West. Bette Davis lived in the building, along with other filmmakers. At twenty-seven, I became the president of the board. Nobody wanted the job, and I was, like, “I’ll do it.” I’m very organized.

And so, two things. One, Miss Davis would call me in July and August, saying, “I want the heat.” I’d be, like, “I’m so sorry, Miss Davis, it’s not possible, because it’s July, and it’s a hundred and five degrees, and we’re all dying, and I can’t turn on the boilers.” She goes, “*I want the heat*.” She would lay by the pool in a big black hat and a black maillot bathing suit with high heels, black sunglasses.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/jamie-lee-curtis-has-never-worked-hard-a-day-in-her-life

Now, Voyager is mostly terrible, but Warners knew how to make plushness entertaining. The film's best moments all revolve around David and Dame Gladys Cooper squaring off.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Friday, June 2, 2006 2:16 PM (fourteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

You still think so? I was quite taken with it last year

No. I've learned to live with the squeamish elements. She puts so much intensity into the duckling phase of her development that when she relaxes into the princess phase it takes my breath away.

Yeah it really rides the line of schmaltz but for me never veered. Makes a good pair with The Heiress.

I've considered how Davis would've worked in The Heiress. Answer: not at all. I can't imagine her playing the gawky, gauche Catherine, and she's unthinkable opposite Ralph Richardson -- she would've eaten him alive.

wdve slayed in many Streep roles tho

Oh my god, every.

I agree that BD couldn't pull off the extreme about-face that OdH pulls off in The Heiress, partly because her "homely" phase would've have been as shocking and her cruel turn would be typical. So much of that movie is the character's infantile behavior/demeanor/mannerisms, and OdH is so brilliant and subtle, and all I can think of is BD in Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, totally flailing.

well HHSC is waaaaay past her prime, that's not fair

de Havilland ever so slightly overplays the homeliness, but the subtle framing and the exchanges with Clift, Richardson, and Hopkins help.

She is awesome in "The Nanny". Weirdly, that might be the only thing I have ever seen her in.

This was on tonight, the children in this film are so good - well, one of them was Pamela Franklin, so no surprise her being so good, but the boy in the film only appeared in one other film ("Doctor Doolittle").

OF HUMAN BONDAGE (1934)

enjoying her (not bad) cockney accent

the character leslie howard is playing wants slapping but i guess that's why it has this title

Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte is fuuuuuuuuuuuuun.

The title song turns up in some strange places. Fassbinder has the porn seller/police informant Carla sing it to herself in front of a mirror in "Gods of the Plague". Stranger yet though there's this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlrZUO0QlPA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVTrlB1rVLk