Post Description

The Bette Davis Collection, Vol. 3


The Old Maid (1939)      
All This and Heaven Too (1940)     
The Great Lie (1941)
In This Our Life (1942)    
Watch on the Rhine (1943)     
Deception (1946)

 The Old Maid (1939): Bette Davis was fresh from the successes of Juarez (1939), Dark Victory (1939) and her Oscar-winning Jezebel (1938). The director, Edmund Goulding, had already guided her through two films (and would work with her again on The Great Lie in 1941). Jane Bryan, playing her daughter, had previously costarred with Davis in three films; the actresses were to remain lifelong friends.

All This and Heaven Too (1940): Davis in relatively subdued form as a governess accused of having an affair with a married nobleman (Boyer) in 19th century France, and of aiding and abetting in the murder of his neurotically jealous wife (O'Neil). Telling her innocent story in flashback to a class of American schoolchildren who have recognised her as a notorious woman, she is eventually rewarded by their sympathy and understanding. Adapted from a bestseller by Rachel Field, it's a pretty long, gloomy haul, though lavishly mounted (with photography by Ernest Haller) and sensitively acted.

The Great Lie (1941): Sudsy melo as George Brent divorces concert pianist Astor, marries Davis, and then leaves a metaphorical Amazon jungle for the real one, where he apparently dies in a plane crash. Meanwhile, back in the big smoke, Astor discovers that she's pregnant and Davis wants to adopt the baby as a souvenir of her darling hubby. The leading ladies blast away at each other like pocket battleships, while Max Steiner and Tchaikovsky provide a sumptuous musical background.

In This Our Life (1942): Bette Davis steals her sister's husband and ruins her life in this out-of-control family melodrama. 'No one is as good as Bette when she's bad,' claimed the publicity, and she's bad in this all right. John Huston (whose second film this was) wrote that 'there is a demon within Bette which threatens to break out and eat everybody, beginning with their ears. I let the demon go'. In the roadhouse sequence, the sharp-eyed will spot most of the cast from Huston's first picture, The Maltese Falcon, including Bogart, Astor, Greenstreet, Lorre, and the director's father, Walter.


Watch on the Rhine (1943): Warner Bros. had led Hollywood in criticizing fascism before the start of World War II with pictures like Confession of a Nazi Spy (1939). Once the U.S. entered the war, they supported the war effort with a series of films about the Nazi menace, including All Through the Night (1942), Desperate Journey (1942) and this adaptation of Lillian Hellman's daring 1939 play. In fact, Warner's seemed the only studio capable of doing justice to her condemnation of fascism, written at a time when many in the U.S. still supported Hitler's government.


Deception (1946): Four years after Now Voyager, Deception resurrects the same team for another grand emotional wallow - the 'woman's picture' at its historical zenith. Here, though, the passions are even more overblown, with Rains, excellent as a mad, bad composer, exerting a Svengali-like influence over Davis, his duplicitous pupil, and Henreid, as the master cellist who needs Rains' new composition to make his reputation but needs Davis even more. As she lies her way out of Rains' clutches and into marriage with Henreid, so the effects of her 'deceptions' become more corrosive. 

Bonus: Stardust: The Bette Davis Story (2006)

Deze documentaire laat de succesvolle carrière en het stormachtige privé leven van Bette Davis zien; één van de meest gelauwerde actrices van Hollywood. 

#  Actors: Bette Davis, Mary Astor, Miriam Hopkins, George Brent, Claude Rains
# Format: Box set, Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD, Full Screen, Restored, NTSC
# Language: English (Dolby Digital 1.0)
# Subtitles: English, French
#  Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
# Number of discs: 7 (6 x dvd9  1 x dvd5)