What ever happened to bette davis?

And Davis—she still spits fire and rakes her co-stars with those Gollum eyes, still breaks the rules and the stemware with the hauteur of a queen accepting her due. Warner Home Video is releasing its third DVD box set devoted to the actress’s films, in which nestles one forgotten, unholy jewel that goes to the heart of what Davis was about.

It’s called In This Our Life, made in 1942, between The Man Who Came to Dinner and Now, Voyager (possibly her single best movie), “Life” casts the star as Stanley, the sweet-voiced, black-hearted sister of Roy (Olivia de Haviland). (What’s with the men’s names?)

Stanley steals her sister’s husband and drives him to suicide. Stanley runs down a little girl with her car, pinning the blame on a saintly black man. Stanley cosies up to her perverted moneybags uncle and hints she’ll do anything to earn his favour.

Stanley is b-a-a-d, and no one could have played her better than the ruthless Ruth Elizabeth Davis, late of 22 Lewis Street in Newton, Massachusetts. John Huston who once directed Davis, wrote, “There is something elemental about Bette—a demon within her which threatens to break out and eat everybody, beginning with their ears. I let the demon go.”

Think of her in 1932’s Cabin in the Cotton (the film in which she committed to celluloid the deathless line “I’d love to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair”) and realise how close she came to define the ice mermaid. Davis remains the prickliest and most complex of classic-era stars. Davis fought and swore and battled with directors to the very end. She also spoke the language of the ladies in the back row of the Bijou better than almost any other working actress of her time.

How? By acting out their own contradictions and throttled fantasies. Davis was a combination martyr and avenging angel. Initially the prude in the rough-and-tumble Hollywood’s boys’ club, she learned to give as good as she got. She lived out daydreams of life’s unfairness (the spoiled rich girl dying of a brain tumor in Dark Victory), of the consequences of headstrong behaviour (her Oscar-winning spoiled belle in Jezebel, wearing a red dress to an all-white ball and losing fiance Henry Fonda to the scandal), of being too spoiled and selfish (the vain cluck of a wife in Mr. Skeffington).

Her films were about female power first denied, then breaking through in a sensory overload of goodness or scalding villainy. What kinds of power does a woman want? What kinds can she hope for? How does the difference between the two warp her? Every Bette Davis film asks these questions, even 1950’s All About Eve, in which Broadway star Margot Channing has it all while understanding it can all be taken from her in an instant.

Bette Davis was a neurotic actress. Yet overacting was only one weapon in her arsenal. She found her style in a clipped, off-kilter vocal delivery and an edgy physical presence. The famous Bette Davis gaze—the downcast eyes rising halfway, falling, then rising to stare the other actor full in the face—is a trick used by the actress to give her characters away. Through it we see the manipulativeness of women who think manipulation is their only choice. As it sometimes is.

After World War II, Davis’ career foundered. She made two classics, Eve and the outrageous What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Her professional jealousies got the better of her, and her fourth marriage, to actor Gary Merrill, fizzled. Instead of an institution, like Hepburn, she became camp, fodder for gay parodies that fondly but crudely coloured outside the lines she drew.

Yet in her prime there was no star as demanding or as watchable—none who drew the line so far out in the sand and explored the consequences.
-Melissa Magsaysay (NYT)