The great Bette Davis enjoyed a ten-year career peak between 1934 and 1944, half driven by her brittle, hard-edged, ache-in-the-heart element opposite strong male costars, and the second half largely propelled by her women-centric tragedies.
Among the highlights of Davis’s glory period: Of Human Bondage (’34), The Petrified Forest (’36), Marked Woman (’37), Jezebel (’38), Dark Victory (’39), Juarez (’39), The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (’39), All This, and Heaven Too (’40), The Bride Canme COD (’40), The Letter (1940), The Little Foxes (1941), The Man Who Came to Dinner (’41), Now, Voyager (’42), Old Acquaintance (’43) and Watch on the Rhine (’43).
Davis bounced back, of course, with All About Eve in 1950, and then bounced back a second time with her classic hag-horror performance in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (’62, filmed when she was only 53 or 54).
In February ’43 Davis spoke to The New Yorker‘s Janet Flanner in order to promote her Oscar-nominated performance in Now Voyager. Flanner (1892-1978) was a brilliant writer. Her sentences and phrases (“atavistically suspicious of happy endings”) were perfect in a lean, pared-to-the-bone, thoroughly thought-through way.
Flanner: “As far as she has been permitted, Bette Davis has molded her film career on her motto, ‘I love tragedy.’
“Until Pearl Harbor she was the American favorite of the Japanese moviegoers because, they said, she represented the admirable principle of sad self-sacrifice. An adult-minded New Englander, atavistically suspicious of happy endings, she was so convinced by her early Hollywood parts that a floppy feminine hat was a symbol of celluloid sappiness that she later had written into her contract a clause permitting her to refuse to carry a hat in her hand like a damned basket of rosebuds.
“Becoming a big star often addles a human being, usually in one of three ways; the victim becomes a superior, lonely ego and stays home, or becomes a public character and goes out constantly, or becomes glamorous, no matter where he or she happens to be.
“Miss Davis was glamorous, years ago, for about a month. This period ended when, backed up by a smart town car containing a white poodle and livened chauffeur, and attired in moody black velvet slacks and jacket, she met her mother, who had been on a trip East, at the Los Angeles railway station. Mrs. Davis was unable to believe her own eyes and flatly said so. The glamour was dropped later that day.
“It is her notably large eyes, disliked at first by both Hollywood and herself, which finally accelerated her ascent in pictures. When Hollywood at last got around to making analyses, it discovered that eighty per cent of screen acting is concentrated in the eyes. In Dark Victory Miss Davis made it one hundred per cent.
“Since her role was that of a woman threatened with insanity, her director wanted her to indicate her disorder by crazed motions of the hands. She decided to use only her eyes. Even the quantity of her erotic appeal, which so worried the studios at the beginning, has been recomputed. When, twelve years ago, a producer said she had no more sex appeal than Slim Summerville, she said he went too far. Now producers go even farther; they say she is solid, ice-cold, Puritan sex, of the type against which the Sunday blue laws had to be passed.
“If you ask the Hollywood trade who is the best actress in the business right now, the unanimous, indeed the only fashionable, answer is Davis. The trade adds, sotto voce, that her box-office is enormous because men fans are convinced that she is feminine, though she is really only maternal.
“On a recent War Bond selling tour in the Ozarks and other rural districts, Miss Davis made the perturbing discovery that she scared lots of simple Americans of both sexes. This in turn alarmed her. Some metropolitan theatre critics claim that she seems complex in her roles because she herself is an unresolved character.
“On the other hand, émigrés from Europe feel that she should be the dominant member of a great national stock company, like France’s Comédie-Française, rather than be allowed to beat out her talent and wings in the movies.
“Her own idea of an ideal program would be, as she puts it, ‘to play one good play a winter on Broadway and then photograph it that summer in Hollywood.’ She will probably always think of the stage when she thinks of a good play, and to her the cinema will undoubtedly remain something done with improved lantern slides. ‘A movie,’ she once said, ‘is not even a dress rehearsal.'”