From the 1940s: In This Our Life

1942 Drama
From Warner Bros
Directed by John Huston

Starring
Bette Davis
Olivia de Havilland
George Brent
Dennis Morgan
Charles Coburn
Frank Craven
Billie Burke
Hattie McDaniel
Lee Patrick
Ernest Anderson

I hadn't planned to review this movie.  I had, however, DVR'ed it and decided it was going to be an afternoon pleasure.  Steamy hot outside but cool in my library, I settled in, knowing just about any Warner Bros drama starring not one but two of the studio's premier contract actresses would put me in movie heaven.  And indeed it did.  I'd seen it just once years ago and barely remembered much at all.  But boy did I enjoy the hell out of it and decided to share some things with you.

This is the story of a family so of course it commands my attention right away as does the fact that these characters all have scenes together which I love.  The one thing I did remember well was that Bette Davis is such a wicked person and you may well know that when she is bad she is just so good.

She and de Havilland are sisters.  The film doesn't offer a clue as to why they have male names.  Davis is Stanley and de Havilland is Roy.  How weird is that?  They still live with their parents in their Richmond, Virginia home.  The father (Craven) is a Casper Milquetoast type who offers opinions but is easily shut down when challenged, and the mother (Burke) tries to rule the household from her wheelchair.  Neither sister pays much attention to either one of them.

Roy is an interior decorator, a sweet woman who is married to Peter (Morgan), a surgeon.  Everyone knows Roy can be counted on and the family loves and admires her.  Stanley is pathologically spoiled and highly manipulative, totally without any moral compass.  The story opens the day before she is to marry a progressive attorney Craig (Brent), however, she and Peter are going to run off together which will send the family into a tailspin.

Feeling dead inside, Roy divorces Peter and he and Stanley move to Baltimore and marry.  The union is not an easy one because life with Stanley cannot possibly go well for anyone.  They argue constantly, he drinks too much and she is a shopaholic who spends too much money.  It looks like they are headed for divorce when Peter commits suicide.  (I didn't care for how this was handled.  Bam, he's dead.  Who saw this coming, even an inkling of it?  More to the point, that's not how they built Peter... he wouldn't have killed himself.  He was too strong.  He would have divorced her.)

It takes Stanley about an hour to get over Peter.  She moves back home.  She decides to try to get Craig back despite the fact that he and Roy are now a couple.  It doesn't work.  Craig is on to her but more than that, he has been terribly hurt and despondent and it is Roy who breathes life back into him.

Oh yes, there's also Uncle William (Coburn), the mother's devious brother who managed to gyp the sisters' father out of his share of the family tobacco business.  It's odd that he's welcome in the family's home until one realizes he seems to take care of some of their financial needs.  He is also very fond of Stanley... their touchy-feely relationship certainly has that incestuous hue to it.  He would walk over anyone but Stanley and it's obvious how she got the way she is.

There is also the family maid, Minerva (McDaniel) and her son Parry (Anderson) who takes care of the family cars and does other odd jobs around the house.  Parry is much liked and treated like one of the family.  Roy not only encourages him to study law when she discovers that he wants to be an attorney but she gets Craig to hire him while he's learning.

If in all lives some rain must fall, this family has a monsoon when a drunken Stanley, known for her fast and reckless driving around town, strikes a mother and her child who are crossing the street and the child is killed.  Stanley briefly stops but then drives on.  She is panic-stricken that she will be found out.

When she is confronted by the police after they notice the damage to her car, she blames Parry, saying he took the car to have it washed and obviously was involved in the accident.  While it is a wicked thing to do, it is made all the worse because Parry is likely the most decent person in the story.

Neither Roy nor Craig believes her and the latter sets out to prove she was the driver.  Stanley does what she always does... she runs to her grandfather.  But she finds him in a near-stupor... he's just found out he has six months to live.  Stanley screams at him that I don't care about you dying... what about me?  She needs money to get out of town.  When the cops arrive, she slips out a side door and to her death as her speeding car crashes through a barrier on a mountaintop.

There are more layers than our time (yours and mine) permits but this is the gist of it.  Some of the dialogue crackles with its honesty, incisiveness and inspiration, especially for 1942.  Racial issues seemed respectful, especially for the time.  Oddly and despicably wrongly, the film was not approved for foreign release because the wartime Office of Censorship said it dealt truthfully with racial discrimination as part of the plot. 

This was only the second film John Huston directed and it has to be his most unusual.  His films are decidedly male-oriented.  He likely accepted the assignment because he and de Havilland were involved in a hot love affair and this way they could spend more time together.

It must have been like old home week for some of the actors.  This was the last of 11 films Brent and Davis appeared in together and over the years it took to make them, they had on-again, off-again romantic entanglements.  This was the third of six films for good pals Davis and de Havilland and third of three films for
de Havilland and Brent.  It was the third of five films for McDaniel and de Havilland and the second of three films with McDaniel and Morgan.

Most of the acting plaudits, of course, go to Davis.  When she goes bad, I go glad.  She is the dynamo here that one expects from her in any of her work. Perhaps no actress acted more with her face than she did.  And those eyes!  No doubt that de Havilland shines as the good sister but it's hard to top Davis's scene-chewing.  The two lead actors, Brent and Morgan, were more or less along for the ride.  Coburn, usually a lovable curmudgeon, was always fascinating to watch when he played unsavory characters.  Kudos, too, to Craven for keeping his beaten-down character interesting.

In spite of her abominable treatment of Anderson in the story, Davis is actually responsible for his being hired.  His part had not been filled when she spotted him working in the WB commissary and recommended him to Huston.

It was a popular film with the public while critics probably landed somewhere in between lauding and trashing it.  Who didn't like it? Well for one, the author Ellen Glasgow.  She won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1941 novel but thought the film fell way short of what she wrote.  But isn't that the attitude of most authors and a large segment of society as well?

Another one was Davis who thought she was wrong for the part (not young enough) and waged a war with her boss, Jack Warner.  She had a lot of strife with him over film roles and usually went on suspension rather than do a film she didn't believe it.  But she couldn't afford another suspension at the time so she went kicking and screaming into the role.

And she was as obnoxious behind the scenes as she was in the film.  She went to war with the makeup people for not making her look younger.  She not only criticized her makeup but had most of her costumes made anew.  She hated how they did her hair.  I actually found it more to my liking than I usually did.    

Raoul Walsh received no credit for directing a segment or two when Huston was called away by the military.  He also received no credit from Davis who lambasted him at every opportunity starting with maligning him on his directing skills.

She was so incensed with everything about the film that she eschewed watching the dailies... until she finally did.  And then she went white when she saw how many more closeups Huston had given his girlfriend de Havilland over what Davis had.  

Despite what she says, this is an utterly watchable Bette Davis film.

Here's a trailer:

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He reeked of handsome