It is interesting to speculate on how Davis and the redoubtable Paul Muni would have played off each other had they ever appeared in the same scene in Juarez. Both had come a long way since Bordertown. Like Davis, Muni had gone on to costume vehicles of monumental prestige such as The Story of Louis Pasteur (for which he won the 1936 Oscar) and The Life of Emile Zola. The Warners held Muni in awe by 1939, and he was “Mr. Muni” to everyone but his closest friends and his watchful, strongminded wife. Even Hal Wallis and Jack Warner himself felt more comfortable communicating with the Great One through messages and intermediaries. John Huston, who always resented Muni’s brother-in-law’s interference with the Juarez screenplay, described him as tough in arguments, winning out not so much intellectually or logically as via sheer stubbornness. When bested in an argument, Muni simply pulled rank and threatened to quit the project, which, according to Huston, “sent everybody scurrying and conciliating to beat the band.”
Still, there is no denying the monolithic strength of Muni’s Juarez. His tendency to lose his real personality behind the makeup, mannerisms, and general mystique of the man he was portraying in Juarez gave him a reality, a verisimilitude, and a convincing force of character that were riveting and irresistible to audiences. In one of his most majestic scenes, Muni arrives in a town square alone in his carriage, enemy forces all around him, and a populace in thrall to his traitorous rival. He goes to the door of the palace, forces his cowardly opponent out, and harangues the crowd, winning, against all odds, their fresh allegiance and the murder of his rival. And he is very touching as he mourns the death of Abraham Lincoln while exiled in a mountain enclave surrounded by his few followers.
Juarez reflects well on everyone concerned with the making of it. Donald Crisp, who played Bazaine, the commander of the French forces in Mexico, felt that Juarez was one of Hollywood’s most underrated pictures, and commented on its epic sweep, on its wonderful human variety and colorful ambience.
“William Dieterle,” Crisp recalled, “was a really gifted director who could capture the essentials of an historical film; he blended the characters, the action, the atmosphere into a colorful, authentic overall look that reminded me of Griffith at his best.” Crisp, who had worked with Griffith in the early movie days and had played General Grant in Birth of a Nation and the villain in Broken Blossoms, knew whereof he spoke. “Dieterle made you feel for the characters in Juarez, he kept you siding with one, then the other, it was a triumph of deeply felt empathy. He made those people come alive, even beyond what was written of them in the script. It was a privilege to work in a Dieterle picture.”
James Shelley Hamilton, always a perceptive critic, wrote of Juarez in The National Board of Review Magazine, “Most of the acting is on a superlatively high level. Paul Muni as the stolid Indian and Brian Aherne as the elegant and refined Emperor are remarkably effective contrasts in appearance, manner and speech.”
Of Bette Davis, Hamilton declared, “[She] subdues her strikingly individual characteristics to a portrayal of the Empress Carlotta that is not only touching but overtoned with premonitions of her eventual tragedy, and her finally flitting away into the darkness of madness is the most unforgettable moment in the picture.”
14
The Old Maid and Elizabeth: Davis at Her Zenith
IN MARCH 1939 Davis began work on the picture in which, in my considered opinion, she gives her all-time best performance. Her Charlotte Lovell in The Old Maid is a role of sweeping range with strong and colorful emotional contrasts. Moreover, as Charlotte, Davis undergoes a complete change of character, aging from twenty-three in 1861 to forty-three in 1881. Playing Charlotte gave her an opportunity to demonstrate the steady, relentless, dramatically compelling progress from vivacious, hopeful, romantic youthfulness to disillusioned, embittered, desiccated middle age. She had never before had such an opportunity.
The Old Maid was a pivotal film in Davis’s career in that it showed her capable of playing strong characters of a kind never before associated with her. With few exceptions she had played contemporary young women with various love problems or melodramatic dilemmas. True, she had been evil in Of Human Bondage, petty and spiteful in Jezebel, even psychotic in Bordertown and Dangerous, but The Old Maid provided her with a character so different from any other she had done that it startled her audiences and her producer into recognizing that here was an actress with far greater potential than had hitherto been suspected.
The Old Maid began as a novel by Edith Wharton—a novella, actually, part of a grouping called Old New York. Later The Old Maid was published on its own, and it came to the attention of playwright Zoe Akins, who dramatized it for Broadway. As one of the outstanding plays of the 1934–1935 season, it proceeded to win the Pulitzer Prize.
Presently it was picked up by Paramount and assigned to Virginia Van Upp, who prepared a screenplay. The Paramount executives worried about its viability for cinema, however, so it was eventually sold to Warners.
Judith Anderson and Helen Menken (one of the earlier Mrs. Humphrey Bogarts) had made great personal successes on Broadway and at first there was concern about finding two cinema actresses who could equal their ensemble chemistry and force. Hal Wallis knew from the start that only Bette Davis could plumb and dissect the complex depths of Charlotte Lovell, the young Philadelphia aristocrat who has a secret love child by a man killed in the Civil War and who, obsessed with her guilty secret, loses out on a promising marriage and gradually becomes an embittered old maid while her child grows up not knowing Charlotte is her mother. But who would play Delia Lovell Ralston, Charlotte’s cousin, who rejects the man Charlotte loves and loses in favor of a Philadelphia millionaire? Later Delia, mother of two, is determined to usurp the love of the child of the dead man she also loved, and alienate her from Charlotte. Kay Francis was seriously considered for Delia, but her contractual quarrels with Warners ruled that out.
Miriam Hopkins had made a picture-to-picture deal with Warners, and it was decided by Jack Warner, Hal Wallis, and the screenwriter, Casey Robinson, that she would make an excellent foil for Davis, and vice-versa. Both were fine actresses with the bravura-style theatrical flair called for in the screenplay. Shortly Hopkins was cast for the film, creating a juxtaposition with Davis that was to be fateful—and full of fireworks.
Casey Robinson has recounted his difficulties with the screenplay. He took on the assignment when pressed by Wallis, but refused to read the Van Upp treatment, returning instead to the original play. Literate as it was, it seemed too saccharine and sugary to him to the exclusion of more complex emotions. The screenplay he prepared mixed equal portions of salt and sugar. Director Edmund Goulding picked up on this bittersweet love-hate tone.
Robinson also recalled that the many weddings in the film posed structural problems that he could only overcome with photographer Tony Gaudio’s help, with clever montaging and by contrasting elements within the weddings themselves.
Bette Davis has never looked more beautiful than in some of the early sequences of The Old Maid, thanks to Gaudio’s careful lighting and astute angling. In her wedding gown scene, when she is torn between hope for her imminent marriage and the memory of the man she loved and lost and of her illegitimate child, who is hidden in a home she has founded for orphans of the war, her face registers wild and agonized changes of mood. The picture seems to come to a dead stop, a deep stillness, in this beautiful scene. And later in the same scene, when Hopkins discovers that Davis’s illegitimate daughter is the child of the man she once rejected but still loves, the scene turns diabolical; her sweet concern is superseded by jealous rage (“You and Clem! You and Clem!” she hisses at the terrified bride, who rejoinders, “You still love him!”).
Terrible is Hopkins’s anger as she screams, “You hypocrite—twenty children to hide one child!” and a spirited Davis answers, “Yes! His child! I should have known that was something you could never forgive!” Intent on evening the score, Hopkins rushes downstairs and lies to the bridegroom ab
out Davis’s health, forcing a cancellation of the wedding.
Later, in another riveting scene, Davis, finds out from the man she almost married that Hopkins lied (pleading Davis’s sudden ill health rather than revealing the truth about the child) and confronts Hopkins with her hurt and hatred. “You lied to him so I wouldn’t have a chance, didn’t you!” Davis is left, frustrated and enraged, to face the camera, a look of terrible anger and furious bewilderment on her mobile features.
Davis and the love child go to live with Hopkins, who proceeds to steal the child’s love away from Davis, who, over the next fifteen years, withers into the sour and strict old maid, “Aunt Charlotte.” The girl, Tina, grows to adulthood believing she is an orphan from Davis’s institution, loving the motherly Hopkins and hating the grim old maid, who disciplines herself never to show softness toward the child for fear she will reveal the truth of her maternity.
Soon Tina is in love with Lanning Halsey, a handsome young Philadelphia aristocrat (William Lundigan was most personable in the role), but his family disapproves, given her unknown parentage, and plans to send him away to forget her. Hopkins inveigles a reluctant Davis into allowing her to adopt Tina, so she will have the benefit of a good family name. On the night before the subsequent wedding, Davis almost tells Tina (winningly played by Jane Bryan, in yet another of her appearances with Davis) the truth, but finally surrenders her to Delia. “You’re the mother she needs and wants tonight,” Davis says. “She was never mine, perhaps because her father was never really mine either. He loved you. She loves you, too. Go to her, Delia.”
Hopkins later tells Tina that Davis is an old maid because Davis had refused to give Tina up to marry a man “who would have given her everything.” She asks Tina to “give the last kiss” to Aunt Charlotte just before her carriage sets off after the wedding. This she does, and in the final scene, arms linked, the mellow widow and the at-last-peaceful old maid walk arm in arm through the mansion’s front door to join the other wedding guests.
The film is full of poignant scenes, such as the one in which William Lundigan and Jane Bryan are making love, communing as only the young can, while Davis listens forlornly behind the drawing room door; slowly she draws up her shawl in unconscious protection against the cold within as well as without. And when she senses the dangerous abandon of Tina’s love for Lanning, she is petrified by the thought of history repeating itself and goes into the hall to confront the couple and order Lanning from the house. Davis cringes as Bryan castigates her for being a sour, ugly, withered old maid who hates her because she is young and in love, while she “knows nothing about love.”
Earlier in the picture, Davis looks down on happy young couples dancing at Hopkins’s daughter’s wedding. Wistfully she goes into a bedroom and begins dancing to the music. Suddenly she is overwhelmed by her loneliness, and slowly she sinks to a couch, brokenly whispering the name of the one man she had truly loved, who had been taken from her by the long-past Civil War.
And perhaps the finest, most eloquent, most dramatically compelling scene of all: Davis stops Hopkins on the stairs, the night before the wedding, as she is about to go up and give the bride-to-be motherly advice on her wifely duties. The hatred between them flares up bitterly. “You made me an old maid,” Davis hisses, “you divided his child from me; you taught her to call you Mother! Well, tonight, just for tonight, she belongs to me!” And when Hopkins protests that she “hasn’t thought of Clem Spender in years,” Davis declares: “Oh yes you have; you’ve thought of him when you’ve thought of her—of him and no one else! . . . a woman never stops thinking of the man she loves; she thinks of him for years, in all sorts of unconscious ways, in thinking of all sorts of things—a sunset, an old song, a cameo on a chain.”
The Old Maid is infused with a tension rare in dramatic films—the hatred between the women, often layered over with civility and politeness, is a tangible thing, and it lends the film a diabolical force and a riveting, compelling fierceness. While many of these qualities are due to the fine acting of the principals, the real-life bitterness, tension, and professional rivalry between Davis and Hopkins bring them alive in a truly unique way.
Hopkins had relished the chance to co-star with Davis. Here was her long-sought opportunity to put her down, upstage her, humiliate and madden her. She was still seething with rage because of Davis’s brief but intense affair with her husband, Anatole Litvak, whom she would divorce later in 1939, not naming Davis as corespondent only because her pride could not have stood it. Her professional jealousy of Davis knew no bounds. Here her hated rival had won an Oscar and vastly augmented fame for a role in Jezebel that she had played in a flop Broadway play four years before! And she brooded that only ten or so years back, she had been the star and Davis practically a bit player in the Rochester group! How their positions had reversed, how intolerable Hopkins found it. Davis was queen of the lot; Hopkins was an intruder on a limited contract. Davis’s name alone could carry a film; Hopkins’s box-office clout was so limited that producers could not star her in a major way, let alone carry her name singly above the title.
For all these reasons Hopkins went into The Old Maid primed to make her rival miserable at every turn. In her autobiography, Davis expressed amazement at the inventive turns Miriam’s upstaging took—moving backward in a couch scene to capture the most flattering camera angle while Davis had to turn to face her; creating business with her ever-fluttering hands while Davis delivered a key speech; appearing on the first day of shooting in a replica of a gown Davis had worn in Jezebel, as if to say: I was there first, and years before you!
Hopkins, carried away by her spiteful rage and jealousy, adopted other strategems that only boomeranged on herself. Judith Anderson had played Delia as a harsh, forbidding, revengeful woman—Hopkins couldn’t stand the idea of the audience disliking her, so she played Delia for more warmth and sympathy; while this made for a plus in subtlety of a sort, it muted her characterization and helped hand the picture to Davis.
Davis frustrated Hopkins by not reacting to the overt and subtle attacks made on her. She later admitted that she went home at night and screamed for an hour. She marveled at how Hopkins, an excellent actress in a fine role, could blur her cinematic impact in pursuing upstaging stratagems.
Whatever Hopkins thought she was doing, it only succeeded in enhancing Davis’s truly majestic and deeply felt performance. Full-bodied, wide in range, Charlotte Lovell was a role that called for the full complement of Davis’s considerable histrionic powers. As the young girl she is loving, vulnerable, hungry for union with the man (George Brent) she loves, and determined to win him on the rebound after Hopkins rejects him to wed another. And when she has her man pinned down, she is aggressive about it, too. “Don’t you know that what happens to you means more to me than anything?” she whispers passionately, in one of the most tender and intense love scenes the screen has ever boasted. Tenderness, warmth, womanly steadfastness, and the vulnerability that dares to win its objective despite all odds and risks, that is the young Charlotte Lovell, as Davis limns her. Later, caring for her child in the Charlotte Lovell Home for War Orphans, she is the very essence of motherly nurturing and tender sustenance. And later, in the famous scene in her wedding gown, Davis conveys most affectingly her never-ending mourning for her lost lover: “He didn’t come back. He never will. . . .”
That is the magic of The Old Maid for Davis. And the magic that Davis brings to The Old Maid. Given the power and literacy and splendid acting and utter taste of this film in all departments, it remains a mystery to this day why it doesn’t rank higher among the great films of that great cinema year 1939. We hear endlessly of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Stage Coach and Wuthering Heights and, of course, the definitive film of the year, Gone With the Wind, but The Old Maid, which won rave critical notices and made more money in 1939 than Dark Victory or most other films, is strangely neglected.
Yet it had a magical, wondrous effect on audiences that year—certainly o
n me, at age sixteen. Right after the Warner shield, the credits of The Old Maid appear, and the screen is infused with a fierce white light. Max Steiner’s inspired score—perhaps the finest he ever wrote—encapsulized in the short credit running time, tells the entire story of the film—its initial youthful and romantic promise; its grim, disillusioning, and poignant midsection; and its final portion, a form of catharsis and resolution, but tragic and sadly unfulfilling.
Edmund Goulding, who had guided Davis through two previous films most creditably, surpasses himself in his direction of The Old Maid. Enthralled and stimulated by the intense, neurotic quarrels of frustrated, heart-wounded women, he fills The Old Maid with his special sensibility. This is a picture that even William Wyler could not have handled so truthfully, so sensitively, and so presciently. He who had weathered World War I, who had known so many disappointments in his gay love affairs, who harbored closeted secrets and fears in homophobic 1939 and in a bitchy, gossipy Hollywood—who would have understood more than Goulding the black secrets, the mourning for departed loved ones, all the repressions and displacements that give The Old Maid its own special brand of nuclear fission? And so it all comes together—the gay sensibility of Goulding expressed at its finest hour; the anger and jealousy and frustration of Hopkins; the instinctual recognition of Davis that in Charlotte Lovell is a many-faceted, richly-hued role of stark contrasts and unlimited characterizational range. The picture, like all works of true art, reveals something new with each viewing; the remarkable contrapuntal fusion of love and hate, tenderness and iciness, combat and surrender, the inner in combat with the outer, the yang with the yin, it is all here.
Davis never really liked The Old Maid. In her autobiography she said she was never mad about the role, but admitted it proved most popular. Her jaundiced and highly subjective attitude toward the best role and best film of her entire sixty-odd-year career was doubtless influenced by the hateful memories of Hopkins’s spite and perfidy, which kept her constantly on edge. But this infused her performance with yet another dimension of tension and superb dramatic attack, toned down and disciplined by the sensitively watchful and delicately persuasive Goulding.
Fasten Your Seat Belts Page 21
