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Bette Davis' sprint sets the pace, the breathless forward thrust and darting turns of a socialite fleeing from the center of her life. Soon a cloud parks over the pleasure-seeker, the equine tumble (filmed with a blurry premonition of Marnie) can no longer be ignored: "Confidentially, darling, this is more than a hangover," she tells her confidante (Geraldine Fitzgerald) between cigarette puffs. Edmund Goulding's camera keeps pace with the frisky heroine, then frames her in a superb moment of stillness—Davis in close-up profile, forced into awareness of mortality as the physician (George Brent) offers a list of the symptoms she's been trying to hold at bay. Brain surgery buys her some time but the true diagnosis is concealed, nevertheless it leaps at her from the report and festers in her mind until she hurls it like a dagger at her friends. "I think I'll have a large order of... Prognosis Negative." Time and light, cf. Delannoy's La Symphonie pastorale. The gentlemen's club as the dying woman's preferred arena for livid joyriding/self-abasement, the near-affairs encompass the sponging fop (Ronald Reagan) and the horse-wrangling brooder (Humphrey Bogart, in a dry bit of Brontëan lampoon). From ritzy saloon to idyllic cottage by the doctor's side, death like abrupt darkness on a sunny day, the challenge is to meet it "beautifully and finely." ("We'll just pretend nothing's going to happen," thus the key to a successful marriage.) Goulding's alternations of mood guide the diva toward the from-garden-to-deathbed climax, where Davis, a serene pale flame, delivers her own last rites and embraces the finality of a Max Steiner requiem and an out-of-focus lens. With Henry Travers, Cora Witherspoon, Dorothy Peterson, and Virginia Brissac. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |