This spring, I have been watching Bette Davis movies, and this past weekend, I watched Jezebel from 1938.
Wow. What a wild ride.
The tagline for this one could be — well, that escalated fast.
Especially as the movie gets toward the end.
It just races forward like a freight train out of control, but in a good way.
Bette stars in this one with a very serious Henry Fonda (I think he’s serious in every movie he is in).
George Brent, who was also in Dark Victorywith her, is in this one too.
George Brent and Bette Davis. This is not my photo. Copyright Warner Bros.
Our story takes place outside of New Orleans in 1852.
Bette portrays a woman named Julie who comes from a wealthy family and is engaged to a banker named Preston. Preston is often busy, and this irks Julie, who is very headstrong and self-centered.
When she is getting fitted for a long white ballgown she is supposed to wear to a special ball, she sees a red dress and decides she’s going to stand out and wear that one.
Everyone in the shop and in her family is horrified.
You just don’t wear red in “polite Southern society” at this or any ball.
Forget that, Julie says, even when Preston sees the dress and tells her there is no way she is wearing it. She is wearing it, she tells him, and that is that. The dress is gorgeous, even in black and white, by the way. I wanted to see it color and looked online, but couldn’t actually find an official photo of it anywhere. There are some colorizations of it, but those were done by others, that I can see.
A Photoshopped-colorized image of Julie’s forbidden red dress. Not my photo.
All of Bette’s clothes in this movie are stunning.
Back to the movie, though….Preston is furious but takes her to the ball anyhow. At the ball, people part like the Red Sea, not because they are impressed. They are scandalized by the dress and act like Julie is a — well, you know.
Preston returns Julie and her family home later that evening and says to Julie’s mother he wishes her a goodnight. To Julie, he says, “Goodbye, Julie.”
This is after they had known each other as children and always expected to marry. Oof!
Julie doesn’t believe it’s really happening, but things get real when Preston moves to the North to run a bank and leaves her behind.
I won’t ruin the rest of it for you. I will tell you that there is a reason the movie is called Jezebel and it is because Julie is called it by someone she knows.
Promotional image for Jezebel from Warner Bros.
For those who are not familiar with the name Jezebel, it refers to the wife of King Ahab of Israel, who was not a very nice woman at all. She would be called “immoral” by many.
I don’t tell you some of the details of the movie or the ending, but I will caution you that you need to fasten your seatbelt after this point in the movie if you do decide to watch it. There is going to be betrayal, talk of slavery failing the south on an economic level, slaves singing as part of the nightly entertainment, a yellow fever breakout, a dual, and so much more.
Your head is going to start spinning before it is all said and done.
Bette in her white dress. (Not my photo.)
Overall, I enjoyed the rush of this movie. I couldn’t look away. It was a bit like Gone with the Wind but shorter. I was somewhat horrified at how women were expected to act and dress a certain way during that time, but, of course, knowing the history, I know it was true.
While I am on the subject of Gone with the Wind, Bette Davis tried out for the role of Scarlet, but didn’t get it.
That worked out well for her in the end. This movie was her first big-budget film, and she won an Oscar for it in 1939. Bette’s co-star, Fay Bainter, who played her aunt Belle, also won an Oscar for best supporting actress.
Vivien Leigh won hers in 1940 for playing Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With The Wind.
Henry Fonda was very good as the brooding Preston, who was also facing his changing ideas of what the South really was.
I haven’t seen him in a ton of movies, but the ones I have seen him in, he was a lot older, so it was fun to see him so young.
Henry Fonda and Bette Davis. (Copyright TCM)
The acting from all of the cast was really very strong, and pulled me right into the time period. The black actors were great but I have a bad feeling they didn’t get the credit they should have at the time.
Warner Bros. had started planning Jezebel as a way for Davis to break out in a big movie as far back as 1935. They were going to buy playwright Owen Davis Sr.’s failed play back then, but passed on it.
But then the book Gone With The Wind took off.
Warner Bros didn’t get the rights to that, so they went back to get the rights to Jezebel.
They hired one of Hollywood’s top directors of that time, William Wyler.
Bette and William started an affair and when he later married another actress, Bette was said to be devastated and in later years called him the love of her life. They paired up again in a professional capacity in The Letter (1940) and The Little Foxes (1941).
So far, I would say this one, next to It’s Love I’m After, is my favorite movie of Bette’s I’ve watched so far.
If you enjoy the kind of content on my blog and all that goes into it, you can support my writing for $2.99 a month or a single donation. Learn more here: https://lisahoweler.com/support-my-writing/
Another Man’s Poison was my second Bette Davis movie, and I watched it on a whim sometime back in January. All About Eve was my first Bette Davis movie, in case you are curious.
This movie is dark from the start. We have Bette Davis as Janet Frobisher, and she’s already committed a crime that she would like to keep quiet.
A celebrated mystery writer, Janet married a criminal who was also abusive. We never get to see her husband because at the start of the movie, he’s already dead and she’s killed him. Not a spoiler. It’s the movie set up and will set up the direction of the rest of the movie.
She’s already called Larry, the fiancé of her secretary, who she, incidentally, is having an affair with, and asked him to come to her house that weekend. She’s walked to a phone box very far from her house to make the call and her nose neighbor, Dr. Henderson, the local vet, comments to her about how odd it is she is in town when she owns a mansion with phones in every room.
Janet essentially tells him to get lost and goes back home.
She has plans to dump her husband’s body in the pond on their property, but a man, George Bates (played by her real-life husband Gary Merrill), breaks into her house looking for her husband, saying he’s a robber and a murderer he and her husband were supposed to meet there after the robbery to escape together.
After a bunch of back and forth, Janet confesses she killed her husband but before she can kick Bates out the door, Dr. Henderson (Emlyn Williams) shows up and not wanting him to know she killed her husband, who Henderson has never met, she agrees to let Bates pretend he is her husband.
What results is another hour or so of panic, blackmail, and manipulation that will make your head spin. And then ending…well I can’t talk about it but oof! All I’ll say is karma is a word I do not write out or usually use so I’ll just say — a jerk!
While researching this film I was surprised to find out that it was co-produced by one of my favorite actors — Douglas Fairbanks Jr. I watched a ton of his movies last winter, which you can find here (scroll down the page).
Bette jumped at the opportunity to film this British thriller in the UK because there was a part for her new husband, free passage on the Queen Elizabeth cruise liner, and she could bring her children. It was essentially a free honeymoon.
There was a problem with the script but, according to TCM, Bette ignored this because she could choose her director (American Irving Rapper who directed one of her biggest hits, Now, Voyager in 1942). She liked him because “she could dominate him” the TCM article says.
“I’ve always wanted to play in a suspense picture as they’re made in England, with that quiet effectiveness which the British singularly seem to possess,” Bette told the British reporter.
Trouble always seemed to follow Bette and this time was no different. As soon as she arrived in England she threw a lavish party for the British press who rewarded her with tabloid articles about her mink coats, her excess and her husband, “Mr. Davis.”
This movie was not really well-received, with critics rolling their eyes at what they called “the absurdities of the script.”
They were impressed with how Bette pulled off the role even with the issues, though.
“No one has ever accused Bette Davis of failing to rise to a good script; what this film shows is how far she can go to meet a bad one,” critic Frank Hauser wrote in New Statesman and Nation.
The movie wasn’t a success at the time for the couple but visiting England was.
Actor Emlyn Williams bringing the schoolteacher who had been the inspiration for Miss Moffat in The Corn Is Green onto the set of Another Man’s Poison, and introducing her to Davis was an absolute thrill for Davis who starred in The Corn is Green in 1945.
The marriage went the way of the movie, I should add, ending only a year later, which was probably good because it was said to be a rocky and abusive one.
Have you seen this one?
Up next for my Spring of Bette feature is: Dark Victory.
I have been watching and writing about The Thin Man movies, and up this time is Shadow of the Thin Man, which is the fourth movie in a six-movie series.
You can find my impressions/reviews/recaps/whatever you want to call it here.
If you have read my other posts or are familiar with these movies, then you know that the main characters are Nick and Nora Charles.
Nick is a private investigator, but is mainly helping to manage all of Nora’s money since she is an heiress.
Nora, however, would like Nick to do a little more and keep himself busy instead of drinking alcohol and gambling.
Myrna Loy made a comment in her autobiography that movies four through six weren’t as good as the first three because the original writers, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, had decided they didn’t want to be a part of the franchise any longer. I respectfully disagree with her, at least for Shadow of the Thin Man. The mystery is convoluted, as always, (and I am really not sure about the guilty party making sense) but I felt the banter between Nick and Nora was as well-written as the previous movies. This one was a lot better than Another Thin Man, which was confusing and all over the place to me, and written by the married writers.
Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett tried to tank the series after the second movie by adding a baby because they really didn’t want to write a third. They clearly failed at sinking the series. By this movie, Goodrich and Hackett had literally had it.
“They press you awfully hard there…” Goodrich said. “When they started talking about another Thin Man, we started throwing up and crying into our typewriters. We had the nervous breakdown together, [so] we said, ‘let’s get out of here [and] we quit.’”
Novelist Dashiell Hammett, the original creator of the characters, also bowed out of the movies and refused to be part of it.
In this edition, we are introduced to Nick Jr., who is now around 5-years-old. He adds even more chaos and comedy to the mix, especially with his interactions with Nick Sr.
In one scene, he tells his dad he needs to drink more milk instead of alcohol at dinner. This makes Nick Sr. choke down half a glass of milk with some hilarious expressions, before the doorbell rings and he is let off the hook.
It is in this movie that I have to admit I do feel like Nick’s drinking is less funny and more sad. I get that Nick drinking too much is a running joke throughout the movie series, but he’s a dad now and showing his kid that he drinks no matter the mood he is in. There is always an excuse to drink with Nick Charles Sr.
But let’s not get too logical or realistic here. This is a comedy-mystery and we are meant to have some fun watching it, which I did.
In the beginning of the film, we see Nick and Nick Jr. at the park and they are supposed to be reading a child’s book, but Nick Sr. is trying to read the horses who are going to be at the races later in the day. He’s added gambling to his irresponsible repertoire I guess.
Soon Nick is on his way to the track, but not before he’s pulled over for speeding, which is quickly forgiven when the officer recognizes Nick name. Not only does the office not give Nick a ticket, but he’s given a police escort to the track. Things seem to be out of hand, though, when tons of police cars surround the car and escort Nick and Nora into the track. The couple is confused when officers gather around the car and start fawning over him and telling him how impressed they were with the last case he solved.
It turns out that they aren’t actually there for Nick, though. There’s been a murder at the track. Nick doesn’t care, though, and seems determined not to get involved.
He doesn’t want to get involved even when Major Jason I. Sculley, the special deputy for the state legislature, and investigative reporter Paul Clarke visit and ask for his help in the case.
Of course, he eventually does get involved and the mystery picks up. I enjoyed the little interludes in this one, more than the mystery. There are some hilarious scenes with Nora and Nick at a wrestling match where Nora is where a hat that men keep commenting on because they think it is silly.
Then there is the relatable scene where Nick is on a merry-go-round with Nick Jr., trying to grab a ring but getting motion sick and dizzy in the process.
Another Thin Man (1939) was filmed shortly after Powell’s finance Jean Harlow died suddenly. This movie also brought heartache for cast members, especially Powell who lost his ex-wife Carole Lombard in a plane crash in and then his first wife and mother of his only son, Eileen Wilson also died. Myrna Loy went through a divorce and then a quick marriage, which was a strike at her character’s “good girl image.”
But then the real blow to the entire cast and country was when Pearl Harbor was attacked two weeks after the movie released.
In 1943 the franchise also lost its director, W.S. Vandyke, after he passed away.
Loy recalled feeling the void, both of a director and friend, saying that “[Van Dyke] seems to be neglected now. He was one of Hollywood’s best, most versatile directors.
Donna Reed appeared in this film in only her second major screen role.
The firth movie in the series, The Thin Man Goes Home, didn’t come out until 1944, partially due to the war and VanDyke’s death.
I’m watching Bette Davis movies this spring, but have chosen some of the less popular ones for something different.
This next movie, A Working Man, came on afterIt’s Love I’m Afterand intrigued me in the first several minutes so I decided to stick with it. I ended up enjoying it more than I thought I would. It was a cute movie and a very early one for Bette. So early, she still had platinum blonde hair and was 25-years old.
I have a temporarily lost remote to thank for finding this one.
This pre-Hayes Code 1933 movie is about John Reeves (George Arliss), the president of the Reeves Shoe Company, who is determined to beat his competitor, Hartland Shoes.
He’s so determined to beat the competition that he ignores a request by a friend to go fishing in Maine.
His nephew Benjamin Burnett is ready for Reeves to retire so he can take over the business already.
When Tom Hartland, CEO of the Hartland Shoe Company, dies, John Reeves is saddened, even though he was his main competitor.
Benjamin begins to hint that John is senile and to teach him a lesson, John heads off for that fishing in Maine, leaving him to run the business for a while and see what it is like.
Ironically, though, a yacht stops running near John’s fishing pier and two young people swim up to ask for booze while they wait. John, who has always been a hard worker, is disgusted by their laziness. One of those young people is Bette Davis as Jenny Hartland.
The other is her brother Tommy Hartland played by Theodore Newton.
As they begin to chat, John learns they are the spoiled children of the recently deceased Tom Hartland. John decides to call himself John Walton and befriends them so he can spy on their company but as the spying begins, John starts to like the two kids and decides he wants to help them better themselves. He also discovers that the shoe making plant for their late father’s business is being mismanaged.
This launches him into a journey to save the business he’s been trying to destroy for years while also trying to keep his own business going and his identity hidden.
Bette is so young in this one, as I mentioned above.
The screenplay for the movie was based on a story The Adopted Father by Edgar Franklin and written by Charles Kenyon and Maude T. Howell.
Arliss was a well-known silent movie star before going into talking films and reprised his role in this movie from his 1924 silent movie Twenty Dollars a Week, which was based on the same story. Hollywood does like to rehash an old story because the 1936 20th Century Fox film Everybody’s Old Man was based on the same source.
The movie was Arliss and Bette’s second time appearing together in a movie. They were in The Man Who Played God the year before.
But their relationship goes deeper than just being in a previous movie together, according to TCM.com.
“[The Working Man] was the second and last film Davis made with Arliss, whom she always considered one of her mentors and the person who was responsible for saving her nascent film career,” an article on the site states. “She first met Arliss in the late 1920s, when he was a guest lecturer at the drama school she attended in New York. He counseled her not to adopt the exaggerated “cultured” English diction that many actors were then using. Instead, he suggested that she speak standard American English, but make an effort to get rid of her New England accent. Davis followed his advice. In late 1930, Davis was signed to a contract by Universal and went to Hollywood, but she was cast in pallid secondary roles and made little impression. Nine months later, Universal dropped her. According to Davis, she and her mother were packing up to return to New York, when she received a phone call summoning her to a meeting with Arliss, then one of Warners’ top stars. After meeting with Arliss, she was cast in The Man Who Played God, and signed to a Warner Bros. contract.”
We talk about the oversaturation of the entertainment market these days, but back then, movies were made fast and furious. Bette made, or at least released, seven movies in 1933.
The Working Man was her 15th movie, and she only started working in movies two years before. The New York Times gave Bette a good review saying, “Bette Davis, whose diction is music to the ears, does good work in the role of Jenny.” Bette had good memories of working with Arliss.
“Whatever was happening on his set, at four p.m. sharp, everything stopped for a half hour while we had tea,” she said. “I think he had it in his contract. Mr. Arliss helped pour, and everyone, to the lowliest grip, participated. I especially enjoyed knowing instinctively that Mr. Jack L. Warner was sitting in his office having a fit during this expensive homage to a civilized way of life.”
Even after Arliss went back to England in 1935, Bette continued to look at him as her mentor.
Margarita Landazuri wrote in her article on TCM that when Bette was in a contract dispute with Warner, Arliss told her to give in and not to try to sue Jack Warner again. She’d already lost her first attempt.
“Bette, you must go home and do anything they ask for one year,” he told her. “You must accept the fact that you have lost. It’s difficult to handle defeat, but you can take it.” Realizing that her career would be over if she continued to fight, Davis followed his advice. She swallowed her pride and returned to Warner Bros., where she soon became the studio’s top female star. “He certainly was my first professional father,” Davis said of Arliss, and the sentiment was reciprocated. In her home, she kept a framed photograph of Arliss. The inscription read, “with adopted fatherly affection.”
Up next in my Spring of Bette Davis, I’ll be writing about Another Man’s Poison.
This spring, I am watching and writing about Bette Davis movies, and I thought I’d kick it off with a post about Bette herself.
I don’t know why it has taken me so long to watch Bette Davis movies, considering her connection to the area I live in.
Bette Davis’s daughter, B.D. (Barbara Davis) Sherry Hyman used to own and live on a farm about 30 minutes from where I live now. Sadly, Bette did not have a good relationship with her daughter after the daughter wrote two scathing books about Bette.
If you are of a certain age, you may remember the books and the fallout from them in the 1980s.
I personally didn’t pay attention to celebrity drama when I was a child, so I didn’t know about it until recently.
I’ll get to that a little further in the post, but for now, let’s start at the beginning of Bette’s life.
Hadley Hall Meares wrote this for Vanity Affair in 2020, “Opinions? Bette Davis had a few. Born Ruth Elizabeth Davis in 1908, the legendary movie star was a tireless perfectionist and workaholic with little patience for those who did not share her vision. Consequently, her 1962 autobiography The Lonely Life and its 1987 follow-up, This ‘N That, are not short of opinions—many hard-edged, but a few remarkably tender. As her autobiographies prove, there was so much more to Davis’s wild life even than what we saw in 2017’s Feud, which charted her fabled dispute with co-star Joan Crawford.”
Bette was born to Ruth (Favor) and Harlow Morrell Davis. When she was seven years old, her father divorced her mother, and her mother raised Bette and her younger daughter Barbara on her own.
Bette began acting in school productions at the Cushing Academy in Massachusetts in her teens. She then did a summer in a small theater in Rochester, New York, before moving to New York City, where she attended the John Murray Anderson/Robert Milton School of Theatre and Dance. In 1929, she made her stage debut at Greenwich Village’s Provincetown Playhouse in The Earth Between.
Her first Broadway appearance was at the age of 21 in the comedy Broken Dishes. Her first movie appearance was a very small role in 1931’s Bad Sister with Hollywood’s Universal Pictures. In 1932, though she landed a deal with Warner Brothers and her career took off, with her breakout film being The Man Who Played God. After that she filmed 14 films over the next three years! They sure turned them out back then!
Bette was blonde when she first started out, by the way. Her hair was naturally a honey blonde but studio executives made it very blonde in the early 30s, which she didn’t like. Gradually, her hair darkened, or she darkened it to become the familiar brunette we saw later in her career.
In 1934, Bette was loaned to RKO Pictures for Of Human Bondage, a drama based on a novel by W. Somerset Maugham and co-starring British actor Leslie Howard. This movie brought Davis her first Oscar nomination.
Bette’s performance in the movie as “the vulgar, cold-hearted waitress Mildred” would kick off many roles in her career as strong-willed, sometimes unlikable women. Many people interpreted who Bette was in real life based on the roles she played.
Over a career that spanned 60 years Bette made a long list of well-acclaimed films, including All About Eve, Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?, and Dark Victory.
She won her first Academy Award in 1935 for playing a troubled actress in Dangerous. Her second was for Jezebel in 1938. She was nominated eight more times but never won another one.
Bette was high praised by many of her peers with exception to one — her nemesis and co-star from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Joan Crawford — who said these following things about her:
“I’m the quiet one and Bette’s explosive. I have discipline, she doesn’t.”
“She has a cult, and what the hell is a cult except a gang of rebels without a cause. I have fans. There’s a big difference.”
“Sure, she stole some of my big scenes, but the funny thing is, when I see the movie again, she stole them because she looked like a parody of herself, and I still looked like something of a star.”
The pair had a hate/hate relationship for years with Bette saying this about Joan when she died: “You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good… Joan Crawford is dead. Good.”
Bette certainly acted confident, bold, and mouthy most of the time, but even she had doubts at times.
According to the site Golden Derby, Bette was once so worried about her career she took an ad out in Variety magazine: “Mother of three 10, 11 and 15-Divorcee. American. Thirty years’ experience as an actress in motion pictures. Mobile still and more affable than rumor would have it. Wants steady employment in Hollywood. Has had Broadway. References upon request.”
Bette was married four times. She married Harmon Nelson in 1932 and they divorced in 1938. She married Arthur Farnsworth in 1940 and that marriage lasted three years before Farnsworth tragically died in a freak accident.
Her next marriage was to William Grant Sherry, and was for five years. Her last was to Gary Merrill, which lasted the longest but was also said to be violent, bitter, and full of domestic violence.
She had Barbara “B.D.”, with Sherry and adopted two children, Michael and Margot, with Merrill. Margot was discovered to be brain damaged at 3 and Bette put her in a special home, but still supported her financially, and often brought her home for long periods for visits with family.
With Bette’s permission, B.D. married Jeremy Hyman when B.D. was only 16 and Jeremy was 29. The marriage lasted for more than 50 years but many say it was the husband who turned B.D. against her mother. Jeremy died in 2017.
What I feel bad about is that Barbara, B.D., she calls herself a pastor but still publicly shredded Bette in two different books. Maybe Bette was a narcissist and crazy, but the best thing might have been not to write a book about it all, and instead given all that hatred and bitterness to God. That’s just my opinion, of course.
Bette and B.D. during better days.
Before writing the books, Barbara commended her mother for how she raised her when she was younger and in a 60-Minute interview said she’d adopted some of those principals for raising her own son. After the first book came out, she tried to explain in interviews that her relationship with her mother was difficult and that was what the books were about, but she also went on talk shows and just verbally eviscerated her mother’s reputation.
I watched one where she even pulled her oldest son into the action, and he described things he said Bette had done to him when he was visiting her.
B.D. received a lot of condemnation about the timing of the release of the first book because Bette had had a mastectomy and suffered a stroke not long before. Shortly after that she broke her hip. Bette’s assistant later wrote a book where she said she and Bette’s lawyers tried to keep the news of the book from her because she was still trying to heal from surgery.
Bette with B.D.
When she did find out, she was shocked, devastated, and felt deeply betrayed by the book.
“Nothing,” Bette’s assistant, Kathyrn Sermak told Vanity Fair in 2017 when her book Miss D and Me came out, “nothing compared to the betrayal of B.D.’s book. That broke her heart.”
Sermak said cinematic portrayals of Bette are inaccurate.
“I will always be grateful to Ryan Murphy for introducing [Davis and Crawford] to a new generation,” Sermak told Vanity Fair about the movie about Bette’s relationship with Joan Crawford. But that Davis is “not the woman I was on 10 years of film sets with. Miss Davis never behaved on film sets like that. She never yelled, she never screamed—at least not around me.”
Bette felt so deeply betrayed by B.D.’s book that she disinherited her from her will. I also can’t imagine why Barbara felt she needed to write another one after writing one already. More money I supposed.
Bette divided her estate between her adopted son Michael Merrill and Sermak, with stipulations that her son take care of her adopted daughter Margo.
Bette also wrote a message to B.D. in her autobiography, written two years before she died, and in part of it she stated:
“As you ended your letter in My Mother’s Keeper – it’s up to you now, Ruth Elizabeth – I am ending my letter to you the same way: It’s up to you now, Hyman.
Ruth Elizabeth
P.S. I hope someday I will understand the title My Mother’s Keeper. If it refers to money, if my memory serves me right, I’ve been your keeper all these many years. I am continuing to do so, as my name has made your book about me a success.”
B.D. once said she wrote the book to get her mother’s attention so they would talk things out. Trust me, there are better ways to do that, and it didn’t work. The two never spoke again.
Before their relationship took a nosedive, Bette frequently visited B.D. and her sons in our tiny, rural area. There are old newspaper articles quoting people from the community I went to high school in who met her when she either visited their store or their motel. She rarely stayed with B.D. because of the friction between them.
“She looked and acted in real life like she did in the movies,” the owner of a local market told a local newspaper. “She was very straightforward, and there was no doubt that when she said something, it was what she meant.”
The local motel where Bette stayed when she visited her daughter. The motel is no longer there.
He remembered Bette being driven around the area in a chauffeured limousine and that she once came into the sporting goods store he used to own to buy a .22-caliber rifle. He said he heard a woman say her mother would be paying for the gun and when he looked up, Bette Davis was standing there.
The owner of a local hotel called Bette “pushy and possessive.” He said she and her daughter, son-in-law, and grandson came in for dinner one night and the grandson sat on his dad’s cowboy hat. The owner’s dad scolded the child, and Bette told the owner off.
“Bette told him to shut up.”
So, maybe the real Bette was a little bit like her on-screen characters after all.
There are a ton of great movies of Bette’s to watch, but for this particular series, I have chosen the following movies:
It’s Love I’m After (April 15th)
A Working Man (April 17th)
Another Man’s Poison (April 23th)
Dark Victory (April 30rd)
Jezebel (May 1)
Dangerous (May 7)
The Letter (May 12)
Of Human Bondage (May 21)
Now, Voyager (May 28)
These are subject to change depending on what life events pop up between now and the end of May.
This post includes affiliate links, which I will make a small commission on if you purchase from that link. You will not be charged more, but I will receive a very small amount of the purchase price.
The cinematography in The Third Man (1949 ) is outstanding. The play of light with shadows, figures stepping in and out of light and dark both visually and metaphorically, makes this a movie you can’t look away from. If you do, you might miss a subtle exchange of looks, a quick smirk, someone moving in the shadows. You have to be on high alert while also relaxing into the story. You’re on the edge of your seat but also have plenty of moments to sit back and admire the superb acting of Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton.
The movie is set in post-World War II Vienna, Austria at a time when four political powers America, Russia, England, and France were overseeing a corrupt post-war environment.
Cotton plays Holly Martins, a writer of pulp Westerns, who arrives without any money as the guest of his childhood friend Harry Lime (Welles). The problem is, when Martins arrives, he finds out Lime has been killed, hit by a car.
Martins wants to know how his friend died and why, and learns there was a “third man” who was present during the accident. This leads him down a path that gets him mixed up with Lime’s girlfriend and British intelligence and knocks him right into the middle of complicated moral and ethical issues.
A British noir film, The Third Man was directed by Carol Reed and produced by Reed, David Selznick, and Alexander Korda. The cinematographer was Robert Krasker, who won an Academy Award for Best Black-and-White Cinematography for his work on it.
It was written by Graham Greene for the screen, and later a novella was released.
According to information online, Korda was someone who repeatedly told Welles he would fund his projects, but at the last minute, would pull out.
“My whole time with Alex was things like that,” Welles once said. “I kept doing projects for him which I did not abandon, but which he did.”
When it came to casting for the film, everyone knew Welles fit the part (with Greene essentially describing Welles when he described Lime) so Korda asked him. Welles agreed but then, as revenge for Korda’s past behavior, proceeded to tour Europe to film scenes for Othello (1952).
Korda wanted the contract signed and Welles locked in, so he sent his brother, Vincent, after Welles. Over the next week, Vincent had to chase Welles to Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples, and Capri because Wels would make sure they picked up and move to a new location each time Vincent was almost to them.
“I knew I was going to do it,” Welles later said, “but I was going to make it just as unpleasant as possible.” I loved this part of the story shared by TCM.com:
“On the way back to London via a privately chartered plane, Welles played one final, brilliant prank on Alexander Korda. Vincent asked him to hold a basket of fruit that he had gathered for his brother during the pursuit. This was post-war Europe, so fresh fruit was an exceedingly rare item. “It was going to be offered as a great present,” Welles said. “He’d gone and picked each piece of fruit. It was too good to be true! I knew Alex wouldn’t touch any of it if it had been bitten into.” So, when Vincent was asleep, Welles carefully took a bite out of each piece.”
Yes, Welles was literally chased down for this role, and it paid off because the character he played became known as one of the most iconic villains in cinema history.
I can’t say enough about the brilliant imagery in this film. Maybe it is my photography background/experience and my absolutely obsession with black and white photography that had me gawking in amazement and visually enamored with so many of this movie’s scenes.
Here is a still from a scene in the cemetery.
Anna is standing in the middle of the shot, the focal point of the photo, and on either side of her are rows of naked trees, forcing the viewer’s eyes to follow the trees down to Anna and only then wander slowly to Holly, watching her walk away. There is a barren feeling to the scene — the nakedness of the trees, the pale white of the sky showing it’s an overcast day, Anna with her head down, clearly in thought as she’s walking away, Holly watching her with a hint of sadness in his gaze.
Then there is this still from one of the most famous scenes in the movie.
Orson Welles in Carol Reed’s THE THIRD MAN (1949). Courtesy: Rialto Pictures / Studiocanal
There’s a chase through the sewers going on, Welles’ character is on the run and what is so incredible about this entire scene is how the tunnel forms a tunnel for our eyes, once again bringing our focus right to the man running in the middle of the scene, toward the light, toward freedom that he may or may not ever reach.
It was hard for me to take my eyes off this film, not only because of the story but because of the visual smorgasboard.
There are quite a few reviews of the movie online, with many of them agreeing that The Third Man is one of, if not the, greatest noir film ever made.
Tom Spoors from Loud and Clear Reviews writes: “Almost every frame of The Third Man is a visual marvel, employing all kinds of cinematic techniques. There’s plenty of dutch angles, sure, but what I found even more interesting is the way that Reed uses shadows. He puts his main character in a situation and a location that is brand new to him, and builds this world to be one constantly cloaked in mystery. Reed places silhouettes around every corner, plasters every wall with them, creating a city that almost doesn’t feel real. It’s an atmosphere that I don’t think has ever been captured again to this extent, and perhaps the biggest reason why the moviehas gone on to be one of the most critically acclaimed noirs of all time. Simply put, no other film in its genre looks or feels quite like it.”
Philip French of The Guardian wrote about the movie: “From the moment the first audiences saw the opening image of Anton Karas’s zither filling the screen with the nerve-jangling Harry Lime Theme (before, indeed, they had heard the word “zither”), they knew that with the second collaboration between director Carol Reed and author Graham Greene they were in for something special. At its end they recognised (British spelling) they’d seen a near-perfect work, what we now call a noir classic.”
It’s become a tradition for me to share and then disagree with the late film critic Roger Ebert’s reviews on here but this time I can’t.
“Of all the movies I have seen, this one most completely embodies the romance of going to the movies. I saw it first on a rainy day in a tiny, smoke-filled cinema on the Left Bank in Paris. It told a story of existential loss and betrayal. It was weary and knowing, and its glorious style was an act of defiance against the corrupt world it pictured. Seeing it, I realized how many Hollywood movies were like the pulp Westerns that Holly Martins wrote: naive formulas supplying happy endings for passive consumption.”
If you haven’t seen the movie, you really need to and find out if this scene below is a flashback or … what’s really going on….
If you enjoy the kind of content on my blog and all that goes into it, you can support my writing for $2.99 a month or a single donation. Learn more here: https://lisahoweler.com/support-my-writing/
I’ve been watching and writing about what are known as The Thin Man movies with William Powell and Myrna Loy.
I’ve already written about the first two movies, and you can find those recaps/reviews/thoughts here and here.
Today I am writing about the third movie in the series, Another Thin Man.
If you have not seen the first two movies, there is a spoiler in this one, just to warn you.
You’ve been warned. Are you ready?
You sure? Time to look away if you don’t want to know….
….
….
…..
Okay. You’ll have to know now if you haven’t already left.
In this movie, we have an addition to our mystery-solving team — Nick Jr.
That’s right. Nick and Nora Charles have had a baby since the last movie and what a cute baby he is.
He isn’t a central part of the somewhat confusing plot of this movie, but he is an adorable addition. You would actually suspect there would be a baby in this one if you saw the end of the last movie when Nora was knitting baby booties.
Somewhat convoluted plots seem to be the norm for The Thin Man movies, but let’s be honest, we aren’t just here for the mystery — we are here for the Nick and Nora banter and one-liners.
We are here for scenes like one where Nick finds Nora at a night club with men all around her, gently makes his way to her, and says, “Now, Mommy, you know you can’t be out until the doctor says it’s okay for you to leave quarantine.”
That clears the room fast, and the couple is left to compare notes with each other on their investigation.
Let’s go back a bit and give an overview of the movie.
Nick (William Powell) and Nora (Myrna Loy) accept an invitation to visit a family friend who also helps with Nora’s money (she’s an heiress if you remember from the previous movies), Col. Burr MacFay (C. Aubrey Smith – who I have been seeing in a lot of old movies I’ve been watching lately). MacFay is convinced his neighbor, Phil Church, who he worked with before, and is a known criminal, is trying to kill him.
No one else in the family is sure about this but MacFay calls Nick and Nora in the middle of the night practically begging them to help him find out.
While they are there, the dog of MacFay’s daughter is murdered brutally (that was dark) and a knife is thrown at Nick when he tries to talk to Phil Church (Sheldon Leonard).
It was also quite odd that when they were driving in to the estate, Nick saw a stabbed, “dead” body along the road, but when he stopped to investigate the body was gone and the chauffer ran off into the woods.
Skipping ahead, without spoiling too much, I can tell you that MacFay is murdered and right afterward Church disappears.
This leaves Nick and Nora to help the police investigate if Church actually murdered him or if someone else did.
Everyone else involved with the first two movies returned for this one, even the creator of Nick and Nora, noir crime writer Dashiell Hammet, who helped with the screenplay again this time, but was kicked off the last movie for drinking too much.
The two married, Oscar-winning writers who tried to kill the series by writing a baby in — Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich — even came back, but this was their last movie in the series, which Myrna Loy said negatively affected the last three movies.
“Do you know I never saw them at Metro?” she wrote in her autobiography. “It’s terrible, really, but unless they sent for the writers to get us out of a hole, we seldom saw them on the set….I didn’t meet the Hacketts until I moved to New York in the fifties. We became friends, I’m happy to say, and Albert facetiously explained one day why they didn’t write the last three Thin Man pictures: ‘Finally I just threw up on my typewriter. I couldn’t do it again; I couldn’t write another one.’ Perhaps we all should have concurred; those last three never really touched the previous ones.”
Director Woody VanDyke returned as well.
The movie almost wasn’t made, however, due to a health scare with its leading man, William Powell, as well as the sudden, unexpected death of his fiancé, Jean Harlow, right before filming.
William Powell and Jean Harlow
Powell was treated for cancer in 1938. Jean passed away in 1937. It was a more tired and depressed Powell who returned for the movie, even though his cancer treatments were successful. According to TCM.com, the cast and crew did their best to lift his spirits.
“Powell was given a standing ovation by the cast and crew on his first day on the set of Another Thin Man,” an article by Lang Thompson shares. “According to author Charles Francisco in the biography, Gentleman: The William Powell Story, “Powell, looking remarkably fit and tanned, seemed embarrassed by the attention. He held up his hands and the familiar grin began to play at the corners of his mouth as he tried to think of something funny to say. The applause stopped, and Bill found that he couldn’t speak. Myrna Loy rushed over to him and gave him a kiss and a big hug.”
To help with Powell’s recovery, VanDyke, usually known as a no-nonsense guy, cut shooting hours down to six hours a day and let Powell rest whenever he needed.
Powell’s illness kept him from being able to take the role of Maxim de Winter in Hitchock’s Rebecca. The role went to Laurence Olivier instead. Personally, I believe Olivier was a better fit.
Another Thin Man ended up being one of the highest-grossing films of 1939.
Up next in our series will be Shadow of the Thin Man from 1941. We will see if Myrna was right about the last three not being as good as the first three, with Hackett and Goodrich not on board.
You can read my impressions of the other movies I have watched here.
If you enjoy the kind of content on my blog and all that goes into it, you can support my writing for $2.99 a month or a single donation. Learn more here: https://lisahoweler.com/support-my-writing/
James Cagney was only 5 foot 5 inches tall, but he commanded the attention and wielded the presence of a giant. When he walks on screen in a movie everyone focuses on him. He has that confident swagger, that “don’t mess me with me” attitude you can’t look away from.
Every movie I’ve watched this winter for my Winter of Cagney marathon/feature (whatever you want to call it) has only solidified for me what a brilliant actor Cagney was. Were there times that Cagney was Cagney no matter the role? Yeah. Sure. Happens with any actor.
But did that subtle smirk and those heavy-lidded eyes often bring a smile to my face because I knew some sharp or smart-mouth comment was about to come out and I didn’t care if he does it every movie? Absolutely.
I had to wait two months to watch Angels With Dirty Faces with him, Pat O’Brien and novice at the time, Humphrey Bogart, and had to buy it on DVD but it was worth it. The movie wasn’t what I expected and part of me wanted it to end differently but ultimately, it was a movie about loyalty and friendship between two childhood friends and how even when you think a person can’t change or do the right thing they will for those they love.
That’s why the ending had to be what it was.
It was hard, but it was necessary.
Enough about the ending for now, though, let’s talk a bit about the beginning of the movie and what it is all about overall.
Rocky Sullivan and his best friend Jerry Connelly have gotten into crime at a young age. They try to rob a railroad car and are caught. Rocky ends up getting caught and sent to reform school while Jerry escapes.
This sends the two down different paths, and 15 years later, Rocky is a hardened criminal who just got out of jail for armed robbery, and Jerry has become a priest.
Rocky comes back to the old neighborhood, but not for good reasons. He’s back for the $100,000 his crooked lawyer, Jim Frazier (Bogart), said he’d hold for him until he got out of jail, as long as he took the full blame for the robbery. Frazier helped set up the robbery and is in control of a lot of the crime world, keeps a lot of criminals out of jail, and also blackmails city officials and law enforcement.
Jerry is thrilled to see Rocky, but has no idea how deep he’s still into the crime world.
He encourages him to turn his life around and even lets Rocky get involved with mentoring a group of boys known as The Dead End gang.
Here is something interesting my husband read about the “gang.” They were actually an acting troupe who didn’t only appear in this movie, but started on Broadway in a play called Dead End in 1935. From there, producer Samuel Goldwyn brought them to Hollywood to turn the play into a film and then their popularity grew until they were making movies under various names, including the Little Tough Guys, the East Side Kids, and the Bowery Boys, until 1958.
Unfortunately, Jerry learns the hard way that Rocky has not turned his life around and begins a campaign to expose Frazier, Rocky, and everyone who is corrupt in the city.
What will result is two old friends both wanting to save each other from deadly fates.
This aspect of the film is what makes this movie more than your average gangster film. It becomes a psychological study on what two good friends will do for each other.
The film might not have become this if it weren’t for the Hays Code, which was a code set in place in …. By the film industry that required movies to not allow a variety of things to be seen, including glorification of criminals, violence, or sex.
No movie was to make the audience sympathetic to a criminal under the code.
That’s why this movie ended the way that it did and because I wasn’t sure if some of you would want to watch this film, I wasn’t going to show how it ended, but I feel like I have to talk with someone about this ending so this is your WARNING! that I am going to discuss the ending.
Skip this section if you don’t want to know what happens!
Are you ready?
Okay….
Here goes…
Rocky honestly might have been able to go straight or only serve a little time for one of his crimes after he got out of jail but when he overhears Frazier and another criminal say they are going to gun Jerry down to stop him from trying to expose them, Rocky takes matters into his own hands.
He guns them both down, runs off, and is cornered by the police in a warehouse.
Long story short, Jerry convinces him to come out, and Rocky goes to jail for murder.
He doesn’t receive a pardon from the governor, so he has to go to the electric chair. Jerry sees that the boys from The Dead End gang see Rocky as a hero, and he knows that the media is going to be there for the execution (what a different time) so he asks Rocky not to be strong at the end. He asks him to, instead, going yellow — act like a coward. He wants Rocky to look weak at the end so the boys say, “Aw man. That guy was a loser. Being tough didn’t get him anywhere. He died a criminal and a coward. I don’t want to be that way.”
Rocky refuses. He isn’t going out that way and he tells Jerry that.
There is this long walk down a dimly lit hallway (the cinematography is just great here by the way) and we viewers are wondering the whole time what choice Rocky is going to make. As he walks into the room with the electric chair he breaks the fourth wall a bit by staring us down.
Then in the end, right before he’s tied into the chair, he cracks. He begs for mercy, says he doesn’t want to die. All we see his shadow on the wall and Jerry’s face, tears in his eyes. He isn’t praying out loud. Rocky didn’t want him to.
“If you’re going to pray, do it silently, okay?”
I actually teared up at the end and again when I was telling my son about the ending because the Hays Code may have forced an ending where Cagney’s character couldn’t look like a good guy but ultimately he still looked good.
It forced an ending where we saw Cagney’s sacrificial love for his friend. He gave up looking like a tough guy with his dying breath because he knew looking like a coward would make his friend happy, make him feel like he was helping those young men.
I do, however, wonder how the movie would have ended if it hadn’t been for the Hays Code. Would Cagney have done the same thing or would he have essentially flipped his friend off (without the actual gesture) and died the way he wanted to? I’m not sure… I think either ending would have made the movie intriguing and thought provoking.
I really like the thoughts of Joseph D’Onfrio in his article for TCM on this:
“Whether the Hays Office was satisfied with the results of Angels with Dirty Faces now means very little. The fact is that audiences have debated the final climactic scenes of the movie for generations. In those scenes, Pat O’Brien, the former child-thief turned priest, asks his old pal Cagney to perform an act of cowardice so The Dead End Kids would not follow in his footsteps. The ending seems to indicate that Cagney finally sees the light and redeems himself by playing role model to the nth degree. Or does he? Are the actions of Cagney only a feeble attempt at mock-redemption? Are the pronouncements given by Pat O’Brien at the picture’s end merely pious bromides? Cagney said he wanted to leave it up to the audience to judge if Rocky Sullivan does what he does at the end to help the Kids or whether he does it simply out of fear and despair.”
Cagney was highly praised for his performance in this film and won his first Oscar for his portrayal of Rocky, which, he wrote in his autobiography Cagney on Cagney, was actually him imitating someone he’d seen on the streets of New York City when he was growing up.
“Rocky Sullivan, was in part modeled on a fella I used to see when I was a kid,” Cagney wrote. “He was a hophead and a pimp…He worked out of a Hungarian rathskeller on First Avenue between Seventy-seventh and Seventy-eighth Streets…All day he would stand on that corner, hitch up his trousers, twist his neck and move his necktie, lift his shoulders, snap his fingers, then bring his hands together in a soft smack. His invariable greeting was “Whadda ya hear? Whadda ya say?” The capacity for observation is something every actor must have to some degree, so I recalled this fella and his mannerisms, and gave them to Rocky Sullivan just to bring some modicum of difference to this roughneck. I did that gesturing maybe six times in the picture – that was over thirty years ago – and the impressionists are still doing me doing him.”
Like other movies Cagney was in, there was some shooting going on and like movies back then, real bullets were used in at least one scene. Cagney had learned his lesson after he was almost gunned down during the filming of The Public Enemy in 1931.
This time he told the director, Michael Curtiz, that he wouldn’t stand in front of a window as ordered and let a machine-gun expert fire away at him, which worked out well since a hail of live bullets shattered a window pane where Cagney’s head was supposed to be.
This would be Cagney and Bogart’s first, but not last time, working together. They appeared together in two more movies in 1939: The Roaring Twenties (1939) and The Oklahoma Kid (1939). In each of the three movies they portrayed rivals.
A little trivia:
Here is a funny tidbit pulled right from an article by D’Onfrio on TCM.com: “The genuine article, the Dead End Kids were hard nosed guys from the slums, who enjoyed being pranksters, and gave everyone a playful hard time while making Angels With Dirty Faces. Rumor had it that on a previous film with Bogart, the Kids poked fun of Bogie’s tough guy movie image and even tore the actor’s pants off in an off-the-set incident, which encouraged him to steer clear of the Kids thereafter. Only Cagney, with a similar background to the Kids, would stand up to them. One day the Dead End ringleader, Leo Gorcey, decided to play around and ad-lib a scene with Cagney. In his autobiography, the actor wrote, “I gave Leo Gorcey a stiff arm right above the nose – bang! His head went back, hitting the kid behind him, stunning them both momentarily. Then I said, “Now listen here, we’ve got some work to do, so let’s have none of this ******* nonsense….Understood?” “Yeah,” they said. One of the kids turned to Gorcey and said, “Who the hell you think you got there – Bogart?”
***
Pat O’Brien and James Cagney were good friends in real life and made several movies together, including a screwball comedy about Hollywood producers called Boy Meets Girl.
***
The original previews for the movie included a newsreel that featured the signing of the Munich Peace Pact and a speech by FDR about peace at the World Fair.
I often forget to share where I found a movie, but I will tell you that this time I could not find this movie streaming anywhere. I had to buy a Blu-Ray of it off of Amazon but it was worth it. There are extras on the Blu-Ray that I watched last night.
The original trailer and the cartoon that was shown at the beginning in theaters were on there, along with the trailer for Boy Meets Girl, the newsreel, a musical short, “Out Where The Stars Begin”, a looney toons feature called Porky & Daffy, commentary by Dana Polan, and the Lux Radio Theater Broadcast of the movie from 1939.
My husband said we should buy more Blu-Ray’s and DVDs so we can get the extras and I agree. We decided we will be buying one or a set once a month.
So this is the end of my Winter of Cagney. I didn’t get to watch Man of Many Faces since I couldn’t find it streaming but I hope to buy the Blu-Ray of it soon.
Up next I’ll be watching some Bette Davis movies but I won’t be starting them until April.
If you enjoy the kind of content on my blog and all that goes into it, you can support my writing for $2.99 a month or a single donation. Learn more here: https://lisahoweler.com/support-my-writing/
This Winter I’ve been watching James Cagney movies.
I’ve switched the movie I was going to write about last week with the one I was going to write this week because I was going to watch the DVD of Angels With Dirty Faces I picked up, but I’ve been waiting for a night to watch it with The Husband, and that hasn’t come.
In the end, I decided to wait to watch that movie with him because he would like to see it as well, and it will be fun to watch together.
Angels with Dirty Faces stars Cagney with Humphrey Bogart, and Bogie is one of my husband’s favorite actors.
The Bride Came C.O.D. with Cagney and Bette Davis was a perfect substitute for this week, though.
It was a delightfully fun movie, and I needed it this week, so I’m glad I made the trade.
I will be watching this movie again with him soon, though, because it was just too much fun and should be watched with others.
This is a slapstick comedy where Cagney and Davis were both trying their acting talents at something a little different.
First, the premise: Davis is playing Joan Winfield, an heiress who makes impulsive decisions, and her latest impulsive decision is marrying Alan Brice (Jack Carson), a famous singer and band leader. The marriage announcement comes at just the right time for gossip and entertainment broadcaster named Hinkle who needs a big story.
He talks Brice into marrying Joan right away because it will make a great story for his broadcast.
The only issue is that Joan is on the phone with her father when Alan announces his engagement to Joan to the audience at the club and she is trying to work up the courage to tell her father she’s engaged.
Their call is cut short and she never tells him, but Hinkle arranges for her and Alan to go to a small airport to be flown by a private plane to Las Vegas where they can be married.
Steve Collins, a notorious womanizer who pretends he is married with children so he doesn’t get roped into marriage by women who like to date married men, owns the airport and the main plane. He’s never paid for the plane though and the finance company now wants it back. Steve’s handy man, Pee Wee (George Tobias) tells him that Hinkle has arranged for their plane to take a famous couple to Las Vegas and Steve wonders if they will even have a plane to take them in.
Collins tries to think of a way to get the money and has no ideas until Joan’s father, oil tycoon Lucius K. Winfield (Eugene Pallette) calls the airport to try to reach his daughter and Collins strikes up a plan with Winfield to make sure his daughter doesn’t make it to Las Vegas to marry Alan Brice.
If Collins pulls off the delay, meeting Winfield with his daughter in tow in Texas instead, Winfield will pay Collins the money he needs to pay off the plane and keep the airport in business.
The first task at hand is to get rid of Hinkle and Alan which PeeWee helps Collins with. With them out of the way, Collins jumps in the plane and takes off with Joan, his plan to fly her to Texas. Unfortunately, Joan isn’t too happy with this arrangement and tries to escape, causing the plane to crash in the desert.
Here we will be introduced to Pop Tolliver (Harry Davenport), who I just loved.
I loved a lot about this movie.
It was very witty and fun, with some great lines.
Bette Davis was supposed to be 23 in the film which I found a little unbelievable but then again, Bette always looked older to me than she was.
She was actually 33 when this movie was made.
According to Frank Miller from TCM (yes, my go-to-source), Cagney made the movie on the heels of Strawberry Blonde because he wanted to break out of gangster roles.
Ann Sheridan, Ginger Rogers, and Rosalind Russell were considered for Davis’s role but when she expressed interest in trying out, Hal Willis, the producer of the movie, went to bat for her.
“In addition, she was eager to re-team with Cagney, who like her had a history of battles with the Warner Bros. management,” Miller wrote. “They had not worked together since 1934, when they teamed for the minor comedy Jimmy the Gent. Some biographers have suggested that the studio was punishing her with the film because of her notorious temperament, while others have suggested she may have wanted to emulate Katharine Hepburn, who had been equally successful in serious and comic roles. Also possible is that she was drawn to the film’s obvious similarities to It Happened One Night (1934), another tale of a runaway heiress saved from a bad marriage by the love of a simple working guy.”
There was a lot of trouble with the movie, including the writing and the fact Cagney wasn’t a fan of the sweltering heat at the shooting location of Death Valley.
Davis also wasn’t happy because while a stunt double was supposed to take the fall into a cactus for her, she had a fall of her own and ended up with 45 cactus quills having to be removed from her behind.
Neither actor was very fond of the movie years down the road and even critics bashed it with one saying, “Okay, Jimmie and Bette. You’ve had your fling. Now go back to work.”
As for me, I found the film a lot of fun and ended up snickering at the silliness and the exchanges between our main characters.
And as I said above, Harry Davenport really added some charm to the film for me.
Have you ever seen this one?
I found it for rent on Amazon Prime but it is also available on HBO Max, Hulu, YouTube, and AppleTV.
Next week I’ll wrap up my Winter of Cagney with Angels With Dirty Faces and two weeks after that I’ll start a bi-weekly movie watch of Bette Davis films.
If you want to catch up on the other Cagney films I’ve watched this winter you can do so here:
If you enjoy the kind of content on my blog and all that goes into it, you can support my writing for $2.99 a month or a single donation. Learn more here: https://lisahoweler.com/support-my-writing/
