Dark Victory

Death awaits for Bette Davis in Dark Victory

Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory, from 1939, is one of Bette Davis' better melodramas from when she ruled as queen of the Warner Brothers lot. The scenario, an adaptation of a play that opened on Broadway in 1934 with Tallulah Bankhead as the lead, requires Davis to play a Long Island heiress dying of a vaguely specified brain ailment. Robert Benchley described the play as "Camille without all the coughing." The film is total hooey, yet redeemed by Goulding's graceful direction and a superior cast. Goulding's graceful pans of the many party scenes nimbly introduce characters and pivots us to the dramatic crux of each scene. Davis gets to play a gamut of emotions and delivers. Playing a full of beans rich kid, she takes on the pose of a madcap hellion after learning the diagnosis that has been hidden from her. Of course, she see the light and weds the stolid doctor (George Brent) who loves her. She withdraws with him to Vermont for a few blissful months before accepting death with dignity and gaining the dark victory of the title.

Davis and George Brent

As a person, Davis was a piece of work, but no one can deny her facility as an actress. Dark Victory gives her a chance to do a few variations on her usual brittle bitch schtick. Audiences and critics lapped it up and so did I. Davis was coming off her first divorce and, during filming, co-star Brent fell into her romantic clutches. This probably accounts for the warmth (not heat) between the two which far outstrips anything generated in their other films together. Brent was a fairly wooden presence, but his casting in Dark Victory suits him. His character is a decent, one dimensional sort lacking either sex appeal or neuroses.

For sexual and neurotic appeal, we get Humphrey Bogart as Davis' stable groom. The groom has the hots for the heiress and the insolent banter between Bogart and Davis is fun. Bogart had not yet reached the top rung of stardom. This role was a godsend after playing villainous gangsters for the studio or worse: like his cowboy in The Oklahoma Kid or his vampire in the dire The Return of Doctor X. Another suitor for Davis in the film is played by an actor who never reached the top rung of movie stardom, but overachieved in another field, Ronald Reagan. Reagan plays a drunken playboy. Reportedly, Goulding wanted to give the role a dash of sexual ambivalence, but ambivalence was foreign to Reagan in all aspects of his life. The role must have given him pause because he was the son of an alcoholic, but he acquits himself well.

Davis and Bogart

I usually hurl brickbats at him, but Max Steiner's score is quite good. Best of all is a young Irish actress making her American film debut, Geraldine Fitzgerald. Hal Wallis had signed her after seeing her in New York in the Mercury Theater production of Heartbreak Hotel with Orson Welles. She plays the thankless role of Davis' secretary and confidante with amiable aplomb. Life imitated art, as Fitzgerald was mentored by Davis in how to navigate the hazardous byways of Hollywood. Despite acclaim for this picture and her performance in Wuthering Heights, Fitzgerald floundered at Warners and was released from her contract in 1946. Davis, who had tangled with Jack Warner and many others during the course of her career, met the same fate in 1949.