'The Bold and the Bad and the Bumpy Nights' .....Happy B'Day Bette Davis

[pinto]

The Bold and the Bad and the Bumpy Nights

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY (NY Times)
Published: March 30, 2008



BETTE DAVIS, born 100 years ago this week, made her first appearance on film in 1931 and her last in 1989, and like every star of her generation she was always ready for her close-up. The difference with Davis — part of what makes her, I think, the greatest actress of the American cinema — was, she didn’t need it. You could tell what she was thinking and feeling from across the room, even a very large one like the ballroom she swoops into, wearing a red dress, in William Wyler’s “Jezebel” (1938), scandalizing the haut monde of 1852 New Orleans; unmarried young women like her character, Julie Marsden, are expected to wear white. But Julie wants to make an impression, and she does; and as she takes a turn on the dance floor with her stiff-backed escort, you can see, although most of the sequence is long shots, her growing awareness that she has made a terrible mistake, that she has gone, for once, too far.

Her dancing is limp, reluctant; her shoulders sag; and her head is bowed a little, as if she were trying to hide from the disapproving gaze of the assembled revelers: a shocking sensation for Julie, who, like most every character Davis ever played, is accustomed to looking people straight in the eye. There are close-ups in the scene, but it’s in the long shots that you sense most powerfully the burden of that unfortunate dress on this suddenly humiliated woman, feel the depth of her regret and the strength of her desire to be wearing something, anything, else. Bette Davis could make you see red in black and white.

<snip>

And in one of her most celebrated roles, as the panicky aging actress Margo Channing in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “All About Eve” (1950), Davis trots out every bad habit she’d developed over the years, every “Bette Davis” mannerism, and makes them all seem, strictly speaking, necessary: real aspects of an unmistakably real woman. It helps, obviously, that Margo happens to be an actress. (This was a specialty of Davis’s. She played actresses in no fewer than five of her pictures, including “Dangerous,” for which she won her first Academy Award in 1935. The other was for “Jezebel.”) She can get away with gestures and intonations that might be considered somewhat over the top in, say, a real-estate lawyer; theatricality is part of who she is, maybe the largest part.

But — and this is the beauty of the performance — it isn’t all she is. It would have been easy for Davis to play Margo as a pathetic drama queen. What she does is much more interesting: the performance is dry-eyed and free of camp posturing, the portrait of a woman whose theatricality is natural, both as an expression of her self and as a tool of her peculiar trade. It’s something she’s learned to live with, and to make a living from. Bouts of insecurity and emotional neediness are occupational hazards, as is a certain inability to resist the dramatic moment — standing on a staircase at a party, for example, to announce, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night” — but on balance Margo, mannerisms and all, seems a surprisingly level-headed woman. In the end she’s a trouper.

<snip>

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/movies/30raff.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Terrence+Rafferty&st=nyt&oref=slogin