The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (102 page)

Mayer was then caught between two ladies anxious to play Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Davies, supported by Hearst, and Norma Shearer, backed by her husband, Irving Thalberg. Shearer won and Davies, Cosmopolitan, and her bungalow went to Warners for four films before she retired:
Page Miss Glory
(35, Mervyn Le Roy);
Hearts Divided
(36, Frank Borzage);
Cain and Mabel
(36, Lloyd Bacon); and
Ever Since Eve
(37, Bacon).

When her career was over, and after Hearst was broke and sick, Davies again escaped the legend. She behaved with common decency, offering back the jewels Hearst had given her, and standing by him. This final story, all the way to Hearst’s death in 1951, is worthy of a movie—something far better than the 1985 TV job that hired Robert Mitchum and Virginia Madsen, but gave them nothing to do. What a reunion the story could be for Beatty and Dunaway
—Twilight at San Simeon?
Or at Wyntoon, Hearst’s smaller estate, in northern California, where one of the “cottages” has murals in which the fairytale character, Rose Red, was based on the young and undyingly lovely Marion Davies.

Terence Davies
, b. Liverpool, England, 1945
1983:
The Terence Davies Trilogy
. 1988:
Distant Voices, Still Lives
. 1992:
The Long Day Closes
. 1995:
The Neon Bible
. 2000:
The House of Mirth
. 2008:
Of Time and the City
.

Davies is an utterly personal lyric filmmaker who moves as swiftly as music from the lacerating to the ecstatic. The
Trilogy
was three short films made over a period of years for small budgets, about a Roman Catholic and homosexual who lives in Liverpool: “Children” was made in 1974–76 on a British Film Institute grant; “Madonna and Child” was released in 1980 as a graduation project at the National Film School in England; and “Death and Transfiguration” was made with funds from the BFI and the Greater London Arts Association.

All these pictures were shot in black and white, which in Davies’s eyes, “has the ability to strip bare, to rid the image of all superfluity and to create a beauty that is all the more powerful because of its very starkness.” Moving backward and forward in time, torn between the similar appeals of real mothers and icons of the madonna, filled with situations of dread and pain, revelation and consolation, the trilogy makes us think of Bresson and Graham Greene, and it comes close to the thrilled remorse of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Distant Voices, Still Lives
was in color, it was 35mm as opposed to 16mm, and it was an epic of abused childhood, offset by the comfort in popular songs. It is less a narrative than a musical progress, and to these eyes it was marred by self-pity. But no one else had ever dreamed of such a film, and as if mindful of criticism about morbidity, Davies next produced
The Long Day Closes
, a poem to ordinary bliss as seen through the eyes of a child growing up in a dark, impoverished world in which sometimes nothing more momentous occurs than a change in the light. But Davies knows that that
is
momentous.

The Long Day Closes
is about a state of being, a kind of paradise, despite the rain, the harsh circumstances, and the cramped tenement house. Memory has graced all the elements with imagery that is part Flemish, part Bill Brandt, and part a tribute to the lost glory of three-strip Technicolor. Songs mingle with passages of classic movie sound tracks. The camera moves with extraordinary elegance. Nothing happens, yet lives and a time have been opened up and gently restored, as in a tender anatomy lesson.

It must be a large question where Davies goes beyond autobiography. But
The Long Day Closes
is a triumph of common experience.
The Neon Bible
seemed to me an enterprising failure, based on a novel by John Kennedy Toole, but
The House of Mirth
was a great film (dreadfully missed by public and critics alike) in which a thorough sense of literary values was driven home by Davies’s rare capacity for naked feelings.

There was a horrible hiatus in which Davies gave master classes—and wrote for radio. At last,
Of Time and the City
was half-documentary, half-song. It was unique and very moving, but who could wonder if touches of anger and self-pity had crept in.

Andrew Davis
, b. Chicago, 1947
1978:
Stony Island
. 1981:
The Final Terror
. 1985:
Code of Silence
. 1988:
Above the Law
. 1989:
The Package
. 1992:
Under Siege
. 1993:
The Fugitive
. 1995:
Steal Big Steal Little
. 1996:
Chain Reaction
. 1998:
A Perfect Murder
. 2002:
Collateral Damage
. 2003:
Holes
. 2005: episode from
Just Legal
(TV). 2006:
The Guardian
.

Andrew Davis has made an unusual journey. After studying journalism at the University of Illinois, he was a camera assistant to Haskell Wexler on
Medium Cool
(69). From that, he became the cinematographer on a number of low-budget action pictures:
Cool Breeze
(72, Barry Pollack);
Private Parts
(72, Paul Bartel);
Hit Man
(72, George Armitage);
The Slams
(73, Jonathan Kaplan);
Lepke
(75, Menahem Golan). That led to
Stony Island
, an independent feature, done in the Chicago area, about a racially integrated musical group.

But after photographing
Over the Edge
(79, Kaplan), he directed a cheap horror film,
The Final Terror
, which helped him get the Chuck Norris picture
Code of Silence
. Three years later, he was handling Steven Seagal in
Above the Law. The Package
was that rarity, a poor Gene Hackman film—with Tommy Lee Jones in support.
Under Siege
marked the commercial triumph of Seagalism, and from that Davis jumped to the blockbuster
The Fugitive
(with Jones in pursuit of Harrison Ford). That picture raised a rabble, and won Jones an Oscar, but in truth it’s devoid of the long-running suspense of the TV original, to say nothing of the depressive foreboding David Janssen brought to it.

Nothing since has been as big. But
A Perfect Murder
was a singularly inept “opening up” of
Dial M for Murder
, which seemed blind to the contained theatrical charm of the original.
Collateral Damage
was set back six months because of its inadvertent overlap with the events of September 11. When will they realize that so much of American film has nothing to do with life, death, damage, or duty?

Bette Davis
(Ruth Elizabeth Davis) (1908–89), b. Lowell, Massachusetts
Bette Davis trailed the subject of acting across the audience’s path with all the preemptive originality of Queen Elizabeth spreading ermine on the ground before Raleigh.

Davis’s unexpectedness began with the implausibility of a far-from-pretty girl becoming a movie star. At once hysterically mortified and daring us to admit that she was not attractive, how could the lady with pulsing eyes succeed unless she was a serious actress? This implied that she alone in Hollywood was a real professional; those others, more beautiful and calm, must also be lazier and emptier. Davis always stressed how hard she worked and left us to gather the rarity of such diligence. She went to war with her studio for better scripts and directors, even if in circumstances that were straight from the overheated script conferences that produced the movies she was fleeing. But the smoke of that battle had still not cleared when she took her greatest part, Margo Channing in
All About Eve
, the grandest cinematic expression of high theatre. In that film Davis is a curdled cocktail, her lips ashine with greasepaint and her hair youthfully long, seeming to merge with her fur coat. But what sort of actress is Margo Channing? Not just ham, but ham baked in honey, and studded with cloves.

Margo brags that she “detests cheap sentiment,” but her self-projection depends upon it. And Davis was a vulgar, bullying actress, who made mannerism a virtue by showing us how it expresses the emotion of the self. When Davis’s autobiography,
A Lonely Life
, was published in 1962, Brigid Brophy compared the actress to St. Teresa and remarked on the nature of a great actress’s being rooted in an hysterical personality:

The essence is not belief (which is merely and involuntarily mad) but make-belief in the fantasy—to the extent of giving a great performance or of having, as a deliberately cultivated act of will, a mystical experience. Miss Davis needed her bad scripts as sorely as they needed her; they were what she needed to wrestle through in pursuit of that “truth” and “realism” … which to her are “more than natural.” For in Miss Davis’ control is always chasing after the fantasy, insight after melodrama; the chase creates, in her autobiography as in St. Teresa’s, a wonderful spiral of intensity.

Bette Davis—the name was an allusion to Balzac’s Cousin Bette—made her stage debut in 1928. Universal hired her and put her in her first film,
Bad Sister
(31, Hobart Henley). She had small parts in
Seed
(31, John Stahl),
Waterloo Bridge
(31, James Whale), and
The Menace
(32, Roy William Neill) before Warners took her up to play with George Arliss in
The Man Who Played God
(32, John Adolfi). This began her long period under contract to Warners, a studio run on a team of male stars. She took supporting roles in
So Big
(32, William Wellman) and
The Rich Are Always With Us
(32, Alfred E. Green) and worked her way up singing “Willie the Weeper” in
Cabin in the Cotton
(32, Michael Curtiz); in
Three on a Match
(32, Mervyn Le Roy);
20,000 Years in Sing Sing
(32, Curtiz);
Ex-Lady
(33, Robert Florey);
Bureau of Missing Persons
(33, Roy del Ruth);
Fashions of 1934
(34, William Dieterle);
Jimmy the Gent
(34, Curtiz); and
Fog Over Frisco
(34, Dieterle). But Warners only began to take notice after RKO borrowed her to play Mildred in
Of Human Bondage
(34, John Cromwell), an important role and the first to show her as a woman living ruthlessly by her wits. Warners then gave her a real chance in
Bordertown
(35, Archie Mayo);
Front Page Woman
(35, Curtiz); and
Dangerous
(35, Green), in which she played a Warners “Persona” actress and won the Oscar. In 1936 she was in
The Petrified Forest
(Mayo),
The Golden Arrow
(Green), and
Satan Met a Lady
(Dieterle).

The last, a bad adaptation of
The Maltese Falcon
, summed up her dissatisfaction with the material Warners gave her. She refused her next film and, while on suspension, sailed to Britain to make a movie outside her contract. Warners sued and a hectic court case in London went against her. She was apparently humiliated and penniless, but the case had publicized her flamboyant independence. Never averse to the role of proud martyr, she returned to more consideration:
Marked Woman
(37, Lloyd Bacon);
Kid Galahad
(37, Curtiz);
That Certain Woman
(37, Edmund Goulding); and
It’s Love I’m After
(37, Mayo). This last was one of the first concessions the studio made to romantic comedy on her behalf. They went further with
Jezebel
(38, William Wyler), a lurid Deep South women’s picture that allows Davis first to scheme then repent: it is lit up by her little girl’s conviction—a trash heap glowing with fire at twilight. It won her a second Oscar, though it killed any chance at Scarlett O’Hara. Now, at last, she was in her tortured element:
The Sisters
(38, Anatole Litvak); as a rich girl who goes blind in
Dark Victory
(39, Goulding)—making death the great performance; as the demented Carlotta in
Juarez
(39, Dieterle);
The Old Maid
(39, Goulding); as the fidgety Virgin Queen in
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
(39, Curtiz).

The part of Elizabeth drew on the emotions of a woman fearful of romantic neglect who makes a cult of highly strung capriciousness. Within a few years, Davis had given up modern, masculine films for costume melodrama. She excelled in the tearjerker
All This and Heaven Too
(40, Litvak), and she was at her best in
The Letter
(40, Wyler) and
The Great Lie
(41, Goulding) before
The Little Foxes
(41, Wyler), which made explicit her command of the emotional woman, thwarted or spurned, who becomes a malicious tyrant. The good scripts she had called for needed only to be red-blooded and to turn upon her passionate ugliness. After
The Man Who Came to Dinner
(42, William Keighley) and
In This Our Life
(42, John Huston), she played Charlotte Vale in
Now, Voyager
(42, Irving Rapper), a classic exaltation of the women’s picture. Much quieter in
Watch on the Rhine
(43, Herman Shumlin), she was then in
Old Acquaintance
(43) and a very nasty wife to Claude Rains in
Mr. Skeffington
(44), both by Vincent Sherman.

At about this time, her material withered away:
The Corn Is Green
(45, Rapper), when movie corn should be aflame with ripeness;
A Stolen Life
(46, Curtis Bernhardt) as twins, one with icing and one without; and then three duds in a row
—Deception
(46, Rapper);
Winter Meeting
(48, Bretaigne Windust); and
June Bride
(48, Windust). Her last film at Warners,
Beyond the Forest
(49, King Vidor), was one she disliked, and yet Vidor was a director made for her, and the film has some exotic moments.