Bette the Queen Bee

As anyone who knows me at all knows, yesterday was a bit of a holiday for me, a day I anticipated and sacrificed a substantial amount of time and sleep to fully savor and enjoy. Yesterday was Bette Davis day on TCM. Ode to joy! There's only one woman who could get me up at four o'clock in the morning, miss my morning run to fiddle endlessly with the VCR/DVD recorder, and spend the next 18 hours as a complete vegetable, and that's Bette. This was not just a day in front of the boob tube. This, was an event.

There are so many things I love about Bette from her personal life: her resilience, bawdiness, perfectionism, her childhood bearing striking resemblance to mine. But yesterday I didn't want to focus on any of those things. Yesterday it was all about the acting. And after now proudly checking moving #48 off my Bette-Bucket list, I can only say one thing. 

Dang, she's good.

I'm so fed up with the style in Hollywood today, that we as the audience shouldn't know that the actors are acting, it should all look effortless and completely realistic. Well bull pucky, I can see real life every day, the movies are supposed to be entertainment! And entertain she does. There are mannerisms in each of her characters that are hypnotizing, not the naturalness of the actresses own idiosyncrasies, but ones she, (and I'm sure her directors) developed to give full breath and bones to each character. 

 The first one streaming through the wee small hours of yesterday morning is Irving Rapper's 1942 Now Voyager. Bette is uber-ugly Aunt Charlotte, the caterpillar-browed and chunky late child of her suffocating mother. Charlotte is on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown, and more than any other gesture, it is her hands that do the acting. Mama Vale, played by Gladys Cooper, is the first on the scene to draw our attention to the hands in this movie--she is ringing them compulsively as the first scene opens and she is bulldozing the idea of Charlotte being, um...slightly dissatisfied in her stifling life with Mother. Later in the same scene, we see Charlotte's hands caught in the same obsessive habit, not only revealing how close she is to a total freak-out, but also how far her mother has gone in molding her daughter into a carbon copy of her own miserable self. (Spoiler alert: Charlotte's hands aren't doing anything but sexily holding cigarettes by the end of the movie. Tootles to Mama Vale). 

Next up is William Wyler's 1939 Jezebel, a achievement unfortunately eclipsed by Gone with the Wind blowing in that same year. In the pivotal and now infamous red dress scene,  Henry Fonda aka Preston Dillard seditiously forces Julie to stay at the virginal white Olympus Ball when she's (by her own choice), wearing red. It seemed like a good idea at the time, a "statement" against the legalism of the deep south, but now Julie is quite understandably mortified and wants to go home. Pres forces her to stay and dance with him, and we're all shocked at his horrific cruelty. But, hate to break it to ya Hank, it's not his icy blank face that conveys his un-chivalric behavior. It's Bette's arms. From the second he says, "Shall we?" and starts lugging her around the floor, her arm goes completely stiff and unresponsive. When the band stops playing she tenses it so hard that we're sure she's going to make a break for it. All the embarrassment and anger and damaged pride is all bottled up in those arms.

Finally there's Juarez, with Bette playing the Empress Carlotta in one of the best "look-out-I'm-going-mad" scenes ever to flash Hollywood. Tell you what, hell hath no fury like an Empress chewing out Napoleon for letting her Emperor husband die at the hands of Mexican nationals. Yikes! But it's amazing to watch. Any Davis fan has seen fire-breathing, nostril's flaring side of their icon a million times, but this lashing is so passionate, so truly ferocious, if I had been Claude Rains taking that, I would have split. 




She was right, what Bette said in her interview with Dick Cavett. Acting should be a little bit bigger, a little larger than life. And Bette my dear, you were.