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DVD Mr. Skeffington
Fanny Skeffington, an incorrigible society flirt of the WWI era, was one of the meatiest roles and most exasperating women Bette Davis ever played. Flighty Fanny loves the attention of her male suitors, but marries the steadfast Jewish financier Job Skeffington (Claude Rains) for security; long after their wedding day, she still enjoys receiving gentlemen callers. Time catches up with Fanny, of course, and the bills are due by the time World War II rolls around.
Mr. Skeffington is a vintage Warner Bros. workout for Davis, who never shied away from playing unsympathetic or physically unappealing roles. (Her main worry here was looking pretty enough in the early reels to justify Fanny's reputation.) Her theatrical performance and Rains's impeccable work carry the handsomely dressed story through its many melodramatic shifts. The dialogue by Julius and Philip Epstein (who were doing Casablanca around this time) has the sprung rhythm of screwball comedy, although director Vincent Sherman and the cast don't always seem to have noticed this. There's also the growing issue of anti-Semitism--a subject rare in Hollywood prior to this--especially as it concerns Fanny and Job's daughter. But mostly the film has Bette Davis, who strides headfirst into the gray areas (her indifferent treatment of her daughter is especially unappetizing), a fearless attitude that looks like the polar opposite of Fanny Skeffington's vanity. --Robert Horton
Usually it was the acting of Bette Davis that made most of those melodramatic soapers she appeared in watchable, but she's not quite up to par in this one. She plays a narcisstic woman in love with her own beauty; every eligible bachelor around is after her. But she meets the rich (and Jewish) Caude Rains when he is about to prosecute her brother for defrauding him; Davis convinces him not to. Eventually they marry.
But it's a loveless match from the start, and they each find affection in the company of others. After years of this Davis decides to divorce him; Rains settles handsomely and goes to Europe - just in time to fall into the net of the Nazis. Davis flits around wherever her money will take her, until she contracts diphtheria and overnight turns into a Medussa. She's a lonely old hag now, but Rains comes back, blinded in a concentration camp - and because he can't see her, he thinks she's still beautiful. They reconcile.
A lot of the scenes and much of the dialogue are pretty snappy, especially early on. But Davis is just so cloying here and she so over-does that high-pitched, whiny voice that you just want to strangle her. The messages are loud and clear (life is a serious business, physical beauty isn't everything), and even the timely reminder that Hitler's Nazi's were brutal, especially to the Jews, is befitting and commendable in a 1944 movie. And Claude Rains is excellent. I just think the movie could have been better.
Touching movie with many strong messages
Spoilers
This movie is just excellent. Bette Davis stars as a cold woman who lives with her brother who she loves. She gets all of her self esteem from men trying to marry or get with her. Thats her only focus in life. She doesn't have the ability to love or really be loved. But, theres more to the story then this, she does marry Mr Skeffington and he ends up going to fight in the Holocoust. Bette ages a lot in the movie and she starts to realize her priorities were off. Theres much more to it but this is a classic. They just don't make movies like this anymore.
Mr. Skeffington
Although the packaging showed signs of wear (not surprising given it's age), the video was in very good condition. And what a film! Bette Davis at her best - I have loved this film for years and the ending still makes me cry!
"Come on, Oscar--let's you and me get drunk." This caustic Bette Davis line is not aimed at a co-star but at the Academy Award itself, which down-on-her-luck actress Margaret Elliot cradles bitterly at the beginning of an inebriated evening. As you can guess, Davis is at full-throttle in his ripe melodrama, which came a couple of years after All About Eve and serves as a kind of less-classy companion piece to that classic. As the movie begins, Margaret has lost her career and family because of her own demanding nature. Rescued by a roughhewn boatbuilder (Sterling Hayden) she once befriended, she confronts what's most important--being a star, or being a (ahem) woman.
In the opening sequence of The Letter, director William Wyler delivers a primer on film directing: at a rubber plantation, in the tropical funk of a Malaysian night, the heavy stillness is suddenly broken by shots... and a woman with a gun, descending a staircase. She is the wife of the plantation owner, and the dead man is, ahem, not her husband. Holding the gun so securely is Bette Davis, in one of her greatest performances (her acting of a big revelation, late in the film, is still an astounding piece of emotional fluency). The story is taken from one of those sturdy Somerset Maugham tales that has proved itself in many versions, but this is the keeper; it was nominated for seven Oscars®, including best picture, director, and actress, winning none. Wyler's... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Bette Davis - Herbert Marshall - James Stephenson Director(s): William Wyler DVD Release Date: Released the 11 January 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Leave Her to Heaven is one of the most unblinkingly perverse movies ever offered up as a prestige picture by a major studio in the golden age of Hollywood. Gene Tierney, whose lambent eyes, porcelain features, and sweep of healthy-American-girl hair customarily made her a 20th Century Fox icon of purity, scored an Oscar nomination playing a demonically obsessive daughter of privilege with her own monstrous notion of love. By the time she crosses eyebeams with popular novelist Cornel Wilde on a New Mexico-bound train, her jealous manipulations have driven her parents apart and her father to his grave. Well, no, not grave: Wilde soon gets to watch her gallop a glorious palomino across a red-rock horizon as she metronomically sows Dad's ashes to the winds. Mere screen moments later,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Cornel Wilde Director(s): John M. Stahl DVD Release Date: Released the 22 February 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The greatness of John Garfield was that he was a tough guy who wasn't afraid to wear his sensitivity on his sleeve. What makes this such a great film is that director Jean Negulesco and his two writers (including Clifford Oddets) construct a complex web of ambiguity around Garfield's own torment. He's a violin virtuoso from the slums of New York who rises to the top with the assistance of socialite Joan Crawford (who was never better). There's a sexual intensity to his art that she wants to possess, and there's a vulnerability behind her lacerating façade that he wants to expose. They play each other like a couple of virtuosos, stripping each other's spirit away. What helps transcend this depression-era class struggle is its cool sophistication. It's a sublime noir about... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Joan Crawford - John Garfield Director(s): Jean Negulesco DVD Release Date: Released the 14 June 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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