New DVD from Fox is all about Bette
After leaving Warner Brothers, where she made some of her most enduring films, Bette Davis washed up at 20th Century Fox. Darryl F. Zanuck's studio was never quite sure what to do with an actress of her stature, or of Davis's peculiar talents, a situation made clear by Fox's new five-disc "Bette Davis Collection" (coming out April 8, just one week after Warner's latest Bette set). Davis had made her name at Warners playing Southern belles and brassy dames - at times brash and outspoken, at others cowed and silent. By the time she reached Fox, Davis had already won two Oscars, but she had grown too old and become too large an on-screen presence for the roles she had once played.
Fox offered Davis top billing, but the roles were not always as large as the typeface. Though Davis is the putative star of all five films in this set - "All About Eve," "The Virgin Queen," "Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte," "The Nanny," "Phone Call from a Stranger" - including "Phone Call," in which she makes little more than a glorified cameo, she cedes center stage to other performers, such as Olivia de Havilland in "Charlotte" and Richard Todd in "Queen."
Davis played grande dames and repressed loners - highly disparate roles that each required copious amounts of pancake makeup and long nights in the studio's costume department. "Eve" inaugurated Davis's Fox tenure with a splash, but later films are less familiar presences. "Queen," here for the first time on DVD, features Davis reprising her legendary Warner role as Queen Elizabeth I from 1939's "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex." Always the least self-conscious of actresses, Davis was content to look horrid onscreen, and her queen is made up like an alien with Kabuki makeup, bright orange hair, and gaudily opulent costumes. Like another, later Elizabeth, Judi Dench in "Shakespeare in Love," Davis owns the film without possessing much of its real estate.
"Charlotte" is also a sequel of sorts, with Davis returning to the Southern Grand Guignol of her earlier collaboration with director Robert Aldrich, "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" Davis was initially scheduled to play the demented, possibly murderous Charlotte opposite Joan Crawford, her famously combative "Baby Jane" costar, but de Havilland stepped in after Crawford dropped out. Davis stumbles about her Louisiana mansion in fright wig and unflattering housedress as a series of familiar faces (Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Mary Astor) pop in and out, their exaggerated accents dripping all over the carpets.
Davis was not a natural fit for the horror/suspense genre; her rhythms are too measured, her performances too mannered to march to the rhythm of a thrill a minute. Instead of fully adapting to the requirements of genre, Davis bent genre to suit her talents. "Nanny," from 1965, gives new meaning to the phrase "killing with kindness," with Davis's caregiver a menacingly bland figure who may be trying to murder her young charge. Like "Queen," "Nanny" is another example of Davis's solid work in otherwise-mediocre entertainments, and a reminder of how much she benefited from the strong hand of talented directors - and the Warners system that nourished her.
