“The Letter” opens on a startling, murderous scene. The setting is a Malaysian plantation in the middle of a hot summer night. Out from the door to the owner’s bungalow stumbles a man. A woman is close behind him with a gun. She fires six shots into the man’s back until he lies dead, sprawled across the porch steps. The woman stands over him with a cold, remorseless facial expression.
It’s one of the best opening scenes in all of cinema. Shocking, eye-catching and exciting, it manages to pull you right into the film’s sinister atmosphere. Director William Wyler may have been the one who envisioned this piece of movie magic, but it comes off because of the actress behind the revolver, Bette Davis.
The centennial of Davis’s birth occurred on April 5. The actress is easily one of the most celebrated and honored in Hollywood’s history. She received a score of Oscar nominations and was the first woman given the prestigious American Film Institute’s (AFI) Lifetime Achievement Award. This month, a commenorative stamp can be added to her lengthy list of accomplishments.
Viewing the introductory sequence in “The Letter” helps to provide a brief illustration of what Davis brought to the screen. Her ability was magnificent, but it was in subtle moments that she was really able to touch a viewer. In this particular film, she plays a cold-blooded, calculating killer who wins no sympathy from the audience. Despite this, there is never a second to look away. It is impossible to watch “The Letter” and not study Davis, wondering just what she’s thinking and what she’ll do next.
“She seems to be a woman who had so much gumption,” said student Chloe O’Connor, who recently discovered Davis’ outstanding body of work. “In “The Letter” she is so mysterious. She is able to keep you guessing about what’s going on inside.”
Personal friend of Davis, James Wood, said in an interview with Turner Entertainment for the television special “Stardust: The Bette Davis Story” that “if you froze a frame of [“The Letter”], she looks like the most elegant New England lady. And yet, there’s probably a subtext of someone who may indeed be truly evil.”
Davis always played unconventional characters that broke from the norm of glamorous leading ladies. She was never afraid to play ugly, evil and sinful, and was equally willing to play beautiful, virginal and kind. But what made her fascinating were the subtextual layers to every character she portrayed.
“You can tell she was independent,” O’Connor said. “She was the kind of woman who could survive perfectly well on her own.”
Her initial experience in Hollywood was lackluster. She spent her first three years in nothing parts with little prospect for brighter opportunities. The studio system made her up with platinum blonde hair and gave her femme fatal second leads in gangster pictures.
It wasn’t until 1934, when she made “Of Human Bondage,” that she got the chance to show what she was made of. Here she played Mildred Rodgers, a despicable, manipulative person with little morals. It was a stark, gutsy portrayal that America hadn’t seen before.
This lead to her stardom, but it was only after much fighting with Warner Brothers that she was able to consistently grab the type of roles she really wanted. At one point, she went so far as to walk out on the studio. At a time when studios not only had their players under contract, but essentially owned their lives, this was unheard-of.
Davis later explained in an interview with talk show host Dick Cavett, that she walked out because the films she was doing were “junk.”
“I knew that if only good directors and scripts could give me a career, I couldn’t do it on the junk,” Davis said. “I say do something about it if you’re really that upset.”
Warner Brothers took Davis to court for breach of contract and won the suit, but Davis would appear to have won in the long run. She became the queen of the studio, often referred to as the fourth Warner Brother.
During her decade-long reign as queen of the Warner lot she played everything from a suppressed spinster in “Now, Voyager,” twins in “A Stolen Life,” a sociopath in “In This Our Life” and a spoiled southern belle that predated Scarlett O’Hara in “Jezebel,” for which she won her second Academy Award.
“People who watch contemporary movies don’t really know what they’re missing if they haven’t seen one of her films,” said student Adam Wheat. “The best that actors and actresses do today with internalizing characters is nothing compared to how she internalized her characters.”
There’s a song entitled “Bette Davis Eyes,” popularized in the early 1980s by Kim Carnes, that is an ode to her most distinctive feature.
“She really captured the essence of making the eyes the window to the soul,“ Wheat said. “Where many actresses feel the need to over dramatize to show you what they’re feeling, Bette Davis felt it and let you see it through her eyes.”
Her personal favorite performance was found in “Dark Victory,” in which she plays a cancer-stricken individual who learns she has a few months to live. The only sign she will have signaling her death is temporary blindness. Her character is able to capture happiness with the man of her dreams, but just as she has forgotten her prognosis, her vision starts to dim.
“It’s a very difficult thing to play. Whatever is happening is happening beneath the surface,” explained Oscar-winning actress Ellen Burstyn, also in an interview for the Turner Entertainment special. “The blindness she did very well. She goes into a kind of soft focus, so that you could see her not seeing.”
Her career faded after a stunning turn in “All About Eve,” where she played aging Broadway actress Margo Channing, who utters the famous, and often misquoted, line “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”
Then, she found the character of Baby Jane Hudson.
“What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” was a gritty, campy scream-fest that pitted her against rival Joan Crawford. Davis played her demented character to the hilt, bringing in her final Academy Award nomination.
What could have been little more than a nasty screen villain was made into a poignant portrayal in the professional hands of Davis.
“She deepened the work,” Burstyn said. “It wasn’t all about the surface. It was about the internal being.”
Film fans owe it to themselves to discover this fiery personality. There’s a reason, after all, she placed second (behind Katharine Hepburn) on AFI’s Top 25 Female Movie Legends list. There’s an old saying about Davis: “When’s she good, she really good. When she’s bad, she’s better.”
Whether you’re able to catch the good Bette or the bad one, the next time one of her myriad of classics shows up on television, give it a look.
