Miss Davis, victorious.

From the year 1939 to the year 1944, Bette Davis was nominated for an Oscar at every ceremony. She won in 1939 for Jezebel, playing just the sort of character you’d expect her to be playing with a title like that. (That second Oscar would turn out to be her last; she would end up with 11 total career nominations, and you better believe that each one was for best leading actress.)

The movie she was nominated for in 1940 was 1939’s Dark Victory, a huge, tear-jerking success for Warner Brothers. If you’ve ever heard the line “I think I’ll have a large order of prognosis negative!”, this is the movie that comes from. Bette is Judith Traherne, a selfish but not unlovable socialite, who neglects to tell anyone when she starts having pounding headaches and double vision. Eventually a fall from her horse forces her to go to the doctor, and he figures out what’s wrong with her. You guessed it: brain tumor. The thing is, the doctor falls for Judith, and so when the operation isn’t a success and he believes her death is imminent, he lies to her. She thinks she’s fine, but when she stumbles across her file while breezing around his office in his absence, it leads to a tense, terrific confrontation scene in a restaurant and the delivery of that immortal line.

Highly recommended viewing for anyone who appreciates that certain brand of Golden Age Hollywood melodrama. Which, of course, everyone should.

Here, the trailer, which is fabulous in a different way. All that writing spelling out the story on the screen seems pretty ridiculous until you remember the awful “In a world where…” voiceovers we get now. And yes, that is Ronald Reagan playing one of her buddies. How I love it when that guy turns up!

I’d never heard of it before, but it was good!

The Petrified Forest (1936) is the first movie I’ve seen wherein Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart take the screen together. Let me tell you…it was sweet. This is actually the third film in which they’d both appeared, but neither of the others featured them in starring roles as they have here. Davis is a waitress at her father’s diner in the Arizona desert, where you can also find the last gas station for miles. Just as she’s feeling a bit beguiled by a soulful drifter (Leslie Howard), reports are coming in that notorious gangster Duke Mantee and his men are on the run in the area. Duke would be Bogie—until Casablanca came along, he was much more likely to play the bad guy than the in-love guy.

As you can imagine, the new lovers, along with a few other random characters, have a run-in with the gangsters, who take them all hostage in the diner. Now comes the chance for everyone to talk about what they wanted out of life. Gangsters or no, above all this is a conversation film, quite obviously based on a play. Much of the dialogue is wonderful in that just-barely-over-the-top way: “Let there be killing. All this evening I’ve had a feeling of destiny closing in,” says the drifter. Ooh! Tension builds until we get our inevitable shootout. It’s all well done and very entertaining. And only 83 minutes long! They used to pack so much into such short running times in these old movies. So fantastic.

A month after this film was released, Bette Davis won her first Oscar, for a film called Dangerous. In the tradition of the Oscars, this was viewed somewhat as a consolation prize for her not having won the year previous for Of Human Bondage. Maybe that was true, but maybe not, because the more Bette Davis movies I see the more I feel like they could have just tossed her an Oscar at any time and no one could have argued. The woman just had that something, you know? There’s an energy that comes from her characters that make them feel like whole, real people. She just really, really knew what she was doing when it came to this acting thing. Her portrayal of her character here, who reads books that her long-gone mother sends her from France, but doesn’t know how to pronounce any of the authors’ names, perfectly blends being naively charming and showing obvious intelligence beyond the level she’s had the opportunity to reach. And even though this is the dramatic, big acting style of the 1930s—and Bette Davis could do dramatic and big better than anyone—there is a subtlety at work. It’s marvelous.

Side note fun facts: this movie was Humphrey Bogart’s big break, and the story behind it is pretty great: the film’s third star, the very famous at the time but now somewhat forgotten Howard (who was also ol’ club-foot in Of Human Bondage…new respect for him after this film), insisted that Bogart be able to reprise his role, as he’d played in the stage version with Howard. The studio wanted quintessential gangster Edward G. Robinson, but they wanted Leslie Howard more, so they went with his wishes. The film’s success helped Bogart build his career, and eventually he named his first child–a daughter with Lauren Bacall—Leslie, in honor of Leslie Howard. Additionally, in 1948 Bacall and Bogart made the great film Key Largo, which thematically is very similar to The Petrified Forest, with people in a remote location being taken hostage by gangsters and a budding love story between two people who’ve only just met. This time, though, Bogart was the good guy, and the bad guy was—you guessed it—Edward G. Robinson.

Back when “Mildred” could be a name for a bombshell…

Of Human Bondage, made in 1934, is pretty much universally regarded as Bette Davis’s breakthrough film, the one that made her a star and was expected to get her an Oscar nomination. At this point, Davis had been toiling for Warner studios for three years, cramming 22 nobody-watches-them-anymore films into that period. She was loaned to RKO for the role of the fairly detestable object of our hero’s desire, Mildred Rogers. Good job, Warners….who knows how long it would have taken for a breakthrough role to come along had she not broken free from their assembly line for a bit.

It’s clear that this movie was made before the Hays Production Code started regulating morality in films. Davis is an unwed mother! Le scandal! And we see naked lady paintings! But wow, despite its pre-Code freedoms, it is not a very good movie. Has anyone else seen it?  Or read the book? Does the book expect us to sympathize with the main character even though he is a total douche just because he has a club foot and his limp makes him self-conscious? Does it bounce from scene to scene without connection, leaving us to guess how much time has passed, and expect us to accept that characters love each other for no apparent reason? Urgh. But: Bette is clearly the best thing in the movie, and quite a sight to behold. Her character’s pathetic desperation to rise above her station as an uneducated waitress and subsequent upwards-and-downwards spiral is held together by her sheer force of will, cuz it sure isn’t the script. Love that Bette….but if you need a dose, rent The Little Foxes instead, mmkay?

At the time, Davis’s performance was described by Life magazine as “probably the best performance ever recorded on the screen by a U.S. actress.” I’ll agree it’s impressive—I’ve rarely seen anyone do the self-destructive bitch mode better than Bette. When she wasn’t nominated for an Oscar, there was a write-in campaign for her (write-ins are no longer allowed. But they should be. Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine! Paul Giamatti in Sideways! ….but I digress). She ended up losing to Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, but still, fun fact.

In conclusion, save yourself the trouble of watching this movie, but do watch this short clip from near the end. It’s one of the great fit-throwing moments of film history, and the best bit of dialogue in the film by far. “I used to wipe my mouth!” With that classic Bette Davis inflection…awesome.

Ruth Elizabeth Davis, April 5 1908 – October 6 1989

This is what Bette Davis looked like when she was first starting out in Hollywood. For someone whose first and still favorite Davis movie is All About Eve, where Bette’s marvelous Margo Channing is a dark-haired cynic who’s seen too much, smoked too much, and is worried about growing old, this blonde angelic version is much different than the image usually conjured up upon hearing her name. I’ve been reading Ed Sikov’s great biography of Davis, Dark Victory, and it’s fascinating to learn just how different Bette was in her younger years from the no-nonsense diva with quite the party reputation she’d become. Most of her earliest films just aren’t watched much anymore, while many from decades following are revered. Reading this book makes me want to seek out some of her early work, as well as revisit her greatest roles. And so, properly enough, since it is also the month of Davis’s birth, I declare April to be Bette Davis month here at Celeberrimous. Stay tuned.

Kiddie cinema!

Please read this London Times article immediately, because it is the greatest damn thing I have heard about in a good long while. How can it not be when it begins with this sentence: “In a noisy primary school classroom in East London, 15 very small film buffs are arguing about whether The Red Shoes is better than Duck Soup.” Ah! Don’t you want to know more?!

…okay, so you read it? Isn’t it fantastic? I’ve said many times, including right on this here blog while discussing a screening of City Lights, that kids could really love 1920s and 30s slapstick movies because they have the same kind of humor as Bugs Bunny and friends. Kids in the 2000s watching Monsieur Hulot films? C’est merveilleux, oh que j’adore M. Hulot, il est si drôle! And The Red Shoes? It’s based on a fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson! It’s gorgeous to look at like a Technicolor cartoon! How crazy awesome that someone thought not just to show it to a group of kids, but to really get them talking about it. (Although I do hope that Grease was reserved for the slightly older kids—I wouldn’t want to be the parent who has to explain to a seven-year-old the Rizzo pregnancy scare subplot.) And to also get professionals to come talk to the students? Including my beloved Alan Rickman? I’m bursting with the loveliness of it all. I credit much of my own love of all kinds of movies to being exposed to a lot of stuff from the 1930s and 40s as a kid (Fred and Ginger movies were certainly just as common in my house as Disney cartoons), so hearing about this program seriously made my day.

This article proves that movies for kids needn’t be of the boy-meets-talking-dog sorts of genres that talk down to them. Some makers of so-called kids’ movies, such as Pixar, get this and make films that feel timeless and appropriate for all ages. Many other studios making kid-friendly stuff don’t seem to get how smart kids really are. But I’m thinking that maybe the folks over at DreamWorks Animation are starting to seriously catch on….and with that, I’ll segue with only slight awkwardness into a review of their latest film, Kung Fu Panda.

This isn’t a perfect movie the way I consider Finding Nemo or Ratatouille to be, but it is a huge step in that direction for the studio that made such hideousness as Shark Tale and can’t move on from the mediocre-but-lucrative Shrek franchise. Visually, it’s vibrant and fun and at times quite beautiful. The opening sequence—a dream of our main character, Po—features bright, angular hand-drawn animation, serving as both a respectful nod to what came before CGI and as a great contrast that made me appreciate even more just how nice the computer animation looks here. The characters are about fifty times more likable than in other DreamWorks cartoons, and while the simple story doesn’t visit any new territory, the filmmakers realize this and take advantage of it rather than trying to mask it.

Yes, you probably know just from the title exactly how things will play out in this underdog tale. Po the fat, clumsy panda dreams of being a kung fu master instead of running his dad’s noodle shop. Circumstances arise that help him reach his dream, however unlikely it may seem. A word about the dad: Po seems to be the only panda in town and he’s being raised by what appears to be a stork. This is never explained, though a funny moment comes when we almost think Dad’s big confession is coming. I love that this was not explained. Please, show me the kid who couldn’t fill in the logical story that Po was an orphan adopted by a family who couldn’t have kids and didn’t care that their son was different than them. Seriously, the explanation is unnecessary, and that’s the sort of detail I’m referring to when I say that this movie doesn’t talk down to its kid audience.

All that time that’s not spent giving us exposition is filled up with wicked action scenes and glorious training montages instead—Lord, I love a good training montage. The movie showcases some of the best animated fighting I’ve seen, and the big set-piece scenes are enthralling, particularly the villain Tai Lung (voiced by Ian McShane, aka Al Swearengen!) escaping from his one-man, thousand-guard prison using only a feather. Please note though, if it bothers you when cartoon characters do things like jump upward from a falling object, this may not be the movie for you.

Now for the downside. Though I liked the characters, most are underserved. Po and his master, Shifu, fare alright, but every member of the “Furious Five” seems either one-dimensional (Tigress is determined! Crane doesn’t like to be bothered! Mantis is easy-going!) or non-dimensional (Viper and Monkey are so pointless they didn’t even have enough lines for me to notice they were being voiced by Lucy Liu and Jackie Chan. Come on, if you’re gonna pay Jackie Chan, get your money’s worth). Out of the five, Tigress does most of the real fighting we see, which I felt was a bit of a cop-out. I wanted to really see how a crane or viper or mantis does kung fu without all the requisite body parts, or at least get a sequence of the monkey kicking someone’s ass with his tail, but it never came.

Despite its faults, Kung Fu Panda is by far the best CGI film to come out of its production studio, and for that I really applaud DreamWorks. This movie has heart where its other films only have snarkiness, and it’s the only movie I’ve ever seen from them that I would want to see again.