Fasten Your Seat Belts by Lawrence J. Quirk
Author:Lawrence J. Quirk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-05-06T16:00:00+00:00
18
The Quintessential Bette Davis Movie
IN LATE 1944 Davis determined to produce her own films. As producer she would enjoy a tax break, but, more important, she would get to exert full control over every aspect of her films, and that appealed to her enormously. She contracted with Warners to do five films in which she would star. She wound up doing only one—A Stolen Life.
A remake of a 1939 Elisabeth Bergner film, A Stolen Life appealed to the sad, introspective, self-searching mood in which Davis found herself in late 1944. She had been a widow for a year, her romance with Corporal Lewis Riley had fizzled, and she was uncertain about her other involvements, including the one with Sherry. She admitted later that she was more lonely in that period than in any other in her life. Working closely with talented writer Catherine Turney, she put many personal touches and insights into the picture—her great love for New England, her continuing analyses of her inner nature—part dreamy romantic and part egoistic pragmatist—and her continuing enthrallment cum disillusionment with the many ways of love, in which by 1944 she had become one of the world’s great authorities, on screen and off. Production on A Stolen Life began in the spring of 1945. Release was delayed a year, when Warners used it to highlight the twentieth anniversary of sound.
The project also appealed to her vanity and offered her an exciting challenge, for in A Stolen Life she would be giving her public what her flacks styled “Double Davis”—she would play twins. One, the shy, withdrawn Kate, would be counterpoised against the brazen, aggressive, man-hungry Pat. She knew instinctively that she could do ample justice to both.
Davis, a true New Englander, had long admired the works of such fellow Massachusetts natives as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote, “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string,” and Henry David Thoreau, who had written about the absolute necessity of each human being stepping to the beat of his or her own drummer. One poem in particular, by Emerson, guided her. It went: “Give all to Love; / Obey thy heart; . . . / Nothing refuse. . . . / Let it have scope; / Follow it utterly, / Hope beyond hope; / High and more high / It dives into noon, / With wing unspent, / Untold intent; / But it is a god, / Knows its own path, / And the outlets of the sky. / [Love] was never for the mean; / It requireth courage stout. / Souls above doubt, / Valor unbending.”
A Stolen Life is one of Bette Davis’s finest pictures (one of my three personal favorites). It displays the then thirty-seven-year-old actress in one of her most sensitive, introspective, and deeply felt performances. It is also one of the most poetic and intense studies of the pangs of unrequited love ever put on the screen, its only peer being Joan Fontaine’s lovely, haunting romance of old Vienna, Letter From an Unknown Woman, which followed it two years later.
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