Bette Davis won her fourth Best Actress Academy Award nomination for this moody William Wyler melodrama, made previously in 1929 as a vehicle for stage actress Jeanne Eagels (who also won an Oscar nomination for the same role). The movie gets a high ranking at IMDb, but it's not one of my favorite Davis films. There's nothing exactly wrong with it, but it just left me a bit cold and uninvolved.
The story begins with Davis gunning down a man outside her plantation home in a sweaty tropical country. From there, the film unravels the mystery of what led up to that moment. Is Davis's character a victimized heroine who was acting in self-defense, or is she a lethal femme fatale and a great faker to boot? I'll leave it to you to find out for yourself.
The film has all the stylistic panache one would expect from a William Wyler movie; it has the look of a film noir before film noir was even a recognized genre. It put me in mind a little bit of something Graham Greene would write, given its tropical setting and moral ambiguity. And however indifferent I may be toward the movie as a whole, I do have to admit that it has a remarkable ending, and if Gale Sondergaard doesn't give you the creeps, you're a better man than I.
Grade: B
The story begins with Davis gunning down a man outside her plantation home in a sweaty tropical country. From there, the film unravels the mystery of what led up to that moment. Is Davis's character a victimized heroine who was acting in self-defense, or is she a lethal femme fatale and a great faker to boot? I'll leave it to you to find out for yourself.
The film has all the stylistic panache one would expect from a William Wyler movie; it has the look of a film noir before film noir was even a recognized genre. It put me in mind a little bit of something Graham Greene would write, given its tropical setting and moral ambiguity. And however indifferent I may be toward the movie as a whole, I do have to admit that it has a remarkable ending, and if Gale Sondergaard doesn't give you the creeps, you're a better man than I.
Grade: B