Bette Davis guest starred in three episodes of “Wagon Train,” and BBFF Ivan tipped me off to a rerun of her second appearance in “The Elizabeth McQueeny Story”. This 1959 episode featured Ward Bond in the lead as wagon master Seth Adams leading a wagon train to, er, somewhere in the west. I don’t really know.

Bette looks like she’s going to laugh when she makes her appearance as the fabulous Madame Elizabeth McQueeny, matron to 10 lovely girls who are going west to establish a finishing school. They come with high recommendations and are to accompany the train as it heads west. It takes a few days but Adams, being the smartest of the bunch, figures out that the Madame is actually planning on setting up a dance hall. Those aren’t students, they’re dancing goils!

Acting, theater, and dance halls seem to be used as euphemisms for cat houses and prostitutes, but sometimes when the show says “dancer,” it really means “dancer.” Made for kind of an uneven episode, but there was some fun dialogue:

ADAMS: “You’ll be entertaining a lot of men.”

ELIZABETH: “I am a lot of woman.”

Soon after setting out, the train runs into a group of native peoples who turn over a bedraggled and soused man who claims to be one Count Roberto de Falconi, played by Robert Strauss, who is epically hot in this episode. He’s no Animal Kasava here, is what I’m sayin’. Bette looks pretty damn great herself, although I notice the weird lipstick thing is going on in one scene again. I think she must have worn lipstick outside the lip line in earlier days and it just didn’t translate well when she got older. Or maybe it naturally smeared outside the lip line after being worn.

Adams wants to kick de Falconi out, but Elizabeth takes a shine to him and takes him on as her wagon driver. Things get out of hand quickly when some of the dancing girls start hitting on the men in the wagon train, and the wives demand Elizabeth and her girls be kicked out.

Meanwhile, the Count is obviously no Count — they repeat the joke that he’s a “no account” several times, just enough to be irritating — and is instead looking to find a way to make serious bank. Dancing girl Roxanne falls in love with the young son of one of the angry wagon train women and they “accidentally” sleep together (you know how it is). Just as it looks like they would find true love in spite of adversity, they’re struck with spotted fever. Elizabeth and the girls take care of the sick while the Count tries to run off with her cash, but he is found, also ill from the fever. Elizabeth chooses to believe the Count never tried to steal her money. Meanwhile, Roxanne dies from the fever, which is her due. Harlot! Hussy!

A brief voice over from Adams says that the women weren’t kicked off the train after nursing the sick back to health, but they weren’t treated well, merely tolerated. Elizabeth and the girls are transferred to another train going their way, so the night before they part, they perform for the wagon train a grateful can-can. A can-can of appreciative thanks, if you will.

Bette, bless her heart, cannot dance. I noticed this in In This Our Life, but somewhere I read that she had been a dancer early on, so I thought perhaps I was being too critical of her. After seeing “Wagon Train,” I’m going back to my original opinion: Bette Davis cannot dance. And by the look of her facial expression, she knows it. She grits her teeth into a forced smile, which causes her to look like this

when she’s supposed to be looking jovial. You know, I tried to be mature and serious about this episode, but I absolutely lost it when I saw Bette do the awkward can-can while making the same faces she drew on Joan Crawford’s pictures. She has gorgeous legs and seems to have loosened up a bit toward the end of the dance when she bops her butt at the camera, but for the most part she is clumsy, nearly shoved out of the can-can line by the other girls, and looks pissed off. Absolute hilarity.

The Star tries so hard to be the All About Eve of film, to mix real life with cinematic license, but it never quite succeeds at its lofty intentions. It’s possible The Star was conceived as pastiche, but I truly doubt it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a worthwhile film, because it is campy and fun and sometimes ridiculous, with one incredible scene that makes the boring worth trudging through.

Bette plays aging film actress Margaret Elliot (sheesh, just call her Margo already). We see her as she stands sadly outside an auction house as her belongings are sold to pay her numerous debts. She catches her own agent leaving the auction with some of her stuff, which is hilarious in the same way Bette waiting for Anita Louise to die in That Certain Woman is. Margaret wants the lead in the upcoming film The Fatal Winter and insists her agent works on it for her, but you get the feeling he won’t.
Afterward, she heads to her ex-husband’s house to visit her daughter Gretchen (Natalie Wood). Gretchen wants to go back to living with her mother, but because of financial concerns she can’t. Gretchen also insists that the kids at school bully her because Margaret isn’t really a star, which doesn’t seem particularly likely, but Gretchen has to be put-upon and that’s her particular cross to bear, apparently.

Before Margaret leaves, her ex’s new wife accosts her with the “I didn’t steal your husband, you totally lost him on your own because you weren’t a real woman” thing that was so popular in the 1950s. I challenge you to not laugh your ass off at this scene, and I will win, because you will laugh. Margaret goes home only to find a pair of leech relatives waiting for their monthly check. My, but she is beset on all sides. No wonder she ends up drinking and driving and getting her ass busted for DUI.

Best scene of the film: Margaret goes driving with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and her Best Actress Oscar on the dashboard. “Come on Oscar, let’s you and me get drunk!”

That’s one of Bette’s real Oscars, by the way. She does a tourist guide speech as she drives past the enormous mansions of stars, eventually ending up at the mansion she used to live at. This is even funnier when you realize director Stuart Heisler is completely earnest with this. It’s obvious he genuinely believes this is an accurate portrayal of an actress in the midst of a breakdown. Meanwhile, Bette is hamming it up so much I’m surprised she didn’t lean out the driver’s side window and scream “WOOOOOOOOO BITCHES!!!” at passersby while throwing empties at their heads.

Margaret gets arrested and ends up in the headlines. I know, it’s a huge surprise, considering her moderate and calm behavior. She’s unexpectedly bailed out by Jim Johannsen, formerly known as Barry Lester many years earlier when she discovered him and made him the hot new handsome young thing at Bette’s studio. Because she’s been locked out of her apartment, she stays in the offices of Jim’s shipbuilding business. Her discussions with Jim often veer toward her old films, and usually the real names of actors are used in recollections about real films, but one anecdote about being in a film where she’s snowed in at a ski lodge with “Ralph Bellows” is clearly about Ralph Bellamy, but I can’t remember what the film she’s referring to.

This is where I tell you I am having a hell of a time writing this because I had to listen to music to drown out my husband’s stereo, and all I had to listen to are two versions of “I Can’t Dance (I Got Ants in My Pants).” So I dug out my old Live365 account and am now listening to… er, apparently I’m listening to Megadeth. Huh. That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.

Anyway, yeah, I can’t remember what Ralph Bellamy flick she was referring to, and you can thank Megadeth for that. But I can tell you who her actress nemesis is: Barbara Lawrence! You may remember Barbara as El Brendel’s daughter in Paris Model. Okay, I remember her as El’s daughter, you probably remember her from Unfaithfully Yours and Oklahoma! She plays herself in a cameo and is a pretty young blonde spectre over Margaret’s shoulder throughout the film. The concept itself is kind of amusing, I admit. You don’t exactly get the impression that Barbara and Margaret were playing the same roles in films.

Margaret and Jim butt heads a lot because he’s a man who long ago realized that films aren’t a lifelong career for most people, but Margaret doesn’t want (or know how) to do anything else. He complains that she’s not a woman, she’s a career. Ooh, more of the women should stay at home stuff! So exciting.

Bette and Sterling reportedly didn’t get along, and their fights do indeed have a sharpness to them that borders on the uncomfortable. At one point, Jim says something that has been dubbed over with a snotty “Listen to your ego, it’s all you have left.” I’m going out on a limb here, but I believe what he really said was not fit for 1952 general audiences.

Even if Bette and Sterling could barely stand to touch each other, Margaret and Jim obviously have the hots for each other, and Jim is great with her daughter Gertrude. Margaret however continues her little breakdown. She steals cheap perfume from a drug store and Jim scolds her, finally convincing her to get a real job. She fakes her way through an interview at a department store, but she’s immediately spotted at the job by two bitchy housewives who gossip that she’s a “jailbird.” Margaret’s freak-out on the old bags is pretty great.

Angry, she demands her agent Harry get her an audition for The Fatal Winter. She gets one, but for the older dowdy sister. Insulted, she goes into the audition insisting on playing the sister flirtatious and glamorous, thinking she’ll get the younger lead when the director sees her terrific performance. The next day she watches the footage and realizes she was far from terrific, she was laughably rotten.

Despondent, Harry lets her stay at his home where he and his wife are hosting a party that night. She tentatively joins in the party, meeting older actors who are basically forgotten, and eventually running into a screenwriter. He pitches her a script about — get this — a middle aged actress who tries to get back into films but can’t because she’s old and pitiable. Frightened (of the self-referential wankery, I assume), she bolts from the party, grabs Gretchen from her ex’s house and runs to Jim’s to live out her days as an allegedly normal woman. Ha!

The movie is a lot of fun, more so when you realize how seriously it was taken at the time. Bette garnered her 10th Oscar nomination for this film, and reviewers at the time favorably compared the film to All About Eve and Sunset Blvd. Bette claimed she based her performance on Joan Crawford’s life, but I doubt that she was being serious, because in 1952, Joan was not that far removed from her epic melodrama days and thus not completely washed up as Margaret is.

Sterling is very good as Jim though he is not at all convincing as someone who loves Margaret, but showing tenderness was never Sterling’s strong suit. Natalie is decent enough, but is given little to do and looks every one of her 15 years while she’s supposed to be about 12, and the result is a little jarring…

…especially when she’s in a swimsuit. During filming of The Star, Natalie was supposed to dive into the water in this scene, and when she balked out of her fear of the water, Heisler tried to bully her into it. Bette lit into Heisler and scared him into cutting the dive from the the scene, an act Wood related in a 1977 AFI tribute to Davis.

The Star comes at a strange period in Bette’s career. After All About Eve, she got movie offers, but the films weren’t of the calibre she was used to. Some were good, some were bad, and the brief boost from AAE dried up after The Star. It was 3 years before she got another role, and soon after that she began to work in television and taking only the very rare good film roles offered. Tomorrow, we’ll visit another one of her 1950s television appearances.

Further Reading:

Apocalypse Later: The Star (1952)

Cool Cinema Trash: The Star

“That Certain Woman” (1937) was the 3rd of a group of Bette movies I watched all in one night and was, by far, my favorite. Sadly, my copy of the film is poor, which you’ll confirm by looking at my screencaps. It’s available on DVD now but at a hefty price, so I won’t be getting a good copy of this any time soon. But if you get a chance to see this film, do! “That Certain Woman” is one of the few 1930s Bette melodramas that distinguishes itself from the others that so often feel like Kay Francis’ castoffs.

For some reason, the copy TCM has covers the edges of the title screen with a grey border so you can’t see the usual “First National Picture” credit on the bottom. No idea why. I assume it’s a re-release print with some copyright issue.

The plot of “That Certain Woman” is compelling in a way that your usual WB programmer isn’t. Bette is Mary Donnell, who we first see going to the cemetery on a cold, rainy evening in 1933. She’s followed there by a reporter who confronts her: She’s the former Mrs. Al Haines, widowed exactly 4 years earlier when her gangster husband was killed in the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. The reporter is doing a “where are they now” series on people involved in the massacre, but Mary won’t have anything to do with it. She’s got a job as a secretary now, a new life, and is as far away from the mob as she can be.

Unfortunately, the reporter knows about her new life and confronts her at her work. She’s afraid her boss Lloyd Rogers (Ian Hunter) will find out about her past, but it turns out he knew anyway. He’s smitten with Mary but, of course, Mary is smitten with someone else — a client’s son, Jack (Henry Fonda).

When Lloyd helps her out with the newspaper situation and with Jack as well, there is a moment where a positively radiant Mary runs up to Lloyd’s desk and thanks him.

It’s an expression of undiluted joy that lasts a brief instant and is gone as Mary runs out of the office to her love. The close-up on Mary’s face is tight but doesn’t linger, although the viewer is left with the image of Mary’s happiness long after she’s left the room. When a saddened Lloyd realizes that he and Mary were not meant to be, you genuinely feel his sense of loss.

Mary and Jack elope but Jack, being your standard soaper rich boy, is coerced away from her almost immediately by his overbearing father who knows Mary’s past. In a plot point used in something like five million weepies from 1925 through 1945 inclusive, Mary is pregnant when Jack leaves and doesn’t tell him, deciding she only wants him if he comes back on his own. He doesn’t. Instead, Mary raises her son on her own with financial help from Lloyd. Meanwhile, Jack marries some society dame. He soon causes a car wreck, seriously disabling his wife Flip (Anita Louise).

A few years pass; it’s now 1937. Lloyd, still in love with Mary, visits her while he’s seriously ill. He dies at her apartment while yet another snoopy reporter is hanging around, and Lloyd’s newly-widowed wife thinks Mary’s son was fathered by Lloyd. The press has a field day with the scandal. Even though Mary won’t reveal that Jack was really the father, Jack still discovers that he had a son and comes back to Mary, promising to divorce the now-disabled Flip and marry Mary for real this time.

Except Flip visits Mary herself and confesses she can’t be a real wife to Jack because of her injuries, she probably doesn’t have long to live, and of course she can’t have kids, so she wants Mary to take Jack so he can be happy. Mary, out of guilt and self-sacrifice and all those other things that make good melodrama, instead decides to give up her son and let Jack and Flip raise him.

At this point, the movie turns inadvertently cruel: Mary apparently goes around Europe looking fabulous and distraught, just waiting for Flip to die.

One day she gets a call from Jack that Flip’s finally dead, and she and Jack practically cheer at the news. You have to laugh, because that is some screwed up shit right there. Jack is the one responsible for the fact that Flip lived for years in pain before dying decades before her time, and he’s also responsible for Mary’s predicament in being a single mother. Why anyone thought it was appropriate for him to be calling Mary with the “good news” that his wife Flip was dead is beyond me, but I admit I enjoyed the ending immensely.

Also, Ian Hunter is terrific. I am loving the hell out of Ian Hunter right now. He is so good in these programmers because he actually works at his role, he never seems bored or like he’s holding back. I’m lookin’ at you, George Brent.  That said, I forget Ian is even in films like “Robin Hood” or “Ziegfield Girl,” so perhaps sometimes he doesn’t make much of an impression. Or maybe it’s just me.

Bette rocks a lot of looks in this film. When we first see her she’s dowdied up, looking for all the world like she did in the early 1930s when at Universal, except in fashions that were out of date even in 1933. I thought that was a terrific touch, not only giving the movie the feel of 1933, but also showing Mary as a girl who hadn’t moved on from what happened to her in 1929.

It’s also obvious that a lot of effort was spent to give Bette significant movie star appeal. Bette herself said that the first time she honestly looked like a star was when director Edmond Goulding worked with her in “That Certain Woman.” It seems odd for her to say such a thing, since in previous years she had been in “Petrified Forest” and “Of Human Bondage”, and even won an Oscar in “Dangerous,” but it’s true that WB was simply not treating her like one of their big name stars. I would argue, though, that the real change for Bette came with “Marked Woman” released a few months earlier, and which I believe was the first film she did after her suit against WB semi-failed.

It’s hard to see because of the poor video quality, but there is a little lovely art deco in Lloyd’s office in the beginning:

“That Certain Woman” is available on the WB Archives series if anyone has an extra $23.00 laying around. Silly sellers online are still charging $30.00 for their used VHS of the movie. The point is, it’s out there in legitimate copies, if you want to shell out significant dough for it.

Lobby card for the film. I don’t remember this scene at all.

“Front Page Woman” was released a mere six weeks after “The Girl from 10th Avenue”, and it shows. These two programmers share 6 cast members and even some of the same sets. Long-time readers will remember how tired I have become of George Brent playing the guy trying to keep a woman in the home where she belongs. Well, folks, “Front Page Woman” is by far the worst offender in that category… thus far.

Ellen (Bette Davis) is a young reporter assigned to cover the execution of a murderer at midnight. Boyfriend and fellow reporter Curt (Brent) doesn’t think a woman should be reporting on such a thing and, true to 1935, Ellen faints to prove how right he was. I’m surprised she didn’t lose a heel while running or fend off the bad guy by hitting him with her purse. Maybe I should mention that Curt and the other reporters deliberately set out to upset her with graphic talk about the execution.

Curt writes two news stories, one for his paper and one for Ellen’s to cover for her womanly inability to report the news, but a screw-up causes the exact story to go into both papers. Ellen thinks he deliberately sabotaged her, and he might as well have: At a 3-alarm fire, Ellen is not allowed in to the area to report on the news because she’s a woman. Curt adds to this problem by lying to the police officers that she’s not even a reporter in the first place.

But she sneaks into the area anyway and sees Marvin Stone (Huntley Gordon, who just happens to be in the featured photo for October in the AMS Silent Movie Calendar, which I’m looking at right now.) Ellen realizes Stone is important in the mystery of who started the fire, but he disappears, only to turn up dead at the hospital. Curt, angry that Ellen found all this out on her womanly own, what with being a dumb woman and all, wants her to quit her job and marry him instead. She agrees that if Curt solves the arson and murder before she does, she’ll quit and marry him. He responds by stealing her scoop on Marvin Stone.

I want to mention at this point that the movie (and I assume the Saturday Evening Post story it was based on) don’t feel it’s enough to disparage Ellen. They include the character of Nell, a large 40-something woman who is referred to only by her weight, veiled negative references to her assumed lesbianism, and how “ugly” she is:

Oh yeah, she’s so ugly, how can anyone bear to exist near such hideousness, etc. etc. Grace Hayle is gets no screen credit here, but she rarely did in any film, although the official off-screen credit for her roles were usually “Fat Lady” or “Chubby Woman”. Not just in the 1930s, but straight through to the 1950s. Also, her stereotypical lesbian garb in “Front Page Woman” was still in use nearly 30 years later for the dismissive ornithologist in “The Birds.” Hollywood ain’t exactly progressive.

Moving on: In the course of digging around to find out what happened, she gets held at gunpoint by Inez (Winifred Shaw) and Curt knows this, but refuses to help her in any way to “teach her once and for all that a woman’s place is in the home.” And I suppose if the desperate and obviously-involved-in-murder Inez shoots Ellen, that will really teach her.

Curt then interferes with the trial of the person who allegedly murdered Stone, not just by eavesdropping on the jury, but by creating phony jury ballots and leaving them in the jury room so Ellen sees the wrong verdict. When she falls for the stunt and both papers get published before the verdict was even given — Ellen’s with the wrong verdict, Curt’s with the correct one — the judge gets a little pissed at Curt. Finally. Man, by this point in the film I was seething. Curt was portrayed as though he was the freakin’ police commissioner with everything he got away with up until that point, and the unethical way he stole others’ work and his interference in an important court case was so unbelievably wrong. But I had to laugh at New York Times reviewer Frank S. Nugent who wrote of this impossible scenario that “we have no doubt that any reporter showing his press card in the lobby of the Strand after a performance will be mobbed by hordes of autograph seekers.”

Ellen gets the last laugh by getting a confession from the real murderer, and Curt pretends he thinks women really are as good as men, so she quits her job and they get married.

Unbe-freakin-lievable.

I could have forgiven a lot if this film hadn’t looked so much like “Girl from 10th Avenue,” which I had just watched, and which people in 1935 would have just seen a few weeks earlier. Here’s an example of the similarity:

Phone booths in “Girl from 10th Avenue.”

Phone booths in “Front Page Woman.”

I believe the apartment Bette and Ian Hunter share in “Girl From 10th Avenue” is the same set seen briefly inside the apartment building that burns down in “Front Page Woman,” too.

Also if the film hadn’t required me to suspend 100% of my disbelief, I would have been happier. Oh, I’ll suspend some disbelief. You gotta suspend if you want to watch movies, but this movie asked too much of me and I wasn’t willing to give it as much leeway as it needed to be entertaining.

The good news is I really, really liked the next Bette film that I’ll post about in the Project, so you get a reprieve from hearing me bitch about her early work. For a while, at least.

“The Girl from 10th Avenue” (1935) is one of those quickie Warner Bros programmers that at times rises above its mediocre goals. But most of these Warner Bros weeklies do, truth be told, and between cost-cutting and bored actors, so many of these films just do not impress.
Bette is Miriam, a shop girl who happens to be standing outside the church where a fabulous society wedding between Valentine French and John Marland is taking place. Also standing in the mob outside is Geoff Sherwood, the lawyer that Valentine threw off so she could marry the rich John Marland. He’s drunk and belligerent and, when the cops decide maybe they should take him in, Miriam grabs him and steers him to a spaghetti restaurant, away from the cops.
There Geoff decides he needs looking after, so he offers her $100 to watch him for a week. She tells him to go to hell at first, but eventually relents.

Next thing they know, they’re married. Geoff doesn’t recall the marriage (booze) and Miriam considers just leaving and annulling the marriage (common sense), but to help get him sober, they agree to stay together with the caveat that either can leave at any time. Geoff rebuilds his career while Miriam works on becoming socially acceptable, as though she was ever crude and awful and unacceptable in the first place. But okay, let’s go with it. Miriam becomes fashionable and sophisticated:

Fabulous much?

Of course, this happens just as Valentine returns from her lengthy honeymoon, disappointed in her new rich husband and determined to get Geoff back. In fact, her husband John (Colin Clive) has moved out of the house. He meets with Miriam to tell her to watch out for Valentine and to encourage her and Geoff to make their South American business trip sooner than scheduled in an effort to save both marriages.

Miriam tries to undermine Valentine’s reputation at a society luncheon. A scene is caused, a grapefruit is thrown, gossip articles are written. Geoff is furious that Miriam is so gauche as to cause a scene, so he decides to leave her. In yet another overly-scripted temper tantrum designed to cash in on Bette’s sensational scene in “Of Human Bondage,” she tells Geoff off and leaves before he gets a chance to do it first. Apparently, that makes him realize he didn’t want to leave. I don’t know, folks, I just report what I see. Geoff goes and gets drunk with John, and the pair head to Valentine’s so Geoff can dump her. Then he goes back to Miriam, waits outside the door until morning when she opens the door to pick up the milk, and he gives her wedding ring back to her. That’s it, kids, the movie ends there.

These films are not bad, and I don’t discourage anyone from watching them, because 75 years later it’s a treat just to be able to see them. And who doesn’t want to spend an hour imagining themselves in a crazy mixed-up relationship with handsome Ian Hunter, or with a mentor who used to be a glamorous Floradora girl, or even eating in a little hole in the wall in NYC that serves cheap pasta and those hard thin bread sticks. It’s diversion and, as much as I disparage these uninspired quickies, I also like them.

Speaking of uninspired, most of the film failed to deliver the deco, but the brief glimpses we get of their fashionable apartment are pretty nice:

While I am usually not a big fan of the leading men in these programmers, I genuinely liked Ian Hunter. I assumed he would irritate me like George Brent or Pat O’Brien do when they just sleepwalk through a film, but I was pleasantly surprised by Hunter. He had a bit of intensity behind his eyes that really worked. Colin Clive was amazing, of course, completely wasted in this film, but he is so terrific to watch in anything that I was just glad to see him. Alison Skipworth plays Miriam’s neighbor, a former Floradora girl who helps Miriam navigate the strange world of society dames, and she’s a real treat.

Bette is good but, really, this was a silly movie and her part was a silly one. She’s quite good early on as the shop girl, and of course she’s lovely in the designer fashions later in the film, but there is no rhyme or reason to her character. You can sense an overall boredom with everyone involved in this film, Bette especially.

And now the title screen for you completists out there: