A 1943 melodrama offers one of the best portraits of a single woman Hollywood ever drew
Out in the world again, I’ve seen a lot of new exhibitions and a bit of new theatre, the heart going out to those actors who, in spite of great reviews, are still taking curtain calls to the sound of too few hands clapping. But in the end, the cultural highlight of my summer had nothing at all to do with novelty. At a BFI cinema on London’s South Bank, I saw Old Acquaintance, a melodrama of 1943 starring Bette Davis, and thought, not for the first time, of a line by the film critic, E Arnot Robertson, who wrote in Picture Post: “I think Bette Davis would have been burned at the stake as a witch if she had lived three or four hundred years ago. She gives the curious feeling of being charged with power which can find no ordinary outlet.”
The BFI’s Bette Davis season, now sadly over, was bliss: an embarrassment of riches to be enjoyed in the velvety dark, preferably with a surreptitious hip flask of something strong (the bars are still closed). But what to choose? Old Acquaintance, which is about the love-hate relationship between two women who’ve been friends since childhood (Miriam Hopkins co-stars) is a pretty awful movie, the high-tide mark of the “woman’s picture” of the 1940s. But I love it for two reasons. The first is that, in Davis’s character, a writer called Kit Marlowe, we have one of the most sympathetic portraits Hollywood ever drew of the single woman. The second is for Davis herself, who turns in a performance so extravagantly good, she might be in a different film altogether. The patrician voice. The oyster eyes. The sheer command of every emotion from yearning to ambition. On the way home, my jaw ached: the effect of having spent almost two hours with it wide open in amazement.
