It’s Love I’m After

I’ve been overdue for another pass at Bette Davis’ filmography, All This reminding me — as some film inevitably does, when I’ve stayed away from her too long — how crazy and brilliant she was. The reward is in watching her, but it’s always a gamble quality-wise with these old contract films. Let me do the dirty work for you. I will scout and steer you away from the stinkers. For a start, trust me when I say this one is incredibly worth your time, a literate screwball comedy to stand just a step below the essentials of the genre. It is begging to be rediscovered.

All About Eve aside, one does not naturally pair Bette Davis and comedy, but she’s extraordinarily well-suited to this; her wild neurotic energy turns out to be perfect for screwball, and certainly her well-known acid tongue suits Joyce Arden, one half of an eternally warring theater couple whose spats always keep them a step away from the altar. Leslie Howard completes the pair, hilarious as a ham actor who never quite stops acting. When Olivia de Havilland falls desperately in love with him, her fiancé enlists him to reprise his great role as a cad (and gad how he’ll mistreat her!) from The Loving Triangle to break the spell. It’s Howard’s show, really, and he’s as good as Rex Harrison in Unfaithfully Yours, marvelously overacting and prattling off similar orations, adding perhaps just a little more sex appeal (at least to this admirer of sensitive Brits).

Of interest, too, is Eric Blore’s manservant whose devotion to his master is absolute, and not so subtle in its implications. (”Do we know anyone named Marcia West, Digges?” / “Not unless you’ve been cheating on me, sir.”) And for my money there are few pleasures as supreme as two heavyweights trading digs and sneers, from Hepburn & Grant in Philadelphia Story to Taylor & Burton in Who’s Afraid. Put Davis & Howard in that class. They, and this film, are formidable.