Mr. Skeffington Reviews

Mr. Skeffington is a star vehicle in extremis. Bette Davis’ performance is a frantic thing, always watchable and frequently spellbinding, but drunk on its own importance. There’s no true plot to accompany the bloated running time, but it’s never boring, really. It just needed a stronger director, writer and, probably, a lion tamer to keep Davis’ ego at the door so that a more reasonable plot structure and runtime could be decided upon. There is really only room for the Star, Her Role and the Vehicle to accompany it. Nothing else really matters. The “story” concerns itself with Fanny Skeffington, a vainglorious New York socialite who starts off a coquette and ends up a grotesquery from a Grand Guignol story. She’s a narcissist of the highest order who loves herself and attention from increasingly younger men first, her brother secondly (perilously close too incestuously), and everyone and everything else third. Davis clearly relishes playing Fanny once the gargoyle in her comes out. Claude Rains, always reliable, gives the best performance in the film. Tender, restrained and open-hearted, he provides an anchor to Davis’ diva-tantrum. A tidy lesson about love is shoe-horned in, but imagine if the film had focused more on one woman’s obsession with aging and staying young and beautiful instead? Those sequences still resonate today. Just look at the plastic surgery industry.