Dark Victory

In Dark Victory Bette Davis played against type: she wasn’t neurotic, she wasn’t a washed-up actress or a woman rebelling against aging, there was no unglamorous transformation and she wasn’t a bitch. She played a likeable, if slightly frivolous, socialite who slowly dies over the course of the film from a malignant brain tumor. Oh, yes, it sounds like melodramatic flim-flam, and to an extent it is, but it would take a cynic with a heart of stone to not be the tiniest bit moved by this poor-little-rich-girl.

Never really one for restraint, Davis holds herself back here. She underplays where she would normally overplay (see: Mr. Skeffington). It works, and maybe in a year without Gone With the Wind, she would have won Best Actress for this. But, at least, she got a nomination. The scene where she goes upstairs to die with quiet dignity is enough to make you reach for, at least, three tissues. Yes, this is one of those movies: a Kleenex movie if I ever saw one. And I bought it, and I was ready to cry at the end. Davis creates a likeable woman; I wanted to believe that she was cured just as much as she did. But I knew better. I didn’t want this to happen to her, she didn’t deserve an early death the way that Mildred in Of Human Bondage did.

Davis is aided with tremendous supporting performances from George Brent, as her specialist and romantic interest, and Geraldine Fitzgerald, as her best friend and assistant. The closing sequence where Davis talks Brent into leaving her alone at their home to die and demands that Fitzgerald not say one word is a series of masterful acting performances with each actor hitting the right emotional cues and crescendos to make the deception and sacrifice all the more realistic.

And if that weren’t enough, Dark Victory obviously had a lot of money, time and effort put into it. The sets, costumes, cinematography and score are all first-rate. They build her entire world and invest you into it with the loving details.

However, not everything is perfect. Humphrey Bogart, before he was Bogie, is given little to do but talk with an awkward Irish brogue. He seems out of place, especially since his New York-inflected speech never really recedes enough for us to believe in his accent in the film. He hits his dramatic moments wonderfully, but that accent is always distracting. And Ronald Regan, plainly handsome and very stiff, is given nothing to do but drink and pine after Davis. I’m not sure if he was a better politician than actor, but I know that he wasn’t very skilled at acting.

Dark Victory is a melodrama, but it is also one of the best melodramas to come out of Davis’ long filmography. To just read a synopsis of the movie is not to experience its charms. To think the film is just about a poor-little-rich-girl is to miss out on a tremendous piece of acting. It is a whole box of Kleenex picture, and sometimes that’s exactly what the soul needs.