Better Horrors and Much, Much Worse

I've been in love with horror since my Aunt Louise took me to a Saturday matinee of The Deadly Mantis (1957).  She brought a scarf to put over my face during the scariest parts, and I've always wanted to know what was happening on the other side of that scarf, which sounds more like an introduction to drag than to a film genre.

Being a horror fan still carries something of a stigma with it. I can remember the same aunt later telling my parents I shouldn't be allowed to watch movies like that. Once I snuck home a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland, and when my mother found out she tore it apart in front of me. A few years ago, I tried recommending The Orphanage (2007) to the older women in a theatre workshop I run, only to be shut down as soon as I mentioned it was a horror film. Of course, these were people who wouldn't go see There Will Be Blood (also 2007) because of the title.

Admittedly, being a horror fan means sitting through a lot of terrible films hoping to find the one undiscovered gem with an original approach or a surprisingly good performance. But the best of the genre is as resonant as any other great film. At least the bowsers move and are good for an unintentional laugh. You can't say that about failed social-issue films or yet another snooze-fest with aging British actresses sitting around talking for two hours.

At their best, horror films become metaphors for the parts of life that trouble us most. The best vampire films tend to focus on sexuality issues. The Haunting (1963, not the wretched remake) is about loneliness. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as feature and particularly during its first three seasons as a television series, was a nigh perfect exposition of Joss Whedon's opinion that high school is hell.

Family is a particularly fertile ground for horror. Whether presenting perversions of family life in film's like Rosemary's Baby (1968) or Mother's Day (1980 and 2010), real families fighting off "the other," as in The Hills Have Eyes (1977 and 2006) or extended families assembling for survival as in the two Night of the Living Dead (1968 and 1990) and Dawn of the Dead (1978 and 2004) films, horror can demonstrate the ways the institution functions in crisis and the ways it has changed over time.

More recently, the gifted actor-director John Krasinski has created his own entry in the family horror sub-genre with A Quiet Place, a bit of a family affair in which he directs and co-stars with his off-screen wife, Emily Blunt.

Can the family survive the alien incursion at the heart of John Krasinski's A Quiet Place?

Some of the images in A Quiet Place have the richness of a great American novel. Krasinski and the Danish cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Cristensen photograph the woods of upstate New York with a painter's eye. There's a depth to the images that makes the landscape another character. It's a very threatening character, as the lush greens and lurking shadows hide blind alien predators whose supersensitive hearing makes easy prey of anybody careless enough to produce the least sound.

The film is set in a world that's fallen apart after these creatures arrived unexpectedly. The few people who've survived have given up all sound. They walk around barefoot, use soft items wherever possible (there's a Monopoly game with cloth playing pieces) and communicate via sign language. It's the silent apocalypse. Communication is no problem for the film's Abbott family. Their oldest child, Regan (Millicent Simmonds) is deaf, so they already know ASL.

The film opens with a disorienting, suspenseful sequence. The family is scavenging a drug store to find medicine for their ailing middle child and what few food items are left. They're taking great pains to avoid any sound. The youngest, a four-year-old, tries to take a battery-operated space ship, but his father orders him to leave it. The noises it produces could get them killed. Regan then removes the batteries and gives her brother the toy. As the family leaves, however, the boy picks up the batteries, and you know what's going to happen. This works even if you've missed the film's trailers and media ads. Krasinski establishes the threat simply and economically, and the rest of their walk home is almost unbearably tense.

After the first sequence's violent ending, the action jumps about a year into the future. Blunt is now pregnant. That may seem a questionable choice in a world where silence is survival, but Krasinski and writers Bryan Woods and Scott Beck carefully lay out the details of the family's creation of a safe, soundproof room for her delivery and infant care. There are other tensions. Regan still carries a heavy load of guilt over her younger brother's death and feels rejected by her parents, particularly her father. When Krasinski takes his remaining son off to check their fish traps and insists on leaving Regan behind, it only intensifies her feelings of rejection.

One of the film's strengths is the way Krasinski logically sets up details of their life that will become important as the action unfolds: the birthing room/nursery, the hearing aid the father makes for his daughter, a bank of video monitors in the father's workspace and an exposed nail on the basement steps among them. The latter is perhaps a little over-emphasized. With everybody running around barefoot, I found myself covering my eyes every time somebody hit the stairs (yes, the horror fanatic can't stand the sight of blood).

Krasinski also carefully limns the relationships. There are subtitles for the signed scenes, but rarely are the words the only signifiers. You can see the relationships in a look, a touch. You can even see the disconnects. The daughter's feelings of rejection are physicalized, even as we see the physical expression of her parents' love for her. It helps greatly that Krasinski has found two strong young actors to play the children. He's to be commended for casting Simmonds — a particularly gifted young actress who, like her character, is deaf, — to play the daughter and for casting kids who look like real kids, not plastic stand-ins for our dreams of the perfect family.

When her father leaves her behind, Regan goes off on her own, eventually visiting the shrine they've created where their youngest was killed. The camera captures the depth of her feelings of guilt and mourning, and Simmonds embodies the pain of dealing with emotions she's almost too young to understand. It's like The Member of the Wedding with aliens.

There's also a particularly powerful sequence as Krasinski brings his son back from the river. They pass a house that's overgrown with weeds. That's not necessarily a sign that it's abandoned. You can't exactly use a weed whacker in this world. The son is drawn to it, but Krasinski pulls him back to the path. Then they see the dead body of an older  woman on the other side of the road. Next to her is an old man (the wonderful character actor Leon Russom), his face a mask of grief. He opens his mouth and emits a cry — half scream, half wail. Krasinski pulls his sun to hide behind another tree just before one of the aliens swoops in to grab the man. Those simple images are all it takes to render one of the film's most upsetting moments. It's suicide by sound.

It's hard to unpack all of the film's richness without venturing into spoiler territory. All I can say is that as rich as that sequence is on its own, it also feeds into later plot developments. You can't miss a detail in this film. Many of them are set-ups for what will happen next, and even when they're not, they reveal something about the characters, their relationships and the world in which they live. The film carefully sets up the rules of its world, and then follows them through logically. It's a refreshing change from all the cheaply made, poorly thought out horror films, and even some highly regarded films from other genres, that change the rules simply to wind things up.

In addition, A Quiet Place creates a powerful metaphor for the family under siege. For all the bleakness of the world Krasinski and the writers have created, it's ultimately a very hopeful film. It suggests that the strength of connection can withstand anything, be it the vicious fast-moving aliens in the film or the rather more horrifying forces assailing us in the real world.

Don't tell mom The Babysitter's a Satanist.

There's a metaphor underlying the Netflix original The Babysitter (2017), too. For all its slapstick violence, it's basically a coming-of-age tale, a satanic twist on the teenage rom-com.

Twelve-year-old Cole (Judah Lewis) is afraid of everything: needles, the bullies who routinely torment him and rejection (which explains why he can't see that classmate Emily is attracted to him). He's such a phobic wimp his parents can't leave him home alone. Fortunately, his babysitter, Bee (Samara Weaving), is pretty much his favorite person on the planet. She treats him like an equal, stands up to the bullies for him and lets him ignore his parents' rules once they're out of the house. There's only one problem. She's a Satanist who plans to use Cole's virgin blood for a sacrifice to the dark forces. At base, this is the story of a boy growing up fast when he realizes the object of his hero worship isn't what he thought her to be.

Of course, the hero with feet of clay is hardly confined to horror films. Paul's disenchantment with his nationalistic professor adds to the character's growing disillusionment in Lewis Milestone's classic All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), while Jack Burden's growing awareness of Willie Stark's flaws underlies the plot of Robert Rossen's All the King's Men (1949). Brian Duffield's script for The Babysitter cleverly moves this kind of story into the worlds of romantic comedy and horror. He sets up the plot with solid, internal logic. Bee offers Cole his first alcoholic drink before he goes to bed. Not liking the taste but wanting to appear cool, he dumps the drink while she's not looking. Unknown to him, the drink was drugged so he would sleep through the satanic ritual. Unable to sleep, he sneaks out of his room to watch her play spin the bottle with some of her high-school classmates. Earlier he had spotted her coming on to class nerd Samuel (Doug Haley), which had seemed out of character. When Samuel gets to kiss her during the game, Noah watches as she kills him with two daggers and the other students collect his blood. When they realize Noah's been spying on them, Bee and the teens set out to kill him. His various means of defending himself — a misplaced kitchen knife, a decrepit tree house, even a divorced neighbor's "penis" car — have all been planted carefully in the script.

Duffield is aided greatly by a strong cast. The Australian Weaving, the niece of actor Hugo Weaving, seems to have come out of the "Get Me an Emma Stone Type" casting pool, which is a good thing. Like Stone, she has catlike eyes that make her face lively and interesting, and more important, she shares Stone's gift for sly comedy. She can be brash when she's taking on the bullies and takes on a great conspiratorial air in dealing with Noah. You can tell in a minute why the kid's infatuated with her. Lewis commits to his character's immaturity but has just enough edge to make his standing up to Bee believable. Best of all is Robbie Amell, who manages to be both goofy and scary as the Bee's jock boyfriend. Nor does it hurt that he spends most of the film with his shirt off (which is well enough motivated that you don't have to feel too smarmy for enjoying it).

The Babysitter would be a great guilty pleasure except for one thing — the direction. I suppose there are worse choices to direct a witty genre piece. I mean, Uwe Boll is still working for no discernible reason, and the best thing about the success of the Terminators series is that it keeps Michael Bay away from other people's projects. But after the first scene, in which Noah panics at the thought of receiving a vaccination at his school, it's hard to imagine anybody doing a worse job than McG, best known for the unspeakably bad Charlie's Angels movies. That first scene is so flatly shot it reads like a comic strip, but without the surrealistic edge of great comics-inspired movies like Tim Burton's Batman (1989) or the Deadpool features. McG's approach to action is to play with time, often resorting to slow motion or freeze frames to make parts of a sequence stand out. There's no real sense of style or grace to his use of the device. Just in case you miss those details, he also throws up titles over some of his freeze-frames. When Cole arms himself to deal with Bee and her accomplices, McG has to make sure we see it, so he freezes the frame and throws up "POCKET KNIFE" on the screen. It's like going to the movies and sitting in front of one of those couples that has to explain everything on the screen to each other. And you thought you could get away from them by staying home and watching Netflix! At least you can eat your own snacks without having to sneak them in.

 

The Apocalypse has little pity for the stupid in Stake Land II.

Stake Land II (2016, aka The Stakelander) has the opposite problem. Although well directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, Nick Damici's script has more than its share of problems. That's particularly disappointing given that Damici co-wrote the much better Stake Land (2010) with that films director, Jim Mickle

The Shake Land films are examples of the mumblegore movement, low-budget independent horror films that, like the mumblecore genre that spawned it, focus on character, relationship and naturalistic dialogue over plot. That may be the problem with doing a mumblegore sequel. The original film focused primarily on setting up its vampire apocalypse world and the relationship between Mister (Damici), a seasoned vampire hunter, and his protégé Martin (Connor Paolo), whose parents were killed by vampires. With its world and relationships established, there's more plot in Stake Land II, which isn't necessarily a good thing.

Stake Land had ended with Martin's laying down roots with a tough young woman (Bonnie Dennison's Peggy) and Mister's leaving him to go return to his solitary life. The sequel picks up just as Martin has lost his new family (which is rather a waste; Dennison is a good actress, one of the saving graces of Guiding Light's final years). He sets out on foot to find Mister. And that's where the trouble starts. You'd think surviving in the vampire apocalypse would require some kind of street (or given the rural setting, field) smarts. Not for Martin, though. On the road, he meets an older couple who help him dispatch some vampires. He happily accepts their hospitality, only for them to drug him. He wakes up to find them about to kill him, possibly as a source of food. Fortunately or conveniently, depending on your point of view, he comes to in time to dispatch them and get back on the road. Then he finds a seemingly abandoned building. There's a wild girl there, and he approaches her to see if she needs help. Of course, she's just bait for another group that cannibalizes captives or makes them fight to the death in a post-apocalyptic MMA cage. I suppose you could argue that a few years of domesticity blunted his survival skills, but after getting duped by the couple, you'd think he'd be a little more careful.

Anyway, the cage fight puts him back in touch with Mister, and eventually they wind up at a large survivor's camp run by character actors A.C. Peterson and Steven Williams (best known for playing Mister X on The X-Files). Of course, that puts them in the crosshairs of the vampires, who are working in tandem with the cannibals, and leads to a whole lot of plot complications. In escaping from the cannibals, Martin and Mister capture one of their members. The boy claims to have been forced to work with them, but at the camp, he's held in solitary. He then tricks the young woman serving his meals into unlocking the door and hilarity does not ensue. When a plot depends on this much stupid to keep moving, it gets hard to trust the screenwriter.

At least the thing is fairly well played. Paolo, who's easier on the eyes here than in Friend Request (q.v.), and Damico have their roles down pat and bring the strong sense of relationship the material requires. And Peterson and Williams are the kind of seasoned pros who are fun to watch in almost anything. One of the script's few nice elements is their relationship. As the action unfolds, it's clear that the two are lovers, and they get to go out with some class.

But the film's best element is probably its direction. Berk, who's primarily a writer, and Olsen, an actor, use the camera effectively and know how to frame a scene for maximum effect. They make particularly good use of the Canadian locations, which seem almost an extension of Stake Land's upstate New York and Pennsylvania settmgs. With their depictions of a civilization being rebuilt, the two Stake Land films are similar to Westerns, though their Eastern settings make them seem more like a re-creation of the original 13 colonies. Three's some of the feel of films like John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk (1939). The sylvan setting also calls up memories of the best of regional, independent filmmaking. Stake Land II may not be as good as John Sayles' Matewan (1987), a love letter to West Virginia's mining country, but at least visually it can stand up to John D. Hancock's great rural horror film Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971) and even A Quiet Place.

 

If nothing else, House of the Witchdoctor offers a chance to catch up with Allan Kayser, Leslie Easterbrook and Bill Moseley

 There's mumblegore, and then there's just downright cheap. I'd love to say House of the Witchdoctor (2013) was some great undiscovered gem, but it's not. It's about as vile a piece of exploitation as you're likely to find roaming around the streaming services, though I'd rather you didn't find it. I'll stand by the horror genre until they pry the DVD of Killer Klowns From Outer Space (1988) from my cold, dead fingers, but there are a few films I'd be embarrassed for people to know I've seen. I'll just excuse this by saying I suffered through it so you won't have to. Yeah, that's the ticket.

The film's sole claim to originality is that it works a variation on the home invasion sub-genre of pictures like The Strangers (2008) and its much better European precursor, Ils (2006). As in those films, vicious outsiders assault an unsuspecting group holed up in some remote location. In this case a group of college students have gotten together to help the homeowner's daughter commemorate her fiancé's murder (not quite my idea of a suitable party theme, but to each his own). The invaders are an ex-con (Allan Kayser) and his partner in crime. Kayser has already murdered his mother and a drug dealer, along with raping and killing the dealer's girlfriend. They break into the house, tie up the four houseguests (one stereotyped over-sexed couple, one stereotyped Christian couple), and do all manner of horrible things to them. What they hadn't counted on, however, was the nature of the house and the weekend. Since I don't really want you to see the film, I'll spoil it for you (though if anything I've said has intrigued you, then stop reading here and pretend you don't know me). The girl's parents head a vodoun cult and the four houseguests were intended as sacrifices to their goddess. And just to tip things off that all may not be as it seems, the daughter's name is Leslie Van Hooten, just one letter off from Manson Family member Leslie van Houten. In a better film, that would be a nice touch.

As an index of the film's hatefulness, I'll point out that the rape scenes are the most realistic I've seen since the original (and much maligned) I Spit on Your Grave (1978), yet the murders are surprisingly low in gore. I suppose that's because Kayser, the chief malefactor, has the courage to throw himself into those odious scenes, while the filmmakers didn't have the money or the smarts to come up with convincing stage blood. Still, you can't help wondering what kind of mentality insists on realistic scenes of violation but draws the line at too much gore? Not one to whom I'm happy to have devoted 87 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

What drew me to the film in the first place, was its outré cast list. Like many gay men, I used to lust over young Bubba on the syndicated version of Mama's Family, and I've wondered whatever happened to Kayser, who played him. Well, here he is, still in good shape and trying his damnedest to make his character's unmotivated, two-dimensional hatefulness work. He doesn't really succeed. The vodoun cult includes Dyanne Thorne and Howard Maurer, the married actors who appeared in the Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS series.  They play the doddering couple in the cult, which makes the ceremony more pathetic than frightening.

More prominent are Leslie's parents and the cult's leaders, played by William Moseley and Leslie Easterbrook, who played adoptive siblings in Rob Zombie's best film, The Devil's Rejects (2005). In that film, Easterbrook had taken over the role of Mother Firefly from Karen Black, who had played it in House of 1000 Corpses (2003) but wanted too much money for the sequel. Easterbrook only had one scene, an extended interrogation with sheriff William Forsyth, but it was one of the film's highlights. The two worked off each other beautifully, just pushing the edge of too much without ever going past it. It was an acting duet to rival the kind of work that wins awards in more respectable films. She attacks House of the Witchdoctor with the same gusto. In a better film, her performance would be infectious and might have brought the audience along for the ride. But this film isn't better; it could hardly be any worse. At least she seems to be having fun. That makes one of us.

O, De Havilland!

Olivia de Havilland climbs the staircase to freedom at the climax of The Heiress.

Although she was one of the most intelligent and dedicated actresses of the studio era, Olivia de Havilland has never quite ascended to the legendary status attained by Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck and Katharine Hepburn. One problem was that she lost two peak years in the 1940s to a lawsuit against her first studio, Warner Bros. She was suing because Warner's wanted to add six months to her original seven-year contract to compensate them for time she had been on suspension for refusing scripts. Two years on career hold to avoid six months' work may seem too much of a sacrifice, but that's the kind of commitment de Havilland had to her career. She thought the studio was assigning her to indifferent projects that would damage her more than her absence from the screen. When she won the case (in a landmark decision ending the addition of suspension time to seven-year contracts, which was a big boon to the leading men who had gone on suspension while fighting World War II), she was rewarded with a juicy role in Paramount's To Each His Own (1946) and an Oscar for Best Actress. Warner's got back at her by cutting her best scenes from their final film with her, Devotion (1946), turning her role as Charlotte Bronte into a supporting part. It was the kind of pettiness she had seen done to actors like Ruth Chatterton and Kaye Francis in the past

De Havilland also made some career mistakes in the 1950s (most notably turning down the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire) before cutting back work altogether to relocate to France with her second husband. As a result, she never engaged in the kinds of reinventions her contemporaries did. Nor was she prone to the larger-than-life emoting that helped turn Davis and Crawford in particular into camp icons. She gave simple, honest performances, though over time there was a tendency to excessive sweetness. Even in her prime, in The Snake Pit (1948), she's much more appealing as a madwoman than she is sane. Her character's normal seems almost artificial next to the gritty realism of the asylum scenes. There's none of that, however, in the two nicest ladies she played — Melanie in Gone With the Wind (1939) and the romantic schoolteacher in Hold Back the Dawn (1941). Nor is there in arguably her best and most honest performance, as Catherine Sloper in The Heiress (1949).

Catherine is the plain, shy daughter of a doctor (Ralph Richardson) who resents her because the wife he has idealized as a great beauty and charming hostess died in childbirth. The makeup and hair departments did their best to make de Havilland look dowdy (they can't do anything about those wonderful cheek bones), and she plays her character's gaucheness with subtlety. There's none of the slapstick indulged in in the later Washington Square (1997), adapted from the same Henry James novel on which Ruth and Augustus Goetz had based their play The Heiress. There's something just a little off in the way de Havilland walks and curtseys. When she fans herself, she does it so vigorously people ask if she's too warm (as the great Edith Evans once said, you can do anything with a fan except cool yourself). The film opens up the play, which was set entirely in the Sloper's drawing room, so that she and her family attend an engagement party for her cousin early in the film. Sharing the scene with the people who know how to behave, particularly her aunt Lavinia (Miriam Hopkins knows how to work a fan), she just doesn't fit in. When the handsome, young Morris Townsend (played by the handsome, young Montgomery Clift) asks her to dance, she keeps kicking him.

But then a small miracle happens. With his gentle coaching, her dancing improves. As he courts her, her gaucheness starts to evaporate. Director William Wyler shows more generosity toward Catherine than do her contemporaries. He lets her have moments of grace. And he doesn't make her cousin Marian, conceived in the play as the example of what a perfect young society woman should be, upstage her. Of course, the role is significantly diminished from the stage version. But under his guidance, Mona Freeman is only just a little prettier. She's younger, obviously, but her real gift is a confidence bred by more supportive parenting than Catherine has had.

Humanity and generosity are key elements in Wilder's films. On the rare occasions he presents a major character as a villain — Oscar Hubbard  (Carl Benton Reid) in The Little Foxes (1941), Marie Derry (Virginia Mayo) in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Messala (Stephen Boyd) in Ben-Hur (1959) — they're still human beings. You know what's made them that way. When he agreed to direct The Heiress (at de Havilland's request; she knew what he could do for actors), he asked the Goetzes to make Morris less of a villain. That primarily involved cutting one section from the play in which he complains to Lavinia that if Catherine's father disinherits her the income she's inherited from her mother won't be enough to live really well (her mother left her $10,000 a year, equivalent to about $300,000 today). Montgomery Clift focuses a great deal of his performance on de Havilland. There are times he seems genuinely concerned for her, to the point that you might actually hold out hopes for their marriage. When he jilts her on the night they're to elope, it's almost a surprise.

Dramatically, of course, it's a blessing. This isn't the story of a woman blossoming as she finds the right man. It's the story of a woman's growth after she realizes the only role that will give her value in society, that of wife, has been denied her. De Havilland builds her frustration subtly as she realizes she's been jilted. And Wyler frames the scene with her in the background (one of his famous deep compositions) and Hopkins in the foreground, the aunt's desperation slowly seeping into her niece. There follows a powerful confrontation with her father, who's realized he's dying (the scene in which Richardson listens to his heart and lungs through a stethoscope is an acting gem). Where he had feigned warmth and affection in the past, only allowing his disdain to creep through in a line reading or a gesture, she makes no efforts to hide her revulsion. At this point she knows she'll never have his love, much less his approval, and flatly informs him she doesn't even want his money. The two actors work off each other masterfully, and the shift in power dynamics is truly exciting.

Wyler saves the best for last, however. After a time jump, we meet the older Catherine, now alone and very wealthy. There's a calm about her, but also a coldness. She's still a prisoner of her father's disapproval and Morris' rejection. Then Morris returns. There are two ways to play the scene. You can show that Catherine is setting him up for revenge or you can hide it and make the final moments a surprise. Wyler and de Havilland choose the former, and at first that may seem a mistake. It's not a question of Morris' realizing she's setting him up. It's all very subtle, and Clift plays his excuses with a certain forced arrogance. He can't believe that Catherine would turn him down. It's a question of how soon the audience should be let in on Catherine's plans. That's the wisdom of director and actress. Were the scene played totally sincerely, the shock when she leaves him locked out and pounding on the door at the end would upstage any other point they wished to make. Letting the audience in on Catherine's thinking, allows them to share the artists' point of view about what's happening at the end. De Havilland's reaction when Morris moves in for the kill and suggests that now that her father is dead and the inheritance is settled they're free is like a moment of revelation for the audience. You can see the realization and relief in her eyes. Once she rejects him, she doesn't have to be tied to the past roles forced on her. When she climbs the steps at the end, the last in a series of ascents Wyler has used to capture her shifting emotional states, she pauses briefly, listens to Morris' calling her name, and then goes up with just the hint of a smile. This isn't the grimace of revenge. Catherine truly is free.

In James' novella, he can tell the audience that Catherine has found a new life devoting herself to charity. Agnieszka Holland does the same thing in Washington Square, but it's too clearly spelled out. When Morris in that version watches Catherine relating to an orphaned girl, it seems like the point is hammered home. The audience is reduced to students at a sophomore-level lecture on feminist theory. It's also a little disappointing that after losing her socially dictated role as wife, Catherine moves into another socially acceptable role for women, that of caregiver.

In The Heiress, Wyler and de Havilland let the audience decide what that new freedom means. It's interesting that in the final scenes, she's almost pretty. Her face is less pinched than in the earlier part of the film, her hair is softer and she's wearing a lighter gown than previously. It's not a miracle transformation. This isn't a variation on Now, Voyager (1942). Nor is this to suggest the film equates feminine beauty with success. But it isn't Mourning Becomes Electra (1947), either. Catherine no longer has to shut herself away from a world that's hurt her. She's freed herself for whatever she wants to be. And that's a pretty powerful feminist message.

A study in contrasts: Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland in In This Our Life

Olivia de Havilland is the eye of a hurricane of overblown dramatics in John Huston's second film, In This Our Life (1942). The picture was a huge misstep for Warner Bros. and Huston. Co-star Bette Davis always blamed it on the script, credited to Howard Koch, but in the studio era there's no telling how many hands got stuck into a stew like that. A lot of fans blamed it on Davis. I tend to side with her and would suggest her performance has been unjustly maligned. Ultimately, however, it's a film whose main recommendations are a strong supporting cast and some social commentary trying to break through.

Ellen Glasgow had won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel about raging passions and racial unrest in Richmond, Virginia. The book is almost 500 pages long, which points to the main problem with the movie, which tries to cram all that action into just over 90 minutes. Some of the supporting characters, particularly Billie Burke as the female stars' chronically ill mother, are given no background. And Davis' character seems to have no motivation. In 90 minutes, she steals sister de Havilland's husband, drives him to suicide, goes after her ex, who's now dating her sister, kills a child in a hit-and-run accident and tries to pin it on an African-American law clerk whose mother is the family's housekeeper. There's nothing unfamiliar about that kind of behavior. She's basically a soap opera spoiler in the tradition of Alexis Carrington, Erica Kane or Iris Carrington. Unlike them, however, she has no reason for her bad behavior. She's just there to keep the plot moving.

Davis does her best to keep the picture alive. She had originally fought to switch roles with de Havilland, arguing that a) she was too old to play de Havilland's younger sister and b) audiences were getting tired of seeing her play bad girls. She was probably right, and it would have been fun to see de Havilland take on the other role. Once she knew she had to play it, though, she threw herself into it with her usual full commitment. Her Stanley (one of the film's gimmicks is that the leading ladies both have men's names, Stanley and Roy) can't keep still. She's always dancing to the record player at home or a band or a jukebox when she's out trying to have fun. Fans didn't like her hair, makeup or costumes, but she actually does a good job of acting younger than de Havilland (whose, of necessity, more staid performance helps carry off the illusion) and there's only one costume (a harlequinade pattern she throws on when she comes out of mourning) that seems over the top. In addition, Davis' penchant for realism pays off. After her husband's suicide, when de Havilland comes to take her home, Davis wears little makeup, and her hair is a mess. Few actresses of the era would have played the scene without being practically lacquered into shape.

De Havilland is the steadier character and manages to keep Roy from seeming a total wimp. There's a weariness about her interactions with Stanley. She knows her sister is going to get her way eventually, so why make an issue of it if she doesn't have to. After Davis runs off, de Havilland is perfectly capable of driving her part of the action. She stumbles into a relationship with her sister's jilted fiancé, a lawyer played by George Brent, and has some charming scenes with him as they fall in love. Brent could be a bit of a lug in some of his films. It took an actress like Davis or de Havilland or Barbara Stanwyck (in the wonderfully soapy 1946 My Reputation) to get something out of him, so when he gets two strong leading ladies, he almost gets to shine.

The real shining in the film, however, comes from the supporting cast. As truncated as her role is, Burke immerses herself in it, and it's fun to see her break from her typecasting as a dizzy society matron (her Lavinia could be the poor country cousin of Millicent Jordan, her role in 1933's Dinner at Eight). Frank Craven is just as good as her husband; he makes long-suffering integrity touching. Lee Patrick sums up her character, a party girl who befriends Davis after her marriage, in one hip-swinging walk, then gets to show the character's depth when Davis is widowed. And Charles Coburn breaks out of his usual typing as a bluff upper-class clown to play the women's venal uncle, who cheats their father, oppresses the rest of the town economically and secretly lusts after Davis. His quietness when he realizes he's dying is a surprise in this otherwise feverish soap opera.

The other surprise is the picture's acknowledgment of racial inequality. Hattie McDaniel, as the family's housekeeper, gets her best role since winning the Oscar for Gone With the Wind. Her simple, sincere explanation of how she knows her son isn't responsible for the hit-and-run accident is another island of sincerity in the movie. As her son, Ernest Anderson goes beyond defining stereotypes; he's more of an anti-stereotype. His character growth is kept mainly off-screen, but his rise from errand boy to law clerk (as he saves to go to law school) is one of the film's most compelling plot points. When he's arrested, his repeated statement that "Nobody's going to believe me in this world" is a powerful indictment  delivered simply and quietly. This isn't to suggest the film was a trailblazer by any means. Much of the novel's racial politics was toned down to pass the Production Code, and some of Anderson's work had to be cut in southern states for fear of creating racial unrest, as if cutting a few scenes from a film could stem the tides of history.

The treatment of race is the most interesting part of In This Our Life. Huston's opening shot, showing laborers at the tobacco plant where Craven and Coburn work, says it all. There's a raised dock at the level of the factory itself and a street below. The African-American workers are confined to the street level unless called for, while the whites occupy the upper level. With that set-up and the background presence of African-American servants in the two main households, race becomes like an ostinato running beneath the rest of the action. It's a pity Huston couldn't have focused the entire film on McDaniel, Anderson and the town's other black inhabitants. All the insane doings of the white populace could have been just so much noise in the background.