Betty? This is Bette.

BD to Elizabeth Montgomery after a spat at Bette's house:

"Betty? When they do the story of my life, you should play me.  And I'm not sure that's a compliment!"

Listen here.  2:20.  It's all very adorable.


I suppose I should note that it could be confusing of me to refer to Bette Davis as BD for short, because her traitor daughter, Barbara Davis, was and still is known to the world as B.D.  It may look lazy to my other middle aged gay Hollywood columnists, but I do like to use initials and B.D. doesn't even count, right?  She wrote a shit book about her mother and ran off to join a Christian cult where she apparently remains.  These seem like poor choices to me.  Now she and her children have nothing to show for their famous lineage but bad attitudes and googly eyes.  Bette cut B.D. entirely out of her will and ended up giving half of her estate to the personal assistant who became a friend and confidant in her last years.

It seems that B.D.'s book was universally rejected as opportunistic and discreditingly fictional slander at the time, particularly by people who had known she and her mother through the years in question.  Perhaps she was seeking to ride the coattails of Christina Crawford and her seemingly more legit "Mommy Dearest," about her childhood with scaryass Joan Crawford.  Even Mommy Dearest is considered to be partly fictional, but who knows what happened behind those hedges.  Like I may have mentioned before, JC seems like she could have been the teacher in Sideways Stories from Wayside School, and that's not a compliment either. 

Pre-Code

I've been watching one of TCM's "Forbidden Hollywood" collections, which showcases movies made in the 30s before the Hays Code really became active and movies were forced to become coy and generic for the good of the viewers.  I always have to put my hand in the air when someone refers to the sweet, good old days when men were men and women were babies and no one cursed or took their clothes off, as my grandmother would say.  I don't think so.  Shit was raw when your grandparents were running it.  You just don't know because they didn't tell you.  Ask Ruth Chatterton. 

These early movies were mostly free of censorship and contain all kinds of things like near-nudity, violence, portrayals of women that violated the conservative norm (running businesses! doing drugs! sex with non-husbands!), and difficult topics like rape, abortion, incest, abuse, addiction.

Unfortunately, the drawback to many of these earlier films is they are terrible.  They have weird, pointless plots, bad acting, continuity issues, and, worst of all for me, stupid and convenient endings.  Still, I love them best.  I watch them over and over because there are so many small details and I love absorbing all of the sets, street scenes, clothes, slang.  They seem like much truer reflections of life than glossier, more edited films. 

Since the code was enforced from the mid 1930s to the late 1960s, I would guess most people probably haven't seen films made before it.  My first exposure to pre-code movies was FEMALE (all caps for emphasis, as in, not a lady but a-), which is a story about the fall of a corporate titan who learns the same lesson that all women learn in these films: being independent will ruin your entire life.  Societal constraints for women are for their own good!  Examples:

The Divorcee (1930): A wife learns that her beloved husband has cheated on her with someone named Janice, for god's sake.  She gets very drunk and sleeps with his best friend as payback.  He divorces her and she's never happy again.  Until he takes her back.

A Free Soul (1931): A girl is raised by her libertine father whose lack of conservative parenting lands her in the bed of a mobster who looks a lot like Clark Gable.  Clark tries to ruin her life and Leslie Howard rescues her and brings her back to the prim world she should have occupied all along.

Three on a Match (1932): A bored and fickle housewife leaves her goodguy husband for some scumbag she meets on a cruise.  She gets addicted to heroin and the boyfriend abducts her child from the ex-husband to ransom him for money to pay off his debt to the mob. A very young and vicious looking Humphrey Bogart is one of the bad guys who decides to just kill the child, which the mother prevents by jumping out of a window with a note to the police about the kid's whereabouts written on her dress. 

Starting to get the idea?  I think it's safer in the house, babe.

Another thing that shocked me about the pre-code films is seeing big stars playing some scandalous roles as younger women.  One day I was searching for photos of Claudette Colbert in her Cleopatra outfit, as you do, when I found this clip from The Sign of the Cross, another crazy early film.  I thought the Cleo dress was risque for her, but apparently not.  Here she is, playing an Arab princess and bouncing around topless in a milk bath.  Well, she is French.



I was also surprised to see Norma Shearer in similar roles, although they apparently couldn't get her to take her clothes off, and the extent of her sex scenes are outside shots of some drapes closing, or of her being in a man's house in the morning, which tells you all you need to know about her night.


Edit: OH MY GOD, Universal has gone through and had all the clips from The Sign of the Cross taken down!  Don't they have better things to do?  But I did find this, in case you didn't believe me earlier:

A few years later, she'd become America's considerably more modest sweetheart in "It Happened One Night"

And I don't care who knows it.

Tired Old Queen at the Movies, youtube superstar.

He reviews the classicest of the classic 40s-50s hits, Born Yesterday, Ball of Fire, Giant, Now, Voyager, and everything in between.  He has his favorites, and luckily, they are mine too.



He does Born Yesterday in this episode, which is a delightful, subtle comedy that is somehow ridiculous without being too overt.  Judy Holliday is the best ever, and even though Jean Arthur was another baby-voiced, absurdly-funny comedienne, she's too little and refined to have played the big (personalitied) blonde ex-chorusgirl from NYC.  There are so many parts of this movie that I love that I am probably an intolerable watching-partner.  Leaning forward, chin on my fists, "This part is SOOO funny WATCH WATCH HA HA!" 

Anyway, this guy does a really great Bette Davis impression.  Look for the over-35 Bette in his portrayal.  When he says "Tired old queen...at the moviess," in clipped tones while rapidly blinking his eyes...that's her.  There she is!  Uncanny.

WWBDD

I have never liked Joan Crawford. She must have gotten to me as a child somehow because when I see her aged face, I think of severe elementary school matrons; tight-lipped, icy old thornbushes. I guess I changed my mind at some point, however, because when I watched Baby Jane last night, I actually felt a dash of warm familiarity as I searched for remnants of 1939 JC in 1962 JC's face. I've watched The Women so many times that my love for her as bitch homewrecker Crystal melted my anti-Joan sentiments. And who the fuck am I to dislike a woman's irregular beauty? Sorry Joan.

She was a bitch, though. We know this. And when it comes to taking sides (which I do early and often), I am BDATW

BETTE DAVIS ALL THE WAY