184 thoughts on “Bette Davis Movies”

1. BRUCE

   1 My previous post refers. My faith in my TOTAL judgement is partially vindicated as on again reading over your Top 25 I see that Cameron Diaz was one of those who nearly made your list.

   2 Indeed whilst I confined my previous comments to your Top 10 I agree also with Keaton being 11th and Bullock 12th. I had my doubts initially about Diane K but on reflection she has had such longevity, is a marvellous actress and has the CLASS of actresses from the classic era that I think she deserves her 11th placing – and could you really have left out Godpop’s daughter in law?

   3 Anyhow as it stands you and I agree on all 7 of the greatest modern era actresses of all time – did Steve ever reach that number in the comparisons between your critic/audience rankings and his?

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   1. Hi Bob, I’ve looked at Bruce’s top 25 modern actresses list, what are the 7 that you and Bruce agree on in your post?

      Cameron Diaz was cute in her day but I can’t consider as her one of the ‘greatest’ and where is she now? In fact while I agreed on most of the choices, some I disagreed with. Here’s a quote from my comment on the top 25 modern actresses as chosen by Bruce –

      “Actresses I wouldn’t have included on this list are Julie Andrews, Natalie Wood, Debbie Reynolds and Goldie Hawn, attractive, bubbly actresses famous for being in 2 maybe 3 popular movies. But then you have to make it 25 actresses and you’ve ruled out one of the greatest, Elizabeth Taylor. Deborah Kerr? Jean Simmons? Michelle Pfeiffer? Sigourney Weaver?”

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      1. It would have been better if these comments were on the relevant page though.

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      2. Hey Steve…thanks for the re-visit to this page. Mmmm….well Elizabeth Taylor is on the AFI classic list….which is why she is not here. As for the rest…I included Deborah Kerr on my revised AFI classic actress list….so I agree with you 100%. That leaves Simmons (she was considered), Pfeiffer (brief stay at the top) and Weaver….I could see her getting a Top 25 spot.

         As for the ones you don’t agree with ….wow….can not believe you would not include Andrews….her top smashes alone would get her mentioned…..but then add on many other movies makes her a “no brainer”…at least in my brain……but is that really saying anything? lol.

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      3. Cameron Diaz? My goodness is she even an actress? In my opinion, she is a woman who has made films that suit her lack of ability.

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         1. Hey Susanna…..well….I think her career is worth reviewing when looking at the best actress between 1950 and 2010…..in my mind she was not worthy of a Top 25 spot…..but others disagree….and have made some solid points in her behave. Thanks for the comment.

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   2. Hey Bob….thanks for the breakdown on our picks, Diaz was one of many to be considered ….but her stats do not get her in the Top 25. As I look at the list it stills seems to be a decent Top 25. In the end….this is a fun list to look at… I imagine Jennifer Lawrence is close to getting on this list. Thanks for the visit and comment.

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2. 1 Thanks for the additional quotes from Bette Davis. You have probably guessed that I share her opinion that many contemporary film performers are overrated. However in relation to Bette’s own gender if you look at Bruce’s Top 25 Actresses from 1950-2010 I think that he has got spot on in his first 10 listings those women whose serious cinematic careers have been almost exclusively confined to the modern era (officially regarded as beginning in 1961) and who have been the most important female stars of all in modern times – Streep, Streisand, Julia Roberts, Jane Fonda and Julie Andrews. My only regret is that Cameron Diaz didn’t meet the criteria for inclusion in his 25 as I think that she also is one of the modern ones who deserves her proclaimed star status though I am not a particular fan of hers. However I have matched YOUR best in this instance by being in total agreement with Bruce’s Top 5 picks from the mods!

   2 Just as you have a great ear for Mr Mumbles’ vocal chords I know that you will have assessed his visual talents as well and it may therefore interest you to learn that those who knew him in the early days realised that he would be different from all other actors when in an acting class at the Actors’ Studio all the students were instructed to pretend they were a chicken and whilst everyone else jumped up and flapped and squawked all over the place Mr M just sat still and pretended to lay an egg.

   3 FURTHER QUOTES
   Interviewer: You’ve made many good films but awful ones as well.
   Sir Maurice Micklewhite: Yes, some have been dreadful
   Interviewer: Jaws The Revenge was particularly bad
   Sir Maurice: Yes, I’m told it wasn’t up to much
   Interviewer: What! – you haven’t seen it yourself?
   Sir Maurice: No, but I’ve seen the house that it has paid for.

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3. 1 James Stewart had a more consistent and vertiginous box office that Bette but such was his respect for her talent that when they came to make the TV movie Right of Way in 1983 he ceded top billing to her.

   2 VIDEO COMMENTS (1) You have given us a good spread of Bette’s heyday films from the late thirties and the forties including classics like a Stolen Life, Mr Skeffington, Deception and Jezebel and of course obligatory was the 1950 All About Eve in which she co-starred with her soon-to-be-husband Gary Merrill and the favourite husband of the Gabor family Victor George Sanders (2) I think my pick of your posters would be those from The Nanny, The Anniversary Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte and of course The Sisters which I first admired on your Errol Flynn page (3) your black and white solo still of Bette showed how stunning a beauty she was when she was very young (4) you and Bruce agree on 4 of the Top 5 and I side with him including Jezebel instead of Watch on the Rhine which was in your 5 though I was surprised that he had that one so low at 28 for critic/audience (5) overall for me the video is worth a 9.4 for capturing the length and breadth of a great career (6) astute opening quote by Bette pre 1989 about the bar for stardom being considerably lowered since the Classic Era and to paraphrase a line from the song One Day at a Time “Sweet Bette its worse now that then!”

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   1. Hi Bob, thanks for the review and rating. Bruce mentions Watch on the Rhine in his comment on the video, his sources weren’t impressed with it while 2 of my sources gave it top marks, while Jezebel only got a 9 from one source, Maltin. There’s only half a point between the two anyway. 4 of Bette’s films get 10 out of 10 on my chart including Rhine.

      Bette was very quotable –

      “I will never be below the title.”

      “Getting old is not for sissies.”

      On Joan Crawford – “She has slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie.”

      “Joan Crawford and I have never been warm friends. We are not simpatico. I admire her, and yet I feel uncomfortable with her. To me, she is the personification of the Movie Star. I have always felt her greatest performance is Crawford being Crawford.”

      On John Wayne – “I certainly would have given anything to have worked with John Wayne. He’s the most attractive man who ever walked the earth, I think.”

      On Errol Flynn – “He was not an actor of enormous talent — he would have admitted that himself — but in all those swashbuckling things he was beautiful.”

      On Joan Crawford: “I was not Miss Crawford’s biggest fan, but, wisecracks to the contrary, I did and still do respect her talent. What she did not deserve was that detestable book written by her daughter. I’ve forgotten her name. Horrible. I looked at that book, but I did not need to read it. I wouldn’t read trash like that, and I think it was a terrible, terrible thing for a daughter to do. An abomination! I felt very sorry for Joan Crawford, but I knew she wouldn’t appreciate my pity, because that’s the last thing she would have wanted, anyone being sorry for her, especially me. “

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4. Also the only time that Bette Davis acted as her own producer was for the film ‘A Stolen Life” she had formed her own company for that film and it was named for Davis’ daughter which was called “B.D. Production” and Davis was going to produce more films but decided that it was too hard to act and produce at the same time.

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5. Hello,
   In late 1941, Hollywood was rocked by two big headlines that appeared less than two months apart on the front page of The Hollywood Reporter: Nov. 7’s “Davis First Woman to President of Academy,” followed by Dec. 26’s “Davis Resigns as Academy President.
   The Davis in question? Bette, a 33-year-old, hugely popular star who was already a two-time winner of the best actress Academy Award. (She claimed to have given the statue its nickname: “When I saw the award’s rear end, it reminded me of my husband’s [Harmon Oscar Nelson].”) How did she come to lead the then-500-member Academy, founded by the studio chiefs only 14 years earlier, and why was her time at the top so short? That seems a question worth answering 75 years later, as people focus on the relationship of today’s Academy — again led by a woman — to diversity.
   The Academy usually chooses its president from its board of governors, but Davis had never served the organization in any official capacity when she was tapped for the job, which came with a one-year term. She had been touted to succeed two-term incumbent Walter Wanger by Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck, and her election was a popular one — columnist Hedda Hopper cheered, “If any woman here deserves that job, it’s Bette.” Davis later wrote, “I never imagined that I would hold its most exalted post. As the only woman so honored, I was frankly proud. But it was just this pride that shortened the tenure of my office.”
   Davis hadn’t made it in Hollywood on her looks. She was smart, talented and suffered no fools, earning her the reputation of being “difficult” — and numerous contract suspensions — at Warners, and it wasn’t long before the Academy’s board discovered her no-nonsense side. “At the first meeting I presided at as president,” she later recalled, “I arrived with full knowledge of my rights of office. I had studied the by-laws. It became clear to me that this was a surprise. I was not supposed to preside intelligently.”
   She had two big initiatives she immediately pushed to enact. First, she wanted to reformat the annual Academy Awards banquet. Since her election, Pearl Harbor had been attacked, thrusting America into World War II and prompting calls for the cancellation of the Oscars, which had theretofore centered around dinner and dancing. She argued that it would be more appropriate to scrap the dinner and dancing and present the awards in a large theater, charging at least $25 a seat and donating the proceeds to war relief efforts. “The members of the board were horrified,” she later said. “Such an evening would rob the Academy of all dignity.”
   Her other idea was to revoke the right of Hollywood’s thousands of extras to vote for the Oscars. She argued that many of them lacked taste, culture and “didn’t even speak English” — and besides, there were indications that their votes could be swung behind whichever studio hired them around the time of balloting. Davis later said the board regarded this as “the wildest thing they’d ever heard” and Wanger, now the first vice president, spoke up and “wanted to know what I had against the Academy.”
   Davis quickly realized she was getting nowhere. “It was obvious that I had been put in as president merely as a figurehead,” she later wrote. “I sent in my resignation a few days later.” The Academy tried to keep the news from leaking while Zanuck, her sponsor, tried to run damage control. “He informed me that if I resigned, I would never work in Hollywood again,” Davis recalled. “I took a chance and resigned anyway.” Her resignation was “regretfully accepted” by the board at its Jan. 7 meeting.
   The real reasons for her exit were kept largely under wraps at the time. THR reported that it “was predicated upon her feeling that the presidency of the Academy is a &lsquofull-time job’ which she did not feel she could fulfill in addition to her picture contract with Warners. Additionally, Miss Davis is not in robust health, and the performance of the titular Academy office would require an endurance which her doctors felt she did not possess.”
   Wanger reassumed the presidency, and two months later the 14th Oscars took place, still as a dinner, but minus dancing and formal attire, and with attendees asked to support the war effort. Extras retained the right to vote, which almost certainly tipped the scale in the best picture race against Citizen Kane, to the Academy’s eternal embarrassment. Within just a few years, though, the Academy had implemented both of Davis’ big ideas: the 16th Oscars were held in a theater, as has been every installment since, and extras lost the right to vote ahead of the 19th Oscars.
   Davis, meanwhile, far from faded away. She was nominated for three more best actress Oscars before the end of the war, and spent most of her spare time supporting the war effort — she sold millions of dollars in war bonds and started the Hollywood Canteen to entertain servicemen on leave. She and Zanuck didn’t speak again until nine years had passed — “Because he had strongly recommended me, I’d embarrassed him,” she acknowledged — but they reconciled after he cast her in the greatest film of her career, the best picture Oscar winner All About Eve.
   Late in life she confessed that she regretted abandoning the presidency of the Academy rather than staying and fighting for her ideas. “I resigned the position in order to show them, but then nobody cared,” she sighed. “It’s usually a mistake doing something just to show someone.” But, she said she had reasoned at the time, “If I couldn’t function, if my suggestions were disregarded, why should I bother?” She added, “They wanted a mere figurehead, someone famous to publicize the Academy. I didn’t know that. I wanted to rule.”

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