In This Our Life (1942) - film review

Stanley and Roy are two sisters, the grown-up daughters of unsuccessful entrepreneur Asa Timberlake.  In temperament and behaviour the two women could not be more dissimilar.  Whilst Roy is responsible and considerate, Stanley is egoistical and flighty.  On the eve of her wedding to humdrum lawyer Craig Fleming, Stanley decides to run off with Roy’s husband, Peter Kingsmill.  This betrayal brings Roy and Craig together, but it soon turns out that Stanley and Peter are ill-matched.  Stanley’s behaviour ultimately drives Peter to suicide, although Stanley has no intention of playing the grieving widow for longer than she needs to.  One evening, Stanley arranges to meet up with Craig, hoping to rekindle their former relationship.  When Craig fails to show up, Stanley heads back home in her car.  Somewhat worse for drink, she accidentally runs down a mother and her young child.  When the child dies, Stanley tries to pin the blame for the accident on a young black man, Parry Clay.  At first, everyone seems to believe her - until Roy visits Parry’s mother and learns the truth...

"One of the worst films made in the history of the world."  That was Bette Davis’s considered assessment of her one and only collaboration with director John Huston.  If this reaction sounds a tad over the top, that’s nothing compared with Davis’s performance in this film.  In what is arguably the most enjoyable of her monster roles, Davis ignites the screen with something of the zeal of a mad pyromaniac, playing the part of a lying, cheating, narcisitic, man-eating, child-killing fiend for all it’s worth.  To misquote Davis, it is performances like this that make life worth living.  

In an inspired adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Ellen Glasgow, Bette Davis is partnered with Olivia de Havilland, whose career was very much in the ascendant after her Oscar nomination for her supporting role in Gone With the Wind (1939).  Both Davis and de Havilland are perfectly cast in this film, the two well-matched actresses personifying the worst and best in female comportment.  Whilst Davis is the epitome of the self-centred bad woman, her co-star is the goodie two-shoes that society expects a woman to be (and terminally dull with it).   Admittedly the irony is ladled on a bit thickly, although nowhere nearly as thickly as Davis’s lipstick and mascara.  This is the only film in which Bette Davis is out-staged by her own make-up.  

Suitably cast in the (mercifully) subdued male roles are frequent Davis collaborator George Brent and the rising star Dennis Morgan, both exquisite (in a one-legged Meerkat kind of way) as hapless Davis-fodder.  The ample supporting cast includes some of Hollywood’s finest character actors, including Frank Craven, Charles Coburn, Billie Burke and Hattie McDaniel.  Making his screen debut is Ernest Anderson; he landed the part of Parry Clay through Bette Davis’s intervention, after she saw him serving as a waiter in the studio canteen.

A woman’s picture, intended to provide escapism for bored housewives, this is clearly not the kind of film that we associate with John Huston.  Huston had just completed his first film, The Maltese Falcon (1941) and was drawn to In This Our Life because he felt it dealt with some interesting issues, including racial prejudice and incest.  In its sympathetic portrayal of a black man wrongly arrested for a crime, the film is many years ahead of its time, and its subtle suggestion of incest is just as daring.

Even though Huston gave his lead actress a virtual free rein and world defend her performance to his superiors at Warner Brothers, Davis greatly disliked working with him.  When her husband went down with pneumonia, Davis was granted compassionate leave, but this set the shooting schedule back by several weeks when she delayed her return and contracted influenza.  Towards the end of the shoot, after Huston had been called away to work for the war department, Raoul Walsh stood in to complete the film.  Although Walsh directed the scene in which Davis gives her most powerful performance (the one in which she, now in full Lady Macbeth mode, tells her sick uncle that he might as well snuff it), the actress absolutely loathed the director, and their on-set clashes came close to derailing the production.  It is not for nothing that Bette Davis was known as a legendary terror.  When riled, she could put the fear of God into God.

Despite the reservations of both Bette Davis and the Warner Brothers high command, In This Our Life proved to be a great success.   Doubtless, Bette Davis’s wonderfully uninhibited performance was probably enough of a lure to fill the stalls several times over, but Huston’s meticulous direction and a nice turn from Olivia de Havilland couldn’t have harmed the box office receipts.  Predictably, however, the film garnered some very mixed reviews, and it still remains (inexplicably) one of the least celebrated films of both Huston and Davis.

In This Our Life has far more substance than most female-oriented melodramas of this era.  Not only does it tackle some controversial themes (racism and incest) in an intelligent manner, it also provokes its audience to reflect on how society should expect women to behave.  By giving the two leading female characters male names (Stanley and Roy), isn’t the film boldly stating that women should deserve the same freedoms as men?   There are not many American films of this period which make a stab at tackling racial and sexual inequality.  Perhaps this should be considered one of John Huston’s most courageous and socially conscious films?

© James Travers 2010

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