The Old Maid (1939)

The Old Maid is an American film first released in 1939, directed by Edmund Goulding.  The film is based on a play by Zoe Akins and stars Bette Davis, Miriam Hopkins, George Brent, Donald Crisp and Jane Bryan.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


America, 1861.  Delia Lovell is about to marry the wealthy Jim Ralston when her former fiancé Clem Spender appears unexpectedly.  Delia has been waiting for two years for Clem to return to her having set out to make his fortune in another town and now she is resolved to marry Jim.  Delia’s cousin, Charlotte, comforts the disappointed Clem and soon finds herself falling in love with him.  His dreams shattered, Clem enlists in the Union Army but is killed in battle before the Civil War ends.   Meanwhile, Charlotte has given birth to his illegitimate child, which she has named Clementina.  To avoid a scandal, Charlotte opens an orphanage, concealing her own daughter amongst the unfortunate children in her care.   On the very day that Charlotte is to marry Jim Ralston’s brother, she reveals the truth about Clementina, known affectionately as Tina, to her cousin.  Delia is outraged by this news and immediately wrecks the marriage by telling Charlotte’s intended that she is too ill to marry.  Several years later, Charlotte, now an embittered old maid, lives with the long widowed Delia.  Charlotte still cannot bring herself to tell Tina the truth of her parentage and is mortified whenever Tina refers to Delia as ’Mummy’.  In Tina’s eyes, Charlotte is just a spiteful old woman who has never loved.  On the eve of Tina’s marriage, Charlotte decides the time has come to tell her the truth...

It is no secret that Bette Davis had difficulty sharing the limelight with her female co-stars.  The consummate perfectionist, Davis had no patience with petty rivalry and sloppy workmanship and it took very little for the tyrannical side of her nature to assert itself and start stripping days, if not months, off the lives of her directors and producers if she failed to get her way or felt her territory was being encroached on.  There was no end of territory encroaching during the production of The Old Maid, as Davis’s co-star Miriam Hopkins went to almost insanely suicidal lengths to prove that she, not Davis, was the star of the film.

Hopkins had good reason to resent working with Davis.  It was Davis who was awarded an Oscar for her leading role in Jezebel, a film adaptation of the Broadway play in which Hopkins had triumphed.  Whilst making The Old Maid, Hopkins was in the throes of a painful divorce from the director Anatole Litvak and she was convinced that Davis once had an affair with him.  Davis had her own share of grievances.  She disliked being cast in the role of the old maid and would have preferred to have played the more interesting Delia, a calculating social climber with a penchant for duplicity.  Davis had failed to convince Warner Brothers executives that she should play both roles, something that was technically feasible through split-screen photography.  It did not help that Davis’s former lover George Brent was given the leading male role in the film.  With so much mutual loathing in the bag even before the two star actresses found their way to the set, it was clear that there would be trouble ahead.  How director Edmund Goulding managed to keep the show on the road and prevent his two leading ladies from killing each other and everything within a fifty mile radius remains one of the untold stories of Hollywood.  Suffice it to say that barely a day went past without Hopkins doing something to arouse Davis’s worst homicidal instinct and Davis responding in the appropriate manner, like a psychopathic queen bee whose nest had just been firebombed.

Ordinarily, such backstage friction would be the kiss of death for any production.  But, somehow, The Old Maid benefits from the fact that two leading actresses so clearly hate each others’ guts.  You can almost smell the venom in the air as Davis and Hopkins stand side-by-side, with murderous looks in their eyes that would have even Joseph Stalin quaking in his boots.  What could easily have been a lacklustre melodrama ends up as an extraordinarily intense character piece that grips the audience and never lets go, no matter how silly and predictable the plot gets. 

Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins may have found the experience of making this film extremely painful but both manage to give the kind of performance that any filmmaker would gladly auction off his favourite grandmother for.  Some may regard The Old Maid as just another old-fashioned weepy.  Those of a more discerning and generous nature will recognise that it is far more than that.  This is one of cinema’s darkest and most compelling morality plays on the futility of hatred – the irony of which was presumbaly lost on the two great ladies who made it.

© filmsdefrance.com 2010

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