Three on a Match (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932)

Bette Davis, Joan Blondell, and Ann Dvorak in Three on a Match

Cast: Joan Blondell, Ann Dvorak, Bette Davis, Warren William, Lyle Talbot, Humphrey Bogart, Allen Jenkins, Edward Arnold, Virginia Davis, Anne Shirley, Betty Carse, Buster Phelps. Screenplay: Lucien Hubbard, Kubec Glasmon, John Bright. Cinematography: Sol Polito. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: Ray Curtiss.

This crisply directed and tightly edited Warner Bros. crime movie is almost too snugly put together. It runs for only a little over an hour and still manages to tell a pretty complex story that spans the years from 1919 to 1932 in the lives of three women as they grow from schoolgirls to adults. The "bad girl," Mary Keaton, is first played by Virginia Davis as a tomboy showing off her black bloomers on the monkey bars. She barely graduates from elementary school, then spends time in a reformatory before taking a job as a show girl, played by Joan Blondell. The "rich girl," Vivian Revere, played by Anne Shirley under her first screen name, Dawn O'Day, is a bit of a flirt, who confides in the boys that her bloomers are pink, but doesn't show them off. She grows up to be played by Ann Dvorak as a bored socialite married to Robert Kirkwood (Warren William) with whom she has an adorable (read: cloyingly cute) child (Buster Phelps), but runs off with a ne'er-do-well played by Lyle Talbot, who gets in trouble with the mob, headed by Ace (Edward Arnold) and his enforcer, Harve (Humphrey Bogart). The "smart girl," Ruth Westcott, starts out as the class valedictorian (Betty Carse) and goes to business school. Her story, even though she's played by Bette Davis, is the least interesting of the three. In fact, she seems to be there only to make it possible for the three women to light their cigarettes on one match, setting off the supposed curse on the third to catch the flame, who happens to be Mary. The result is that Dvorak, though her career never took off like that of Blondell or Davis, gets the juiciest part in the film and makes the most of it. Of course, Warners didn't know that Davis would become its biggest star, but anyone who decides to watch Three on a Match thinking it's a "Bette Davis movie" is going to be disappointed. Still, there are worse ways to spend an hour than watching formative moments in the careers of stars like Davis -- or for that matter, Bogart, in one of his first gangster roles.

Deception (Irving Rapper, 1946)

Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, and Claude Rains in Deception

Cast: Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, John Abbott, Benson Fong. Screenplay: John Collier, Joseph Than, based on a play by Louis Verneuil. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Alan Crosland Jr. Music: Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

The highlight of Deception is a scene in which Claude Rains, as the imperious composer Alexander Hollenius, invites his ex-mistress Christine (Bette Davis) and her new husband, the cellist Karel Novak (Paul Henreid), to dine with him at a fancy restaurant before Novak is to play Hollenius's new concerto. While Christine and Karel stew, both eager to get the composer's approval so the cellist can make a career break, Hollenius plays the epicure, constantly rethinking the menu and the accompanying wines and keeping the couple from their goal. It's Rains at his best. In fact, he's the chief reason for seeing this somewhat overproduced melodrama, with its sometimes laughable skirting of the Production Code's strictures on sex. Would a worldly European like Novak really be so terribly shocked to find that Christine had been Hollenius's lover? Would Christine really be so determined to conceal the secret that she'd kill for it? Davis pulls out all of her mannerisms -- she disliked the film -- while Henreid struggles to rise above his usual passivity as a leading man overshadowed by his leading lady.

The Petrified Forest (Archie Mayo, 1936)

The Petrified Forest (Archie Mayo, 1936)

Cast: Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Genevieve Tobin, Dick Foran, Porter Hall, Charley Grapewin, Joe Sawyer, Paul Harvey. Eddie Acuff, Adrian Morris, Nina Campana, Slim Thompson, John Alexander. Screenplay: Charles Kenyon, Delmer Daves, based on a play by Robert E. Sherwood. Cinematography: Sol Polito. Art direction: John Hughes. Film editing: Owen Marks. Music: Bernhard Kaun. 

Robert E. Sherwood was once America's pre-eminent playwright, winning three Pulitzer Prizes for drama (plus one for a biography of FDR's relationship with Harry Hopkins). But his plays are rarely revived today, and The Petrified Forest shows why: It's talky and its characters are more vehicles for ideas than human beings. The protagonist, Alan Squier, wears the label Effete Intellectual like a badge of honor. The leading lady, Gabrielle Maple, is the Wide-Eyed Naïf. The villain, Duke Mantee, is all Animalistic Evil. The actors who play them in the film -- Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart, respectively -- do what they can to bring them to life, but they still have to speak Sherwood's lines, or the equivalents provided by screenwriters Charles Kenyon and Delmer Daves. Sometimes the dialogue consists of things no human being ever found the way to utter: "The trouble with me, Gabrielle, is I, I belong to a vanishing race. I'm one of the intellectuals.... Brains without purpose. Noise without sound, shape without substance." Howard makes what he can of this self-pitying poseur, but who sheds a tear when he gets his comeuppance? Bogart, who was in the original Broadway production along with Howard, fares a little better: All Duke Mantee has to do is snarl and growl his lines. It's not prime Bogart, who learned to give a little more depth to his bad guys, but it gave his career a boost after Howard insisted that Bogart be cast in the role instead of the then better-known Edward G. Robinson. Davis comes off best, especially when you remember that her previous teaming with Howard was in John Cromwell's 1936 Of Human Bondage as the slutty Mildred, a character 180 degrees away from the dewy-eyed hopeful Gabrielle. The rest of the cast is entertaining, though Charley Grapewin's gramps, a garrulous old foof who can't help telling tale tales about his encounter with Billy the Kid, gets a little grating after a while. The cast also includes two African-Americans, Slim Thompson as the wealthy couple's chauffeur and John Alexander as a member of Mantee's gang. They are not stereotyped, and they have a brief moment of interaction in which the gangster lords it over the chauffeur, one of the few moments in which the reality of black life in America surfaces convincingly in a mainstream mostly white movie of the era. 

Fog Over Frisco (William Dieterle, 1934)

Fog Over Frisco (William Dieterle, 1934)

Cast: Bette Davis, Donald Woods, Margaret Lindsay, Lyle Talbot, Hugh Herbert, Arthur Byron, Robert Barrat, Henry O'Neill, Irving Pichel, Douglas Dumbrille, Alan Hale, Gordon Westcott. Screenplay: Robert N. Lee, Eugene Solow, based on a story by George Dyer. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Jack Okey. Film editing: Harold McLernon. Music: Bernhard Kaun.

San Franciscans don't call it Frisco anymore but they do call the fog Karl. Not that fog has a lot to do with the story of Fog Over Frisco, which is mostly a fast-paced murder mystery involving a socially prominent family and some stolen securities. Although Bette Davis is nominally the star, she's the murder victim and disappears from the film halfway through. Her prominent billing probably has to do with the realization at Warner Bros. that she was becoming a big star: This is also the year of Of Human Bondage, the John Cromwell film that Davis made on loanout to RKO.  Although Margaret Lindsay, who plays Davis's stepsister, has the larger part, and the cast is full of watchable character actors like Hugh Herbert, Alan Hale, and (in a small part) William Demarest, Davis still shines -- so much so that we miss her in the latter half of the movie. Another attraction to the film are the scenes shot on location in San Francisco, notably lacking any shots of the Golden Gate Bridge, which was under construction.

Waterloo Bridge (James Whale, 1931)

Waterloo Bridge (James Whale, 1931)

Cast: Mae Clarke, Douglass Montgomery, Doris Lloyd, Frederick Kerr, Enid Bennett, Bette Davis, Ethel Griffies, Rita Carlyle, Ruth Handforth. Screenplay: Benn W. Levy, Tom Reed, based on a play by Robert E. Sherwood. Cinematography: Arthur Edeson. Art direction: Charles D. Hall. Film editing: Clarence Kolster, James Whale. Music: Val Burton.

If I had to name a favorite underappreciated director, I think it might be James Whale, best known for Frankenstein (1931) and its even better sequel Bride of Frankenstein (1935) but also for the first (and best) sound version of Show Boat (1936) and for the semi-spoofy The Old Dark House (1932). Whale had a gift for irony and for spiking things with a bit of acid wit -- something that becomes apparent when you compare his version of Waterloo Bridge with Mervyn LeRoy's somewhat mushier 1940 film. MGM tried to suppress Whale's film when it got the rights to make its own version of the Robert E. Sherwood play, but it didn't have to work hard: The Production Code had made the earlier version, which is more explicit about the fact that Mae Clarke's Myra is a streetwalker, unavailable for exhibition when it went into effect in 1934. As an actress, Clarke wasn't a patch on Vivien Leigh, who played Myra in the later film, but she doesn't really have to be; Whale's direction keeps the story moving and surrounds her with some strong performances, including Doris Lloyd as her tough-girl friend Kitty and Ethel Griffies as the landlady. I was puzzled when I saw her leading man, billed as Kent Douglass. I knew I'd seen him before, and it wasn't until I checked that I recognized him as the Douglass Montgomery who played Laurie in the 1933 Little Women. He's suitably callow in both parts, which acted to his detriment in establishing a career, though I prefer him to the ever-pretty, ever-vacant Robert Taylor, who played the same role in the 1940 Waterloo Bridge. Billed sixth in the cast, after Frederick Kerr and Enid Bennett, is Bette Davis, who plays Montgomery's sister, Janet -- a space-filler of a role. If Davis had been cast as Myra -- which she devoutly wanted to be -- this version of the story might not have been lost to sight for so long. It was stored in the vaults at Universal, where it was discovered in 1975 but not released until the 1990s.

In This Our Life (John Huston, 1942)

In This Our Life (John Huston, 1942)

Cast: Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, George Brent, Dennis Morgan, Charles Coburn, Frank Craven, Billie Burke, Ernest Anderson, Hattie McDaniel, Lee Patrick, Mary Servoss. Screenplay: Howard Koch, based on a novel by Ellen Glasgow. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: William Holmes. Music: Max Steiner.

Just mentioning that Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland play sisters named Stanley and Roy should be enough to suggest what sort of movie In This Our Life is. And yes, it's a good sister (de Havilland/Roy) versus bad sister (Davis/Stanley) plot, with George Brent and Dennis Morgan as the men in the middle. As the movie starts, Stanley is on the brink of marrying Craig (Brent) but instead runs off with Roy's husband, Peter (Morgan), after which Roy gets divorced and falls in love with Craig, but Stanley's marriage to Peter goes sour and he commits suicide. So then she sets her eye on Craig again, and so on, accompanied by an almost nonstop score by Max Steiner to make sure you're feeling what you're supposed to feel. But this adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Ellen Glasgow wants to be more. The crux of the plot hangs on Stanley's attempt to frame a young black man named Parry (Ernest Anderson) for a hit-and-run accident that she committed. Unfortunately, the sensitivity of Hollywood studios about offending Southern audiences waters down this part of the narrative, even though Anderson has a good scene in which Parry despairs of receiving justice. Censorship also weakens the incest motif in Stanley's relationship with her uncle William (Charles Coburn), which was stronger and clearer in Glasgow's novel. Davis didn't want the role of the bad sister, and made things difficult for director John Huston (and for uncredited director Raoul Walsh, who filled in after Pearl Harbor when Huston was called into service as a documentarian/propagandist for the Department of War). The result is some of Davis's more flamboyantly mannered acting. De Havilland, however, gives a solid performance as the tough and thoughtful Roy. It would have been a more entertaining movie if it had had the courage to be trashier and less tepidly social-conscious.