Dark Victory (Restored and Remastered Edition)
by Edmund Goulding
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DVD details
Actor: Bette Davis, George Brent, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Humphrey Bogart, Ronald ReaganDirector: Edmund Goulding
Brand: DAVIS,BETTE
Cinematographer: Ernest Haller
Editor: William Holmes
Producer: David Lewis
Producer: Hal B. Wallis
Writer: Bertram Bloch
Writer: Casey Robinson
Writer: George Emerson Brewer Jr.
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 104 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-06-14
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product features:
- Bette Davis' bravura, moving-but-never-morbid performance as Judith Traherne, a dying heiress determined to find happiness in her few remaining months, remains a three-hankieic. But that success would never have happened if Davis hadn't pestered studio brass to buy Dark Victory's story rights. Jack Warner finally did so skeptically. Who wants to see a dame go blind? he asked. Almost everyone: Dark
DVD Reviews of Dark Victory (Restored and Remastered Edition)
DVD Review: Wonderful!!
Summary: 5 Stars
Loved it!! Excellent movie with lots of great actors. Loved Betty Davis Performance!! MillieDVD Review: Dark Victory - A Classic
Summary: 5 Stars
Bette Davis almost always fabulous is great here too. I love Dark Victory & Now Voyager the way I love Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce. Old Movie buffs this is one for you!Dark Victory (Restored and Remastered Edition)DVD Review: One of Bette's Best
Summary: 5 Stars
First things first:
The transfer is crisp and clean overall and the special features (which I usually don't bother with)are fun and interesting. Bette's heyday in the 30's and 40's in which she did her best work in my opinion (She was called "The 5th Warner Brother" and was the undisputed Queen of The Lot. Here, she's at once,willful,high-strung,and at the last,heroic. But what she is here is watchable and it should be no surprise to someone unfamiliar with her work (if such a one exists!) why she was so successful
DVD Review: Classic Drama/Romance. Another Oscar-Worthy Performance From The Queen Of Mean (Just Kidding).
Summary: 5 Stars
Bette Davis, recently fresh from her Academy Award winning performance in William Wyler's "Jezebel," gives another Oscar-worthy performance in this searing drama, which reunites her with "Jezebel" co-star George Brent. Excellent film. Highly recommended.DVD Review: The Victory is Assured
Summary: 5 Stars
I'm watching this for the first time and I know it is a well-deserved classic film. Kitsch-fest according to Pauline Kael, I think it is actually the best pre-war propaganda film ever made. What subliminal stuff! It's released in 1939. Staged among the smart set on Long Island, in the usual way those enviable plutocrats were put before a Depression-ravaged public so that they could live vicariously in great houses and nightclubs while sitting in the darkened theatre. But here (and perhaps this is where "kitsch" may be said to come into it), the rich girl is very ill, more ill than any of the (mostly poorer) audience is likely to be in a lifetime. She is doomed. She has to change her attitude to one of hope, in the face of mortality. When this film was released, my father was a teenager on Long Island, waiting for what he knew was an eventual involvement of the US in the European war. Not as rich as Judith (the warrior princess) Traherne (Bette Davis), but secure, and from the stock which had originally settled the place, the Puritans from whom Judith confessed to have sprung (all the while resenting their inhibiting influence on her sex life). The tumor in her head is once partly excised (The War to End All Wars didn't quite put Europe into the shape it was supposed to), but it is coming back and it is going to blind her (and we are going to go to another war) and her social life is definitely going to be upended. Victory may be dark, but it is victory if you can face death without flinching. Ronald Reagan is in it too, playing Mr. Sang Froid (he will later quip in real life with the doctors who saved him from an assassin's bullet). This is about the quiet before the storm. But all the classes are united. "Where is peace?" Judith asks. Peace is within you, because it sure as heck isn't in the world or in the body itself, so prone to betrayal. Maybe the Puritans had something there. Recurrent wars and recurrent tumors, are just part of the fallen world. The people of spirit stand up to it. (Her doctor husband says, "We just pretend that nothing is going to happen", but the fact that this is said so explicitly, means that the fiction is understood by all parties as such). The script is full of all these allusions to how people were feeling, as peace was on its last legs. Many who watched the film were as doomed as the heroine, with just as many years of future survival to expect. There's a song in it about time and how fleeting it is. Judith sings along. "It is a victory (over the dark) because we're not afraid." The sick wife sends her doctor husband off to fight the foe of cancer, knowing he will never see her again. She plants the hyacinths so that in the spring, when she is dead, they will return (in Greek legend, they spring from the blood of a dying hero). "Give them champagne and be gay. Be very, very gay." When they celebrate the victory which is assured.
I am sure this is not the conventional view of the film, which is generally treated as a vehicle for Ms. Davis, who acquired it as such. But if you put on the spectacles of the people who lived when it was made, there is another interpretation which may in fact be valid too. Dah-Dah-Dah-DAH!
Description of Dark Victory (Restored and Remastered Edition)
Bette Davis?s bravura, moving-but-never-morbid performance as Judith Traherne, a dying heiress determined to find happiness in her few remaining months, remains a three-hankie classic. But that success would never have happened if Davis hadn?t pestered studio brass to buy Dark Victory?s story rights. Jack Warner finally did so skeptically. Who wants to see a dame go blind? he asked. Almost everyone: Dark Victory was Davis? biggest box-office hit yet and garnered Academy Award nominations for 1939?s Best Picture, Actress and Original Score (Max Steiner).Critic Pauline Kael called this shamelessly enjoyable, vintage Bette Davis weepie a "kitsch classic," and time hasn't diminished its ability to give the tear ducts a good flushing. Davis plays a swinging socialite, living the fast life of booze, smokes, and--with the help of Humphrey Bogart as her Irish stableman--raising thoroughbred horses. When a brain tumor starts giving her headaches and eroding her vision, she falls in love with her surgeon (George Brent), who grows more determined than ever to cure her. Davis gives one of her most vibrant performances, and her costars also include Ronald Reagan and Geraldine Fitzgerald. The film received Oscar nominations for best picture, best actress, and for Max Steiner's score. --Jim Emerson
Even in the 21st century, very few film stars create and define their own genre--and certainly not in the complete way Bette Davis did. The Bette Davis Collection gives an exceptionally good survey of essential Bette, with four of the five films absolute knock-down classics from her long reign at Warner Bros. Davis's personality was so strong that she tended to overpower her directors, but William Wyler was one of the few to maintain his own distinctive style with her, and The Letter (1940) is a triumph for both of them. At a humid Malaysian plantation, Davis kills a man in the brilliant opening sequence, and the remainder is a darkly suggestive unraveling of the complicated explanation.
Dark Victory (1939) and Now, Voyager (1942) would be on anybody's list of most representative Davis pictures. In the former, she's a doomed heiress nobly losing her eyesight, a multiple-handkerchief situation that proved one of her biggest hits. Voyager allows Davis one of her favored techniques (appearing frumpy for at least part of her performance) as a mother-dominated spinster who comes out of her shell. Her match with Paul Henreid--and the music of Max Steiner--turns this into one luscious melodrama.
If Mr. Skeffington (1944) is not as celebrated as those films, it is nevertheless a characteristic Warners work-out. Davis wasn't shy about playing unsympathetic roles, and Fanny Skeffington--vain, selfish, married for practicality--is an exasperating tour de force. She gets good support from Claude Rains as the sensible, adoring husband. The Star (1952) is no classic, but its Pirandellian aspects will appeal to the actress's fans: Bette plays a washed-up Oscar-winning star desperate to get herself back in the public eye (think if it as a less witty postscript to All About Eve). There's some hint the main character is modeled more on Joan Crawford than Bette herself, in which case Davis must have loved playing it.
Extras are modest, with short featurettes giving background on three of the discs, and director Vincent Sherman providing commentary for Mr. Skeffington. But the films themselves, and their neurotically intense star, are quite capable of standing alone. --Robert Horton
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