The Bette Davis Collection (The Star / Mr. Skeffington / Dark Victory / Now, Voyager / The Letter)
by Edmund Goulding, Irving Rapper, Stuart Heisler, Vincent Sherman, William Wyler
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Actor: Bette Davis, George Brent, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Humphrey Bogart, Paul HenreidDirector: Edmund Goulding, Irving Rapper, Stuart Heisler, Vincent Sherman, William Wyler
Writer: Bertram Bloch
Writer: Casey Robinson
Writer: Dale Eunson
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Black & White, Box set, Closed-captioned, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 553 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-06-14
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Warner Home Video
DVD Reviews of The Bette Davis Collection (The Star / Mr. Skeffington / Dark Victory / Now, Voyager / The Letter)
DVD Review: This is why I love Bette Davis movies--the summit
Summary: 5 Stars
Bette Davis is close to my favorite actress. She drove studio boss Jack Warner nuts because of her uncanny ability to pick excellent properties that would challenge her as an actress and roles that her millions of fans would love her in. If Joan Crawford was a movie star who always insisted on looking glamorous, Davis was a serious and demanding actress who was not afraid to look awful if the role was great (MR. SKEFFINGTON, WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE).
Bette Davis is at her absolute peak in THE BETTE DAVIS COLLECTION: VOLUME ONE from Warner Home Video. DARK VICTORY (1939), THE LETTER (1940), NOW, VOYAGER (1942), MR. SKEFFINGTON (1944), and THE STAR (1952) all got her Best Actress Oscar nominations. In most cases, I feel she should have won over the eventual winner. Her performances hold up better.
Directed by Edmund Goulding (GRAND HOTEL), DARK VICTORY has Miss Davis as a young woman going blind from brain cancer. Made during Hollywood's greatest year, 1939, it is a supremely well made tearjerker that is too well acted by Bette to be depressing. Max Steiner did the music, Casey Robinson wrote the screenplay, and the co-stars include Geraldine Fitzgerald and Ronald Reagan.
THE LETTER, one of three masterpieces Bette Davis made with director William Wyler, is based on a W. Somerset Maugham story. It is about murder and adultery on a Southeast Asian rubber plantation. Nominated for seven Oscars, including Picture and Direction and Actress, this is a gorgeously photographed and gripping tale of a woman who kills her lover, then tries to get away with it. Herbert Marshall is flawless as her likeable husband and Henry Stephenson is her lawyer. With this, OF HUMAN BONDAGE, and THE RAZOR'S EDGE, Maugham hit gold with Hollywood adaptations of his work.
I adore NOW, VOYAGER. also written by Casey Robinson and directed by Irving Rapper. It may be Miss Davis' crowning achievement. She has a fabulous role as Charlotte Vale, who is a brow-beaten and timid spinster under harridan mother Gladys Cooper. But kindly sanitarium owner Claude Rains and likeable lover Paul Henreid (both the same year they did CASABLANCA) draw Charlotte out of her shell and make her love herself. She tells off Cooper ("If I am a guest in this house, then treat me like one!"), who meets a "stand up and cheer" bad end. Eventually, in one of the loveliest set of scenes she ever played, Davis' Charlotte gets to help draw Henreid's insecure young daughter out of HER shell. This tearjerker masterpiece is the film classic where Henreid keeps lighting two cigarettes and giving her one ("Shall we have a cigarette on it?") It is incomparable, maybe my all-time favorite Bette Davis movie.
MR. SKEFFINGTON, restored from 127 to 146 minutes, is one of Bette Davis' most neglected tearjerker masterpieces. It is an elegantly produced and written (Julius and Philip Epstein) feast of a soap opera that spans several decades of the early 20th Century in two-and-a-half hours. It is about a woman who is so beautiful that men flock to her and overlook her intense vanity. We are in 1914 on a movie that will go all the way to when it was made in 1944. When Davis' Fanny contracts disfiguring diptheria, only Claude Rains' Job Skeffington, her husband by then, stands by her. This movie knockout, another Davis film I truly love, was directed by Vincent Sherman, who is still with us at age 99. He does the audio commentary!
The fifth Bette Davis film in this pure gold boxed set from Warner Home Video is the little-known THE STAR, with Bette playing a variation of herself when the movie was made independently and on a low-budget in 1952. Oscar-winning actress Margaret Ellis is losing her looks, has bills to pay,.and no studio in Hollywood will give her a job. So she proudly takes humiliating work outside the film colony. Stuart Heisler directed an original screenplay by Katherine Alpert and Dale Eunson that may be one of the best movies ever made about the real workings of Hollywood. Sterling Hayden and an adolescent Natalie Wood co-star.
THE BETTE DAVIS COLLECTION (VOLUME ONE) is an absolute must-own feast for her fans, and at least a must-see for fans of vintage Hollywood B&W tearjerkers. This collection is the summit for me, and VOLUME TWO (also out now) is also worth seeing. Recipient of two Oscars and ten nominations, Davis has been done proud by these two boxed sets from Warner Home Video, the Rolls Royce of the DVD industry.
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