If anyone personifies Woman according to the Studio Era, it's the irrepressible Bette Davis, who would have turned 100 this month
Bette Davis at 100
Of the slew of centenaries being celebrated in 2008, perhaps no honouree stands taller than the most diminutive member of the club: the indomitable Bette Davis (Davis would have been 100 on April 5.)
Studio-era Woman
In the same way that Chaplin has become the face of silent cinema, Davis is the face of classic film - at least, the female half (Bogart minds the men's gate.) Her hen-like visage, surrounded by erratically stylish locks and a ubiquitous cloud of cigarette smoke, is the slyly inviting door to a vast vault of melodramatic archetypes, each of which defines Woman in the studio-era age: good-hearted wives in illicit liaisons, jilted dames brought to murder, lonely spinsters who meet amorous foreigners, pillars of community struck with incurable diseases, and ambitious aunts, sisters and mothers driven to half-assed schemes and incurable madness.
Top Performances
We embraced her as all of them, saving our firmest hugs for the incarnations that brought out just the right amount of independence, wit and fire; too much of these characteristic qualities and what we got was camp; too little and the result was anonymity.
But when the arrow hit the mark, like in those powerhouse performances in The Little Foxes, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, The Letter, and All About Eve, we felt both the sharp sting of a force greater than ourselves and an irrepressible empathy for the emotionally broken archer, who lost something irretrievable in the release.
Scream Queen
Then, there was her final period: the scream queen renaissance that began with her unforgettable turn in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? By the time of Jane's release in 1962, the world was convinced that there was nothing left, that the last ounce from that deep, black pool inside her had been splashed across the screen long ago. How wrong we were, for there was still enough left in her inexhaustible tank to power a neo-Gothic masterpiece, a no-holds-barred self-parody; Bette Davis painted by Hieronymus Bosch.
When age restricted her to cameos, she became, as all old stars become it seems, a piece of window dressing aimed at elevating the property. One could say, then, that she, who had spent so much of her screen time trying to protect that particular quality - her class - from wolves both inner and outer, enjoyed the final triumph (as, of course, we always knew she would.)
Bette-ese
Today, in our much more cynical age, it is her crustiness that plays far better than her sad self-regard. Of that enduring and particularly verbal quality, critic and friend Robert Osborne had the best line: "Bette," he explained, "spoke in italics."
