A Long Island heiress learns she is ill and Bette Davis refuses to let her be pitiable. The story is nonsense, Bogart is miscast and Steiner’s score never rests, but Davis carries the film, and the last scene is deserved.
Judith Traherne has everything a 1939 studio could put in a house: horses, servants, a long drive, a wardrobe, and nobody to tell her to slow down. Then the headaches start. Edmund Goulding’s film, from a screenplay by Casey Robinson, is a weepy and does not pretend otherwise, and it is a good one. The medicine is nonsense from the first consultation to the last, and we did not mind for a minute, because Bette Davis is in the middle of it and she has decided that Judith is going to be a person rather than a lesson.
Watch what she does in the first half hour. Judith arrives at Dr Steele’s consulting room determined to be charming, treats the examination as a party she has been dragged to, and fires off lines while he waits. Then he asks her to do a few simple things with her hands and eyes, and she cannot quite do them. Davis plays the fear as irritation, a woman furious with her own body for letting her down in front of a stranger. It was here, not in any of the scenes critics usually name, that the film first got us. We had braced for a great performance and were caught out by a plain one.
She is the reason to watch, but not the only one. Geraldine Fitzgerald, as Ann, is given the job of knowing more than Judith and saying less, and she does it with her face: standing in a hospital corridor while the doctors talk, she looks like someone rehearsing bad news. George Brent’s Steele is mostly a wall for Davis to throw herself at. He is decent, calm and a little wooden, which is what the part asks for and not much more. When the two of them are meant to be falling in love we believed her and took him on trust.
Then there is Humphrey Bogart, playing an Irish horse trainer called Michael O’Leary with a brogue that turns up for some lines and sits out others. He has one good scene in the stables, where O’Leary tells Judith what he thinks of her, and Bogart plays it straight and hungry. Accent aside, he is wrong for the part. Ronald Reagan’s Alec is the drunk friend at every party, glass in hand, and he is more fun than the film needs him to be. Henry Travers, as the family doctor, does his usual kindly business and does it well.
Ernest Haller shoots the estate in high, even light so that everything looks expensive and nothing casts a shadow, then hardens the light in the hospital, where the walls go white and the faces go grey. Orry-Kelly’s costumes chart Judith’s state of mind more honestly than the dialogue does: riding clothes and a slouch hat when she is sure of herself, then gowns that get bigger as the bravado does. William Holmes cuts briskly and the whole thing is done in 104 minutes, which for a 1939 weepy is close to a sprint. Max Steiner’s score is the weak leg. It plays under nearly everything, swells before the actors have finished, and treats every scene as if it needed help. Davis does not.
The second half takes the story somewhere we will not describe, except to say that the film handles it with more tact than the first half led us to expect, and that the last scene, which most critics single out, is earned. We cried. We knew we were being made to, we could hear Steiner doing it, and it made no difference. That is the only test this kind of film has to pass, and it passes.
It is a studio melodrama about a rich woman and a brain tumour, and the diagnosis is a plot device rather than a piece of medicine, so anyone who needs their weepies grounded should look elsewhere. Anyone who wants to see what Davis could do when a script got out of her way has an evening here. Bring a handkerchief. You will feel foolish without one.
