June 15 movie: Mr. Skeffington. I love Bette Davis, and I love Claude Rains, and therefore I love this movie. But. The movie is seriously fucked up. Davis plays an utterly selfish woman who marries Rains for money, knowing he idolizes her but not caring, plays around on him for years, and eventually drives him away. She continues pretending to be the 18 year old belle of the ball for decades, until she's stricken with illness, loses her looks and finds out that none of her friends are really friends after all. Alone and unloved, she reunites with Rains. He's alone, penniless and blinded from a stint in a Nazi concentration camp so he can't tell that she isn't beautiful anymore. And she's been brought so low, so miserable and humiliated, that she's finally learned to appreciate him. Nothing like a happy ending.
It reminded me a lot of the ending of Jane Eyre. "Yay, you're blind and helpless and now I can take care of you!" What a screwed up concept of love! I didn't like it there and I don't like it here. I hardly want to mention the conceit of a Jewish man getting out of a concentration camp during the war and getting back to the US with nothing worse than blindness, as the movie was made in 1944 and Hollywood probably didn't know the truth yet.
But there are some great things about this movie: for one, excellent supporting work by Water Abel and Jerome Cowan. Also there's a very touching scene where Rains tries to convince his daughter to stay with her cold, unloving, Gentile mother, because he wants to protect her from anti-Semitism. I must say, though Davis gets more screen time Rains is really the best thing about the movie for me. His acting is so understated. The way he looks at Davis on the day they get married, when he realizes she doesn't love him at all, is heartbreaking.
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