MILDRED PIERCE 1945

Spoiler Alert: Crucial plot points are revealed in the interest of critical analysis and discussion

For me, Mildred Pierce has always been the most watchable and quotable of Joan Crawford’s movies. Which is really saying something with gold-plated doozies like Strait-Jacket, Torch Song, Berserk!, Queen Bee, and Flamingo Road staring me in the face. 

This film that won Crawford her first Oscar nomination and only win (she would be nominated two more times) ranks so high on my list of favorite movies that, by rights, I should have written about it long before now. But like many classic-era films that also enjoy broad popularity, Mildred Pierce is a movie that's been talked about, written about, analyzed, remade, lampooned, and borrowed from for so long, it simply felt as though I had nothing new to add to the conversation.

That's probably still the case. But the occasion of having recently read, back-to-back, the 1941 James M. Cain novel (upon which the film is based) and a terrific 1980 scholarly volume by film historian Albert J. LaValley devoted to the academic discussion of Mildred Pierce (!) complete with the published screenplay – left me with so much Mildred on my mind, the time felt right to commit my personal thoughts on this long-beloved film, to this, my internet film diary. 

Joan Crawford as Mildred Pierce

Jack Carson as Wally Fay

Ann Blyth as Veda Pierce

Zachary Scott as Monte Beragon

Eve Arden as Ida Corwin

The romanticized Stella Dallas myth—embracing the nobility of maternal love that sacrifices everything to secure the financial and social success of one’s child—gets a severe upending in Mildred Pierce. This surprisingly still-potent melodrama casts Crawford as a working-class divorcee and mother of two (the titular Mildred) whose obsessive/neurotic love for her serpent-toothed eldest, Veda (Blyth), provides the grist that fuels a determined ambition to build a sweeping financial empire on fluffy pie crusts. The drama of this tale is that the same mother-daughter bond…whose dynamics are entrenched in emotional and psychological dysfunction (with a scoop of the Electra complex on top)… figures just as significantly in bringing about Mildred’s personal and professional ruin.

Butterfly McQueen as Lottie

Ms. McQueen made her uncredited film debut in 1939 appearing alongside Joan Crawford in George Cukor's The Women. By 1945 she'd appeared in such high-profile films as Gone with the Wind, Cabin in the Sky, and Since You Went Away. Yet despite the size and memorability of her role in Mildred Pierce,  her name doesn't appear in the credits. 

For all the talk of this being the film to reverse Crawford’s fortunes, helping to erase the stigma of boxoffice poison that dogged her following her so-called amicable ouster from MGM; Mildred Pierce, oddly, represents less a departure from type than some of her other roles. Indeed, in many ways, Mildred Pierce serves up an à la carte menu of everything that first comes to mind when I think about Joan Crawford’s screen persona.  

If I’m guilty of harboring a mental image of The Crawford Mystique as: the inevitable ankle strap shoes, always brandishing a gun, invariably slapping somebody, suffering nobly in shoulder-padded mink, photographed through impossible shadow formations highlighting her eyes, and playing characters disposed of a steely self-determinism…then, Mildred Pierce does not disappoint. It's all here. 

Me and My Shadows
Few stars got as much use out of the "floating shadow" as Joan Crawford

As movie characters go, the been-around-the-block maturity of “common frump” Mildred Pierce-Beragon is ideally-suited to both the gifts and limitations of then-38-year-old Crawford. Playing what is essentially just a more lived-in variation of her usual stock-in-trade: “…the shop girl who fought her way to the top, made a great success” (God help me, I’m quoting Mommie Dearest). An image established as early as 1930's Our Blushing Brides--one of Crawford's earliest post-silent era features--Mildred Pierce is a challenging role that nevertheless remains comfortably within Crawford’s tried-and-true wheelhouse. And to give credit where credit is due, Crawford, clearly recognizing the sharp script, showcase role, and atypically noirish milieu of Mildred Pierce for the rare opportunity it is, gives her performance everything she’s got.

Mildred Pierce didn't introduce the classic Joan Crawford persona, but it certainly solidified it. When Crawford good-naturedly spoofs her image and herself in the Warner Bros musical comedy It's a Great Feeling (1949), the dialogue and gestures she uses (capped with "I do that in all my pictures!") are from Mildred Pierce. 

It’s safe to say that virtually the entire Joan Crawford arsenal is trotted out in Mildred Pierce. But somehow, in this instance, thanks to the overall classy production values, tight script, and unusually strong supporting cast (and maybe because Crawford worked extra hard to impress a director who made no secret of Barbara Stanwyck being his first choice), many of those familiar Crawford-ism notes are struck with a considerably lighter touch.

I think Joan Crawford is a wonderful...if not exactly accessible...actress. No matter how intensely a scene is played, Crawford always comes across to me as being at a slight remove from the real emotions involved. Never allowing herself to be exposed in the ways Stanwyck, Davis, and even Jennifer Jones can. When it comes to character engagement, Crawford doesn't let you in so much as invite you to have a seat and watch her suffer photogenically from a distance. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

The end-product of at least 8 screenplay drafts by nearly as many writers, Mildred Pierce is a film-noir - crossed with a domestic drama - crossed with a postwar woman’s film. The postwar designation denoting the newly-determined genre trend in having the female-driven narratives end on a note of “normalcy” restored…i.e., a return to traditional gender roles. Thus, in the screen ending that’s a tad kinder to Mildred than Cain’s novel (which ends flatly with Mildred standing by helplessly as she’s made a fool of, two times over), Mildred is financially ruined and loses her business empire, but walks off into the L.A. sunrise, arms linked with her recently redeemed, now-steadily employed, likely ex-ex-husband.

Bruce Bennett as Albert "Bert" Pierce

The seamless manner in which Mildred Pierce blends these different genres (doing credit to each and with a considerable amount of humor nowhere to be found in Cain’s novel) is precisely why it endures as one of those movies that, despite owning the DVD, I can’t help watching…no matter how far along into the story…whenever it pops up on TV. It’s old-fashioned Hollywood filmmaking at its captivating best.

Released October 12, 1945
Early marketing misleadingly depicted Mildred as a noir femme fatale.
The whole "Don't Tell Anyone What She Did!" promotional tease extended
 to exhibitors being encouraged not to seat anyone during the film's last 7 minutes

It's said that Paramount's success with Cain's Double Indemnity (1944) is what inspired Warners to update (from the '30s to 'mid-'40s) and insert a murder into Cain's Mildred Pierce, which is essentially a character study and Depression-era commentary on class struggle. Cain was less than happy about his book being turned into a film noir, but I think the changes give Mildred Pierce a focus and economy lacking in the book. I thoroughly enjoyed and was very impressed by the faithful-to-the-letter 2011 Kate Winslet Mildred Pierce miniseries. But the narrative fidelity and Winslet's more human-scaled performance amplified what the Crawford film moves too quickly for me to have noticed: Mildred's blind-spot where the unremittingly awful Veda is concerned paints her more of a dope than devoted.  

"That would have been dreadfully recherché, n’est-ce pas?"
Mildred and Monte share a look in response to Veda being Veda

The character of Mildred Pierce isn’t granted much in the way of self-awareness, but it's a nice touch (one preventing her from appearing to be stupid) for the script to allow for a couple of scenes that show Mildred to both aware and condescendingly tolerant of Veda's airs and pretensions. 

The idea of Mildred as a resourceful but not very insightful woman (the novel cites her flaw as a tendency towards literal-mindedness) might have occurred to me before had 1945's Mildred Pierce been cast with any other actress. In anyone else's hands, the scene where Mildred sells Monte a third of her hard-earned business to get him to marry her just so she can re-welcome Veda-the-Viper back into the fold, would have audiences wanting to haul off and slap Mildred themselves.

But in the hands of Joan Crawford—self-mastery personified—those actions seem more determinedly willful than pathetic. An act of noble self-sacrifice of the sort that has been Crawford’s stock-in-trade for years.

And therein lies the key to one of the major reasons why Mildred Pierce is such an enjoyable film for me: It’s a movie that “gets” that the only way to soften Crawford’s image, making her brittle countenance even remotely sympathetic, is to have nearly every character in the film heap abuse on her head. From the first frames of the film to the last, Mildred places the needs of others above her own (and the one time she goes off to have some fun for herself, fate rewards her with the almost Biblically retributional sacrifice of a child) and is rarely thanked or praised for it. Even after defying the odds and achieving the near-impossible feat of becoming a wealthy businesswoman, building a mini-empire from the ground up (and developing a drinking problem for her trouble), any faint praise offered by others is usually followed by a crack about her smelling of chicken grease.

Joan Crawford at her happiest. Cleaning something.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I think I devote so much space here reiterating how much I’m entertained by Mildred Pierce because, for all its glossy appeal and the perversity of its plot (Veda is a pretty active girl considering she only celebrates her 18th birthday at the END of the movie), it's a movie that's never really engaged me on any kind of emotional level. Which is perhaps not anything I’d otherwise be looking for in a genre film (film noir in particular tends to traffic in the cynical and jaded) except that when I read the novel I was surprised by how moving and sad I found Mildred Pierce to be. Two things I've never felt in all the times I've watched the movie. 

Jo Ann Marlowe as Kay Pierce
One of the more eye-opening disclosures in the novel is Mildred's guilty self-admission 
that if one of her children had to die, she's grateful it wasn't Veda. 

As an example of Hollywood studio system “product” from the days when the main objective of movies was to provide escapism and sell popcorn, Mildred Pierce is every bit as efficient as its titular character. It’s classically structured: character/goals/conflict/ resolution; market-friendly: it’s got drama, romance, glamour, & comedy; and streamlined to a noirish-T: gunplay, double-dealing, and the question of “Who shot Monte?” keep audiences in their seats. If the slick restructuring of Cain's character-study novel into a crime film perhaps excised some of its relatable humanity, at least the Oscar-nominated screenplay by Ranald MacDougall retains enough of the book's subtextual themes (gender disparity, class struggle, sexual competition, single motherhood, etc.) to make repeat visits to Mildred Pierce worthwhile.

Emancipated Woman

A somewhat underdeveloped theme, shunted aside by the dictates of the noir narrative, relates to all that lies within Mildred that never would have had the opportunity to develop had Bert not left her. The woman who introduced herself with the words "I felt as though I was born in a kitchen and lived there all my life," positively thrives when not exclusively assuming the roles of wife, mother, and homemaker; domestic roles '40s America held up as the pinnacles of feminine achievement. Mildred reveals herself to be quite the businesswoman: smart, ambitious, hard-working, and resourceful, she's infinitely more capable and successful than any of the men in her life. And there's even the suggestion (coded by the degree of guilt she must shoulder for not being there for her ailing daughter) that in Monte, Mildred's sexual side is awakened as well.

Eve Arden and Jack Carson lighten and enliven Mildred Pierce

PERFORMANCES

The talent and chemistry of the cast of Mildred Pierce is yet another factor contributing to its irresistible watchability. Everyone but 16-year-old Ann Blyth is cast to type (she, heretofore only appearing in light comedies) and each is at the top of their game. Crawford is held in restraint (for Crawford), Eve Arden is on-the-money with her trademark mordant wisecracks, and Blyth’s strong performance (better every time I see it) is deserving of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination it garnered.

But for me, Mildred Pierce's Most Valuable Player--after Joan--is Jack Carson. Has there ever been a movie that isn’t made better by his casting? The earthy naturalness of his fast-talking Wally Fay not only takes the starch out of the humorless Mildred, but lends each of his scenes a bull-in-a-china-shop air of unpredictability. He shifts effortlessly from comic figure to force-to-be-reckoned-with, and I don’t think the film would be nearly as lively without him.

Veda's brief and ignominious stint as an entertainer is a personal high point of Mildred Pierce. Especially for my partner, who unfailingly breaks into peals of laughter at Veda's a-moving-target's-hard-to-hit choreography and scarf-flailing, bow-out exit. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

From writing this blog I've learned that many families and couples have favorite movies that become in-house quotable staples over time. A phenomenon wherein repeated lines of dialogue or references to certain scenes have morphed into shared running gags.

In the 27 years my partner and I have been together, there are still only a handful of movies that have risen to those hallowed ranks. Andy Warhol's BAD is one of them ("O'Reilly O'Crapface."), All About Eve is another (Birdie - describing the wardrobe mistress: "She's got two things to do: carry clothes and press 'em wrong. And don't let anybody try to muscle in."). But Mildred Pierce is one of our most frequent go-to's for quotes and phrases repeated out of context that have become inside jokes. Quotes attributed to Veda proving to be a tad overrepresented. 

Bert Pierce: "She plays piano like I shoot pool."

Mildred Pierce: "I took tips and was glad to get them."

Ida Corwin: "Personally, Veda's convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young."

Mildred Pierce: "I know you romantic guys. One crack about the beautiful moon and you're off to the races."

Mildred Pierce may not be as dark or thought-provoking as many of the films that captured my adolescent imagination in the late-'60s, and '70s. 

But when I'm in the mood for a good "comfort food movie," Mildred Piece delivers.

BONUS MATERIAL

Evan Rachel Wood as Veda and Kate Winslet as Mildred

In 2011, HBO premiered a five-part, five Emmy Award-winning miniseries

adaptation of Mildred Pierce that's so faithful to James M. Cain's novel

 and so different from the 1945 film, there's no need to draw comparisons.

Bette Davis and Joan Crawford are forever linked in the pop-cultural consciousness, and moments like this don't help. A movie theater across the street from Mildred's Glendale eatery is showing the Bette Davis film Mrs. Skeffington (1944). Prior to this scene, when Mildred is seduced by Monte at his beach house, the music theme playing in the background is "It Can't Be Wrong" the Max Steiner/Kim Gannon melody composed for Bette Davis' Now Voyager (1942)

The Davis/Crawford connection continues with that slinky striped number Eve Arden's Ida wears to Veda's 18th birthday party, showing up 19 years later in the Bette-Davis-as-twins-again (A Stolen Life -1946) melodrama Dead Ringer (1964)...that's Bette in the phone booth. It's worn...sans shoulder pads...by jazz legend, pianist-vocalist, Perry Blackwell, who, as of this writing, recently celebrated her 97th birthday. Her granddaughter informed me that Ms. Blackwell was gifted the top by Eve Arden herself and that she recalls seeing it among her grandmother's performance costumes until she was about ten years old. Thanks to reader Richard Lloreda for bringing this costume rerun to my attention.

Mildred Pierce          -         Mildred Fierce

I saw "Mildred Fierce" - the hilariously spot-in Carol Burnett spoof of Mildred Pierce (The Carol Burnett Show - broadcast November 19, 1976) - many years before I saw the genuine article.  When I did finally get around to watching Crawford's film, the Burnett skit had grown so familiar, and its similarities so acute, it took a while for it to sink in that the movie was NOT, in fact, a parody of the Carol Burnett skit!

Clip from "Mildred Pierce" 1945

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2022

BEYOND THE FOREST 1949

Rosa Moline is discontented and doesn’t care who knows it. Rosa (Bette Davis) is the bored and restless wife of dull-but-decent general practitioner Lewis Moline (Joseph Cotton), the only doctor in the small town of Loyalton, Wisconsin. Loyalton is a lumbering town, literally and figuratively, whose local sawmill blasts heat and spews sawdust ceaselessly, fueling Rosa’s fevered certainty that she is suffocating and being buried alive.
But if the local sawmill is the arrhythmic heartbeat of Loyalton, the only thing that can get Rosa’s pulse racing is when the train that goes to and from Chicago pulls into the station twice daily. A train whose chugging steam engine beckons (per the film’s portentous narration): “Come, Rosa. Come away before it’s too late. Chicago…Chicago…Chicago….”

Bette Davis as Rosa Moline

Joseph Cotten as Lewis Moline 

David Brian as Neil Latimer

Ruth Roman as Carol Lawson

Minor Watson as Moose Lawson

Dona Drake as Jenny

Fans of the overripe cinema of director King Vidor (Duel in the Sun, The Fountainhead, Ruby Gentry) and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? will recognize Beyond the Forest as the film whose title George is stumped to recall when Martha mimics Bette Davis and utters the oft-parodied line “What a dump!” But for that bit of theatrical immortality bestowed upon this hotly contested post-war melodrama (plagued by censorship interference, it's a film Davis did only under protest, contributing to the end of her 18 years with Warner Bros), it’s unlikely many others could recall Beyond the Forest, either; a lesser entry in the Bette Davis canon that has nevertheless developed a devoted cult (and camp) following over the years.

"What a dump!"
Brandishing an emery board, that international symbol of the self-absorbed and aloof, Bette Davis utters what The American Film Institute voted #62 in its roster of 100 Most Memorable Movie Quotes

Joining the ranks of the many discontented housewives of great literature: Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Carol Burnett’s Eunice Higgins…Rosa Moline is a woman who longs for more out of life. Feeling constrained and stifled by marriage and the conventional morality of small-town life, Rosa not only wants more, but also feels she deserves more. Though a Loyalton native, Rosa has always clung to the idea that she is somehow “different” from the other women in town; a grade above the ordinary and therefore meant for better things.
Which is why, rather than simply escaping Loyalton on her own and paving an independent path for herself in the big city—“What as…a telephone girl, a stenographer, waitress?”— Rosa sticks around, thumbing her nose at the low-rent aspirations of the townswomen ("You certainly go in for mass production, don't you?" she remarks to a local mom and her brood) and settling for a life of not-so-quiet desperation as a doctor’s wife in the town’s finest house (said aforementioned dump). 

A life of pitiful attempts at cultivating second-hand class (“I wanted venetian blinds...all the houses in magazines have venetian blinds!”), and of having her middle-class pretensions consistently deflated by the knowing insolence of her Native-American housekeeper. 

Jenny - "Do you want that Chicken a la King business served on toast?"
Rosa - "Well, I showed you the picture in the magazine, didn't I?"
Jenny - "How can I see if there's toast under all that goo?"

But Rosa is a woman with a dream. Well, to be honest, more like a scheme. Not one to content herself with merely the best that Loyalton has to offer, Rosa sets her sights on wealthy Chicago businessman Neil Latimer, the owner of a nearby hunting lodge overseen by family friend Moose Lawson. After carrying on a torrid, year-long love affair with the bachelor industrialist practically under her husband’s saintly, overworked nose, Rosa plans on getting Neil to marry her and whisk her away with him to Chicago. Sure, she's already married, but what’s a minor detail like that when a woman has a destiny to fulfill? And make no mistake, Rosa is a woman who wants the good life, has convinced herself she deserves the good life, and is so determined to acquire the good life for herself; she’s willing to do just about anything and everything to make sure that happens.

When Velma Takes The Stand

Like many a film noir, Beyond the Forest is a tale told in flashback. When we first meet Rosa, she is on trial for shooting a man; the who and why melodramatically divulged once the film proper kicks in and takes us back five months prior. Here, Rosa is revealed to be a crack shot with a lousy disposition (after using her rifle to take out a poor, defenseless porcupine minding its own business, her only explanation is, "I don't like porkies...they irritate me."); the film conveniently supplying three likely targets for her trigger-happy temperament.
There's her goody-goody husband who is too nice to press his clients into paying their bills (those ankle-strap sandals aren't going to pay for themselves, y'know). Next, there's Moose, the town souse, and Lewis' fishing buddy. Moose's only offense is that he, like the character of Leroy in The Bad Seed, is one of the few people in town who sees right through Rosa. Their mutual antipathy (Moose- "You're something for the birds, Rosa. Something for the birds." Rosa - "You're something to make the corn grow tall!") isn't at all helped by the fact that Moose has a well-turned-out daughter (Ruth Roman) who's everything Rosa would like to be.
Lastly, there's rolling-in-dough Neil K. Latimer. Although he and Rosa share a passionate physical attraction and Rosa sees him more as a ticket out of purgatory than the love of her life; the monkey wrench in the works (and probable bullet to the body) is Rosa's nagging fear that he just doesn't think she's good enough for him.

I can't vouch for how 1949 audiences reacted to Beyond the Forest (although we can all agree it wasn't particularly favorable), but I remember getting a huge kick out of watching Davis—Vampira wigged, low-necklined, lumpy-figured, clomping about in Joan Crawford pumps and spitting out her campy dialogue in her best self-parodying, Bette Davis drag queen impersonation—while trying to guess which one of these male clay pigeons would irritate her to the point of having to mete out a little "porcupine justice."

"If I don't get out of here, I'll die. If I don't get out of here, I hope I die!"

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
There’s no getting past the fact that Beyond the Forest’s single main attraction for me is the staggeringly miscast Bette Davis. Looking awkward, uncomfortable, and unable to get even a remotely credible foothold on the type of bad-to-the-bone vexed vixen Gloria Grahame could play in her sleep; Davis (whom director King Vidor seemed intent on molding into a lousy copy of Jennifer Jones' Dueling in the Sun hotpot in a peasant blouse) relies instead on a mannered (read: ludicrous) vamp posturing and broad-as-a-barn emoting.
And while I can fully understand why she campaigned enthusiastically to be replaced by Virginia Mayo in the part—"She's good at these sorts of roles!" (which sounds like a generous compliment until you stop to think about it)—I'm glad jack Warner held her to it, because Davis, in all her sublime awfulness, is the best thing in the film.

Rosa goes camping (with a capital CAMP)
Moose- "The trouble with you, Lew, is you don't get up here often enough."
Rosa - "He doesn't do ANYTHING enough!"

Beyond the Forest treads such familiar noir ground that even upon first viewing, I felt as though I’d seen it before. Indeed, my having already encountered Joseph Cotten as Marilyn Monroe's nice-guy cuckold in Niagara (1953) and David Brian as Joan Crawford's hankered-after symbol of well-heeled respectability in Flamingo Road (1949) contributed to the déjà vu. Beyond the Forest's allusions to adultery, abortion, miscarriage, sexual dissatisfaction, and (gasp!) the lead character’s blatant disdain for all the things postwar women were supposed to want, must have been pretty heady stuff back in the ‘40s, but watching it now only makes me aware of how—outside of a few stylistic touches in the cinematography and use of music—it’s all been done before and to better effect. The sole exception, thus supplying the film’s only spark of energy and interest, is Bette Davis’ completely off-the-rails performance.

Rosa, literally trapped in a domestic cage

PERFORMANCES
As a fan of Patty Duke's Neely O'Hara and Faye Dunaway's Joan Crawford, I obviously have no real problem with unrestrained, bordering-absurd performances. They shine like beacons of inadvertent genius when they enhance (rather than derail) a production. But in accessing the "Carol Burnett Show parody" level of Bette Davis's unsubtle take on the character of Rosa Moline in Beyond the Forest (which bears more than a passing resemblance to a supposed-to-be-awful screen test performance Davis gives in 1953's The Star), it doesn't seem fair to lay all the blame at the actress's ankle-strapped feet.
For example, I'm not sure who came up with Davis' almost "goth girl" appearance here, but you'd have to look to Joan Crawford's garish getup in Strait-Jacket (1964) to find a campier image of toxic sexuality. Another problem is Davis' age. Although only 40, Davis looks at least five years older, the resultant effect being that Rosa's desire to hightail it out of Loyalton comes off as half-hearted at best, at worst, an epic case of foot-dragging.

"Rosa...moving easily, freely, every man's admiring eye upon her."

She's not given much help by a screenplay (adapted from Stuart Engstrand's 1945 novel by Lenore J. Coffee, Warners' only woman screenwriter) which, perhaps in an effort to undercut audience sympathy and identification (who wouldn't want to get out of that hick town?), makes Rosa into an almost misogynist caricature of self-interest and greed. Though one can imagine any number of good reasons why a vital woman would feel stifled by small-town life, the film sees fit to reduce all Rosa's desires to the material and superficial. The only time the movie comes close to granting her recognizably human emotions is when (tellingly) her spirit is broken by a particularly humiliating visit to Chicago. Otherwise, she's depicted as little more than an overage Sadie Thompson spewing forth an unbroken stream of harsh invectives at anyone unfortunate enough to cross her path.

Pregnant, hair restrained, body covered, and (God forbid) wearing flat shoes; Rosa, now convinced of her ordinariness, is at last brought low. Is this return to traditional gender roles what people wanted from women in the postwar years?

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
I don't find Beyond the Forest particularly persuasive as drama, but it can't be beaten as arch-melodrama. Vidor ratchets up the excess to the point that everything about it feels satirical, even when it's in deadly earnest. However, the natural performances of the rest of the cast, Joseph Cotten especially, grounds the film just enough to provide Davis' over-the-moon emoting with a solid springboard from which to soar.
Case in point: my favorite sequence - Rosa's trip to Chicago. Set up as the film's dramatic centerpiece and given ample buildup by having the 1922 Fred Fisher song "Chicago (That Toddlin' Town)" chime in on the soundtrack every time Rosa gets that faraway look in her eyes; the sequence instead plays out like an early draft of Neil Simon's The Out of Towners.

All Dressed Up With Nowhere To Go
Fantasies vs. Murphy's Law as Rosa's dream of Chicago turns into a nightmare

Rosa's escape to Chicago city is a comedy of errors that really couldn’t go much worse. List of mishaps:
She can’t get through to her lover on the phone.
She's kept waiting in his offices for hours.
He finally calls, but she's so lost in thought ("I'm Rosa Moline!") she misses it.
They meet up, and he greets her with wonderful news: he's getting married!
She gets kicked out of a bar for soliciting.
She gets propositioned by a slob in the middle of a monsoon.
In succession: she's heckled by a madwoman, startled by a drunk, and terrorized by a newsboy.
Has to chase down a cab in her ankle straps.

No one ever had as miserable a time looking for a good time as Rosa Moline

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I grew up in a house with four sisters, so I can attest to the fact that the femme fatales of '40s film noir and the sadder-but-wiser fallen women of the '40s "woman's picture" were every bit the vicarious thrill for them as I found them to be in those movies where geeky guys like Tom Ewell and Tommy Noonan wound up with incredible women like Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe.
These films were the kind of wish-fulfillment fantasies that gave wings to our adolescent ids (in MY fantasies, Monroe & Mansfield were replaced by Frank Converse or Steve McQueen). But unlike the myriad male-centric films devised to reassure unexceptional men that the world actually favored them; the women in the film noirs and women's pictures always had to pay a hefty price for their freedom. 

A woman's desire to exert power over her fate was rarely, if ever, depicted as a healthy drive. On the contrary, it was always associated with pathology or moral lack. The fun we had watching the "bad girls" (who always dressed better, had the best lines, and moved the plot forward) was always undercut by the knowledge that no matter how much havoc was wreaked, before fade-out, order...in the form of gender-role normalcy, would be restored to the universe.

Beyond the Forest is too overwrought for me to take seriously, but if well-crafted camp can be considered a legitimate genre (and since we all know how difficult it is to pull off, it should be), it's one of the best of its kind.
A film that can be enjoyed on many levels (I've read of many Bette Davis fans who actually think it's one of her better performances); what I love about it is the essentially camp drag queen sensibility that makes Davis' Rosa Moline such a hoot of a to watch, is matched scene-for-scene with an unconsciously gay sensibility that makes Rosa's plight relatable and sympathetic.

Rosa, channeling her inner fabulousness

Gay men of my generation traditionally grew up in towns and environments where they felt "different" and out of step with others. Unable to relate to peers who only wanted to get married and start a family, a common reaction and survival tactic was to embrace that which made them not fit in. To take pride and revel in one's uniqueness, and to learn (like Rosa) to express oneself by looking, dressing, and behaving in ways more attuned to how one saw oneself—not with how society said you ought to be.

My partner grew up in a small town and tells me that despite having a very happy childhood devoid of bullying or harassment, he never for one moment entertained the thought of remaining there once he came of age. The town's quiet sameness fostered an appetite for big city life, the unspoken dominance of conformity assuring him that he could never truly be himself there. The parallels to be found in the early lives of many gay men (I hope it's only the early lives) and Rosa Moline's bristling at the life she's supposed to want as a woman in a small town, is, I believe, an intractable part of where Beyond the Forest's gay cult appreciation is rooted.

It's a fact of life that we invariably have to leave one place and relocate to another to find ourselves and discover what we really want. Happily, for most of us, the road to self-actualization doesn't involve firearms.


BONUS MATERIAL

As many have noted, the readers who leave comments on this blog are so knowledgeable about films they're more like contributors. For example, Blogger Rick Gould brought my attention to the baggy, unflattering suit Rosa wears to Chicago. Since its difficult to imagine seasoned costume designer Edith Head just "happened" to have dropped the ball with Davis's problematic figure, my mind went to the 1988 book King Vidor: American in which authors Raymond Durgnat & Scott Simon suggest that Rosa's ill-fitting handmade suit was perhaps intended to convey Rosa's pathetic attempt to copy the sleeker, more sophisticated suit worn by Moose's daughter Carol.
In the same book, the authors reference another point Rick brings up, the similarity in appearance of Rosa and her maid Jenny. Their take is that characters of Jenny & Carol both possess more freedom than Rosa sees herself as having and that it's telling how she adopts the clothing style of these women in two unsuccessful attempts to escape from her life.


Hard as it is to believe, Bette Davis doesn't give Beyond The Forest's worst performance. That dubious honor goes to actress Dona Drake. Admittedly it can't be easy doing anything under that dreadful fright wig and three pounds of Max Factor's Dark Egyptian #5, but as Rosa's just-not-into-it maid, Drake gives (to quote The New York Times): "A fine high-school performance."

Drake's offscreen acting must have been considerably more convincing, for the lovely mixed-race actress/singer/dancer/bandleader spent her entire career passing as Mexican-American. Going by several different names, among them Rita Rio and Rita Novello, Drake was wed to famed costume designer William Travilla (Valley of the Dolls, Marilyn Monroe) in what is rumored to be an arranged marriage (the studio guarding her ethnicity, his being gay/bisexual). She appeared in many films, usually as an "exotic."
You can read more about Drake's life and history:
Travilla's Legacy
Little Known Black History

The Lady Dances
Dona Drake as Rita Rio in the 1936 Eddie Cantor feature Strike Me Pink
She's rather adorable in this musical number which fans of Yellow Submarine (1968) will recognize as having segments rotoscoped for "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds."
Watch it on YouTube HERE

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2016