directing details
by
Douglas Messerli
Casey
Robinson (screenplay, based on the stage play by by George Emerson Brewer, Jr.
and Bertram Bloch), Edmund Goulding (director) Dark Victory / 1939
Yet, there is something so well-crafted
about Goulding’s careful direction and his attentiveness to his stars that, as The New York Times critic Fred Nugent
wrote of Goulding’s 1939 film, Dark
Victory:
A completely cynical appraisal
would dismiss it all
as emotional flim-flam, a heartless
play upon
tender hearts by a playwright and
company well versed
in the dramatic uses of going blind
and improvising on
Camille. But it is impossible to be
that cynical about it.
The mood is too poignant, the
performances too honest,
the craftsmanship too expert.
Of course, some of that craftsmanship is
due to the fine acting of Bette Davis as the suffering socialite Judith
Traherne, the aw-shucks humility of her gentle stable-hand, Michael O’Leary (Humphrey
Bogart), the gallant concerns of her doctor and soon-to-be lover, Dr. Frederick
Steele (George Brent), and her deep-friend secretary Ann King (Geraldine
Fitzgerald), who was hired to do all the weeping for her employer’s incurable
brain disease.
And by the time of Davis’ award-nominated
performance, the director had already helped establish the careers of Joan
Crawford and Greta Garbo (who both performed in his Grand Hotel), and had worked well also with Nancy Carroll, Fay
Bainter, and Gloria Swanson. But, of course, that label—which seriously
delimited Goulding’s career—ignored all of his wonderful male-centered
characters, including in this work, Bogart, and in other films, Errol Flynn,
Basil Rathbone, and, later, Tyrone Powers and Robert Young.
Much like her role in William Wyler’s Jezebel, Davis gets the opportunity in
this work to play what she does best: a strong-headed, fool-hardy sensualist,
who redeems herself in the end with noble deeds and an acceptance of her fate. But
Goulding—far more interested in the details of character then in
cinematography—often rewrote his scripts, in this case adding the sympathetic character
played by Fitzgerald.
Many of the quips of the script,
moreover, help catapult the Davis figure from a frightened horse-loving spoiled
child into the kind of figure who she would later play in films like the
wittily evil All About Eve:
Judith: Confidentially, darling, this is more than a hangover.
And
later as she drinks down glass after glass of her favorite aperitif:
Judith:
I think I'll have a large order of prognosis negative!
These
minor character details and scripted witticisms all help to make Goulding’s Dark Victory a far deeper film than
simply a story about a woman bravely standing up to her own immanent death. Davis
plays Judith with a large palette of emotions: imperial dismissals,
sardonicism, true black humor, and real pathos that demonstrate her acting
chops and helps elevate this film from a simple melodrama to a truly moving
study in the intellectual development of a young, vivacious woman, who is saved
by the very thing that kills her.
Despite the wonderful biography by
Matthew Kennedy, Edmund Goulding’s Dark
Victory, it is time for more revaluations of this fascinating film
director, who in retrospect made this film a masterpiece.
Los Angeles, July
15, 2017
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