Old Acquaintance (1943)

Old Acquaintance
Directed by Vincent Sherman
Written by John Van Druten and Lenore J. Coffee from a play by Van Druten
1943/USA
Warner Bros
First viewing/Netflix rental

[box] Kit Marlowe: It’s late, and I’m very, very tired of youth and love and self-sacrifice.[/box]

Compared to Miriam Hopkins, Bette Davis looks like a method actress.

Kit Marlow (Davis) and Millie Drake (Hopkins) have been best friends since childhood, though one would be hard pressed to explain why.  As the movie opens, Kit, a young “literary” novelist, visits the newly married Millie.  We find out that Millie is also expecting a baby.  Millie swiftly shows off her personality by throwing tantrums whenever she doesn’t get her way.  Kit, who knows her well, can make the tears go away merely by saying she envies her something.  Millie’s hen-pecked husband Preston (John Loder) takes a liking to Kit right away.  Millie gives Kit her first manuscript, a romance novel, to read.  As the story proceeds, we will see that Kit will get the critical acclaim but Millie will be the one who gets rich from her writing.

The years pass.  Kit becomes a friend and companion to Millie’s daughter Deirdre, whose mother has no time for her.  Preston falls in love with Kit and she with him but she is too loyal a friend to even listen to Preston’s declarations.  Preston gets enough of catering to Millie’s self-centered lifestyle and leaves her.

More years pass.  Kit is having a romance with a younger man (Gig Young).  Diedre is interested in him too.  I think most readers will see where this is going.

It is worth seeing this movie just to witness the much-anthologized clip of Davis shaking Hopkins in its proper context.   It is really satisfying to see this after spending most of the story wanting to shake, or slap, Hopkins oneself.  Millie is supposed to be a self-dramatizing, skittish, bigger-than-life character and Hopkins milks every last bit of juice out of it, bordering on camp.  Davis on the other hand is in her self-sacrificing career-girl mode, and quite natural for her.  It is fascinating to see her change as her character ages throughout the movie.

The Warner Home Video DVD I watched had an excellent commentary by director Vincent Sherman and a Davis biographer.  It was fun to listen to Sherman’s war stories about shooting this film and his saga with the lovelorn Davis, which he takes almost, but not quite, to what happened after he took her home from dinner.

The revenge of Bette Davis