SunriseSong
The subject matter reflects the genre: a self-centered woman destroys all who dare to love her, and the camera work in the the final chase scene is indicative of the style, with Bette's eyes in the rear view mirror as her character runs from the consequences of her own selfish choices. What possessed the studio to cast Bette Davis (who is 8 years older than Olivia de Havilland) to play the younger sister? Was the studio bound by the novel the screenplay was based upon? Davis steals her brother-in-law (Morgan) leaving her fiancé (Brent) broken-hearted. Once married, Peter ruins his career through drink and he takes his own life. Olivia de Havilland plays Roy, the long suffering sister, with a cool detachment and Billie Burke has a small role as the neurotic mother who spends what few scenes she has chewing the scenery, but she can't hold a candle to the wild-eyed Davis as the willful daughter, Stanley. The frenetic pace of the film careens to its dramatic conclusion with Davis' character unrepentant to the end. One can only imagine the fictional family is as relieved to be rid of Stanley as the actors who played them are to be done with this film. It's a stinker.
Edgar Allan Pooh
. . . but Stanley and Roy are just lover-swapping sisters, IN THIS OUR LIFE shows us. Warner Bros. also uses LIFE to document a fact long suspected by most Americans: the USA's Corrupt Job-Killing Capitalist Oligarchs such as Charles Coburn's "William Fitzroy" here are Animalistic Amoral Sex Pervert Swindlers likely to tell X-Rated radio shock jockeys that they see their own daughters (or nieces) mostly as "fine pieces of (donkey)" that they HAVE (in William's case) or MAY have (in respect to alleged U.S. President #45) taken to bed. Speaking of Rump, it's hard NOT to see Warner Bros.' always prophetic prognosticators foretelling anyone other than Putin's Puppet with Coburn's Funny Uncle Willie character, or someone besides Kellyanne Conwoman filling the spike heels of Bette Davis' Stanley Tools-of-the-Trade. The incipient Race War being instigated Today by the Deplorable Rumpster Minority echoes Stanley's efforts to wipe away her serial-killing sins on Black Souls as LIFE moves on. With this cautionary tale, Warner warns we Americans of the (then) Far Future to fasten our seat belts--it's going to be a bumpy ride!
tieman64
"Your creeds are dead, your rites are dead, your social order too! Where tarries he, the Power who said: See, I make all things new?" – Matthew Arnold Ellen Glasgow's novel, "In This Our Life", opens with the above quotation from Matthew Arnold's 1867 poem, "Obermann Once More". Read that quote again, because it sums up John Huston's filmography perfectly and perhaps highlights best what attracted the director to Glasgow's novel.Surprisingly, however, Huston's film completely revokes the tone of Glasgow's novel in favour for super melodrama. This is Douglas Sirk or Max Ophuls territory, Huston laying on the melodrama fast and thick.Beneath the schmaltz (and the interferences of the Hollywood Production Code, which pandered to the anticipated preferences of white audiences to such an extent that Glasgow's intelligent novel is supremely butchered) one can nevertheless tease out the usual Huston themes. Here we have the birth of the "new southern social order", Huston helming one of the very first films in which a black character is presented in a relatively complex light (or rather, in a role other than comic buffoon, fat mama, salivating animal or domesticated servant).The black character in this case is Parry Clay, an African American youth who is blamed for a hit-and-run accident on a child. The real murderer, however, is a character called Stanley Timberlake, a wealthy white woman who employs Parry as a law clerk. Of course, eventually the truth comes out, Parry is released and Stanley attempts to flee. She runs for it, is pursued by the police, and dies in an auto wreck. Poetic justice.Hilariously, the production code required Stanley's death not because of her false statements, lies, or hit-and-run accident, but because she wrecks her sister's marriage. In the novel, Stanley remains alive, proof of how hard it will be for the New South to overcome the white prerogatives of the Old South. Huston fought hard for this ending, but of course didn't have enough clout (this was his second film as director) to win such a battle.The film's other big flaw is this: Glasgow's novel wasn't a melodrama, but a stream-of-consciousness war between a black family and a white family (the Clays and the Timberlakes). For a novel to give equal consideration to a white and black family was unheard of at the time (people preferred Margaret Mitchell's racist, yet Pulitzer winning, "Gone with the Wind"). Huston's film, however, doesn't heed Glasgow's narrative structure and instead relegates the Clays to the peripheries of the action. "In This Our Life" therefore became just another in a long line of flicks which diminish the African-American experience by making it a footnote in the white experience. Huston tries to make up for this by having Bette Davis, who stars as Stanley Timberlake, play Stanley as though she is "telling the truth". The idea here is to manipulate white audiences to "look on" as the race-rationalising white community would. This helps the film somewhat, but it's not enough.7/10 – Bette Davis is great at performing these larger than life devil women. She's always entertaining. The rest of the film, though well meaning, is bogged down by hokey on screen melodrama and off screen concessions. It would take directors like Fuller and Lumet to further chisel away at Hollywood's "racism" (too strong a word, I know), before exploitation cinema, a product of various civil rights movements, kicked the last bastions of the old order down. Of course a new order was quickly built right back up. But that's another story.Worth one viewing.
