NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Cortechba Overrated

Libramedi Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

sly311 Actors get the roles that match the people they truly are within. The roles Bette Davis has played match the character she truly is--shallow and vain. In each and every character she embodies. Bette's smoking aged her way beyond her years and she looks it in this part, even before they 'aged' her. While the movie and story line are great, the more I watch Bette over the years, the less I like her.

maryettaggolden This is one of the best classical movies I've seen! Bette Davis is my favorite movie star! Love her! Claude Raines is also exceptionally great! It is so true to life about women aging a accepting it gracefully, especially women that were once very beautiful. I guess I saw myself in it somewhat, but not as vain as Bette Davis' character. Interesting how Johnny Mitchell fell instantly in love with her daughter & had just been professing his love to Bette. Later her daughter kinda told her off for the way she treated her all of her life, but in a nice, firm, tactful way! Still I loved it. It earned my 10 stars

secondtake Mr. Skeffington (1944)A full blooded romance, tragic and comic, with political and personal points made for the final two years of the war against the Nazis. Yes it has Bette Davis and Claude Rains (and a huge cast of first rate secondaries). Yes it has Ernest Haller behind the camera, and Franz Waxman in charge of music. Yes the screenplay was written by the incomparable Epstein brothers (most famous for "Casablanca"). And yes it has a director who is better known for his affairs with Joan Crawford and Rita Hayworth, Vincent Sherman.Sherman surely gets the credit for pulling off all these great scenes, keeping the flow over the decades, and making the ending worth the long path getting there. But he had the best support in the world, Warner Bros. being at its studio machinery peak. And it's high drama material of course, dealing with every big topic from family loyalty to greed to vanity to true friendship to redemption. And it covers all the big historical moments (some very briefly, or with comic indifference) like WWI, the Crash, the Depression, and the beginning of WWII. The final scenes are further examples of the movies subtly (or not so subtly) pressing the case for American involvement in the war.As wonderful as Rains is in his somewhat restrained role (it is commented on that he never smiles and has sad eyes, both true), this is a Bette Davis movie. She is not only in nearly every scenes, she's goes through an incredible range of moods. She is supposed to play an unparalleled beauty, and there was some question whether she was the right kind of woman for that role. She has command, charisma, and confidence enough, for sure, but she doesn't radiate the way a Garbo does. But then, Garbo couldn't act like Davis, not by half for this kind of role, and Davis makes the story something more complicated. One of the lasting themes is how beauty depends on love, or on being loved, and so she has beauty in excess because she is loved (or apparently loved) by so many.This is a melodrama of the best kind, like "The Little Foxes" or "Now Voyager." Yes, all Davis movies. She made these stories bigger than life because she, somehow, was bigger than life. But there are a million other things to watch happening, too, from lots of snappy (and witty) dialog to a slick and fluid photography. Note, if you have time, the two steps leading from the large entry parlor of the house where most of the movie is set down to the parlor. It's here, looking up and looking down, or moving up or down, that many of the major events of the movie have their roots. Including during the last few minutes.

classicsoncall No doubt about it, Fanny Trellis Skeffington is a despicable character. She's the kind of person who in real life would be the kind you love to hate, totally self centered and unabashedly out for herself. It's the kind of role an actress like Bette Davis can work wonders with, and in this one, she's remarkable. Perhaps as much as the acting, I was also struck by the competence of the makeup department in aging her character, along with those family members and suitors who endured the story arc throughout the decades. The striking thing however as I think about it now, is how the concept of 'old' has been redefined from the 1940's to the present. Fanny and her contemporaries considered themselves old at fifty (maybe even older at half a century). To my mind, the fifty year old Fanny looked like she could have been seventy, and even then, not looking nearly as good as someone like say, Raquel Welch who turns seventy this year.Being the insufferable snob that she was, Fanny does get her comeuppance in sufficient doses, though too late in life to have made her remorse meaningful. Dr. Byles is dead on when he orders Fanny to "Sit down, I haven't earned my fee yet". You know, that kind of honesty might be grounds for a lawsuit today for making the patient feel bad. But for sheer brutal honesty, there's namesake daughter Fanny (Marjorie Riordan) who cuttingly remarks "Have I a mother"?, excoriating Davis's character for her inability to be beautiful AND a mom.Claude Rains turns in another superb performance; he earned my admiration a long time ago for that great turn in "Casablanca" as Captain Renault. Funny, but he looked older and heavier here than in the Casablance gig, but then again, I go back to my earlier statement about how the actors wore their characters.Fans of Davis and Rains should be reasonably pleased by their work here, each manages a fair amount of screen time and displays their craft well. One of the things I found interesting was the way the picture employed the device, one might consider it a maguffin, of the character frequently mentioned but never seen, Miss Fanny's oft dismissed luncheon companion Janie Clarkson.