William Faulkner and Talladega Nights

If you sit through all the credits for Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, you come to a brief scene of Ricky Bobby’s mother reading to his sons. She’s reading the final paragraph of William Faulkner’s “The Bear,” the scene where Boon Hogganbeck, terrorizing the squirrels in the squirrel tree, turns frantically and threateningly to Isaac McCaslin and cries, “They’re mine. They’re all mine.” In Faulkner’s story the scene represents the acquisitiveness and greed that have destroyed the natural beauty of the original Southern wilderness. The woods where Ike and his companions have hunted deer and bear have been sold to a logging company and will soon disappear forever, replaced eventually by farmlands and then towns and cities. In the film, when she finishes reading to the little boys, they all discuss the meaning of the conclusion, the moral ambiguity that it expresses, so essential, the grandmother explains, to American literature of the early 20^th century. The boys agree that the story’s conclusion is about the transition of the Old South to the modern world.

I first learned of this scene on a Faulkner discussion list. Several members of the list wrote about it, though no one seemed to know what it meant, why it was there. I went to Talladega Nights planning to sit through the credits to find out if the scene were really there. It was.

First, of course, the scene is a joke. Many comic films end with outtakes of discarded alternate scenes or hilarious mistakes made by the actors. Certainly that is the case in Talladega Nights, which includes a number of outtakes shown just before the credits begin. The outtake involving the discussion of “The Bear” is shown by itself, after the credits have ended. I think it was placed there as a hilarious afterthought, so out of synch with the film, so improbable, and so pertinent. Where we look for randomness, we must also look for intent. I think this final outtake offers an additional level of context for a film that largely seems to be little more than a fairly well done sustained joke. Someone connected with the film, by accident or deliberate act, placed the scene at the end of the film as a commentary. Talladega Nights is about the modern Southern and American world that replaces the world of the untrammeled woods where Sam Fathers and Isaac McCaslin hunted their fabled bear.

This is not to say that the film operates in a serious dimension, or that it seeks to be anything more than what it is, a comedy about American stock car racing, a satire of the American dream of personal satisfaction sought through the fulfillment of one’s personal dreams: “I wanna go fast.”

Talladega Nights operates pretty much on the same level as the television series “My Name is Earl,” where the satire and humor is more unrelentingly perverse, biting, and subtle. There’s more slapstick in Talladega Nights, more lampoonish caricatures of people who idolize Dale Earnardt and who, when all is said and done, are good natured, down home, country people. Both the film and My Name is Earl are subject to occasional bouts of sentimentalism, especially the film, with its formulaic portrayal of the hero who rises and falls and then struggles to rise again, winning the love of the shrinking violet who was there for him all along, especially when his career hit its nadir. In fact, there are numerous formulaic elements in the film—the long absent father who returns at the crucial moment to help his son, the opportunistic wife who deserts when his career falters, the devilish, misbehaving young sons, the incredibly thick and mumbled French accent of Ricky Bobby’s gay adversary, the drunken wife of the man who sponsors Ricky’s racing-- the list goes on. The formulas really don’t matter that much because you expect them in this kind of film, and because they are successfully, often hilariously applied.

The most comical scenes for me in Talladega Nights are the ones where Ricky Bobby explains why he prefers to pray to the baby Jesus at the supper table. People have a right to pray to the Jesus they want to pray to, he explains. In several scenes Ricky’s young sons hurl one insolent insult after another at Ricky, at his friend Cal, at their grandfather, on and on. In another scene they escape from the Sunday school where their grandmother has taken them, and then they run amuck, yelling, “Anarchy, anarchy!” One of them exclaims, “Anarchy! I don’t even know what that means.”

Like many films of this type, Talladega Nights succumbs in the end to a sentimental resolution of plot and character. But the process of reaching that point is diverting entertainment.

If Faulkner’s story, alluded to in the final scene, is any clue to a larger meaning in this film, that meaning is commercialization and commodification. At one point someone in the film explains that stock car racing developed from bootleggers who learned to drive their cats fast so they could outrun the cops. (See Thunder Road, 1958, starring Robert Mitchum and based on a story he wrote). They enjoyed the speed and began racing one another, and the American sport of stock car racing was the result. But if we’re to think that at some point or at some level that racing cars is a hallowed American tradition, in this film it is wholly commercial and commodified. The best race car drivers have the emblems of all sorts of name brands emblazoned on their cars. The name brands are an emblem of their success and fame. Ricky Bobby will endorse any product he is paid to endorse (there are hilarious outtakes at the end of the film showing some of his commercials that did not make it in to the film).

Product placement in the film seems intentionally self-referential—it’s a self-parody. Ricky Bobby’s family goes to Applebee’s twice for dinner, and at a crucial moment at the end of the film, in the middle of a slow-motion crash sequence, described by one of the announcers as the longest crash he remembers ever seeing, an advertisement for Applebees interrupts, as if to say that the whole thing is product placement, all of modern America is product placement, crass, obvious, greedy, product placement.

Rosewood

In 1923 white residents of nearby towns invaded the mostly black town of Rosewood, Florida, lynching and killing many residents and burning their houses to the ground. The actual number of victims is estimated to have been as few as 6 and as many as 40. The survivors left the area and the events were largely forgotten, at least in official histories of Florida, until the early 1980s, when accounts of the event surfaced and were published.

The name of Rosewood is now a byword for one of the worst episodes in America’s racial history—though not the worst. The New York Draft riots, and any number of race riots in the 19^th and 20^th centuries exacted larger death tolls among African Americans and white Americans as well. What is significant about Rosewood is that its story was suppressed and forgotten for so long.

John Singleton’s 1997 film chronicles and dramatizes the events surrounding Rosewood. It is organized as a documentary, divided into sections labeled with the dates on which events occurred. The film shows what happened, or at least one version of what happened. It seems closely based on contemporary accounts of the event, as well as on a study commissioned by the Florida legislature in 1983 that led the legislature to pass a bill providing reparations for the families of Rosewood survivors.

The events chronicled in Rosewood begin when a white woman of dubious reputation is savagely beaten by her white lover. For reasons that were not clear she lies and claims that she was attacked by a black man. (This recalls for me Faulkner’s story “Dry September”). The consequences explode and lead to lynchings and mass chaos, with white mobs roaming back and forth across the town, setting buildings afire, shooting and hanging men and women. The sheriff at one and the same time leads one of the mobs even as he tries to control it. Some whites are sorry for the murders they commit; others murder with relish. It is difficult to connect these events with anything recognizable in modern times. But of course they did occur.

Among the few virtuous whites are the storekeeper John Wright (Jon Voight) and his wife Mary (Kathryn Meisle). Voight plays a weak and conflicted man who cannot face the mob and is afraid of losing business if he stands up against the murders. His wife is new to the South, horrified by everything that is happening around her, and appalled by the weakness of her husband. Ultimately, Wright helps survivors escape. Ving Rhames plays Mann, a stranger who is passing through town when the trouble begins. He is the ostensible hero of the film (the “Mann”), though he is not based on a historical character. Because Wright and Mann conspire to help the survivors escape, and because Wright himself is white, the film recalls Schindler’s List, where the Nazi Schindler helps many Jews escape the death camps. This is a way of suggesting that the suffering of African Americans is akin to the suffering of the German death camp victims.

I wanted to like or at least admire this film, but it fails to do much more than show the events leading to Rosewood’s destruction. It doesn’t provide much of an explanation for why the mobs do what they do, other than suggesting that they are racists and that racists behave murderously. White people kill black people and the remaining black people kill white people. There’s a lot of shooting, much death and carnage, many images of horror, and a lot of suspense as the survivors barely manage to escape on a locomotive Wright has secured. Ving Rhames as the itinerant stranger Mann suffers recurring crises of conscience, but ultimately he overcomes his hesitation and rises to the task of being the film’s hero. Wright’s tenuous family situation is redeemed by his discovery of courage.

The film is important for the story it tells, but it fails to tell the story with much understanding and resorts to stereotypes in the process of doing so.

Why was Gone with the Wind so popular?

It was welcome Depression-era escapism.

This Technicolor epic offered overwhelming spectacle.

It played to a general American desire, running contrary to everything we learn in history class about democracy and a classless society, to believe in a mythic lost era of grace and nobility.

We love to feel sympathy for the defeated, and in the 1930s sympathy for the defeated South was not a politically incorrect sentiment.

Vivien Leigh was a compelling and beautiful actress. She plays a ruthless, conniving heroine who gets her way and then her comeuppance.

There was chemistry between Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, despite Rhett’s greasy, shiny hair.

The romance was complicated and lurid, with intrigue and scandal and more than a hint of sex.

The story was, undeniably, an exciting survival tale.

The film was based on a best-selling novel whose success became its own phenomenon and which came with its own Horatio Alger story about its author, a charming Southern woman.

The making of the film was its own epic struggle, widely publicized in the press, building anticipation and excitement over its premier.

It is, after all, even if by accident and happenstance, a well made film, especially the first two hours.

There is always Leslie Howard’s British accent.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

The 1952 film A Member of the Wedding was a closet drama. Only Ethel Waters gave it any life, and what she gave was hysteric and flat. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968) is a different kind of closet drama—a young girl’s view of a small town and its inhabitants. But it is not really the girl’s view that matters—it is the deaf mute, played in the film by Alan Arkin, who takes in the life of the town and suffers for what he sees and feels. Both films focus on a young adolescent girl afraid she is missing out on life. In A Member it is her brother’s wedding. In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter it is simply life, the life everyone else is living, the life that her family’s shrinking circumstances threatens to deny her.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter strains for a kind of lyricism that it never quite achieves. The Member of the Wedding strains for a tragic awareness of life’s darkness. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter explores the trope of a small town’s hidden life.

The girl Mick, played in the film by Sondra Locke in her first major film appearance, lives in a family that is typical in some ways but not in others. Her father has suffered some sort of injury that at least temporarily leaves the family without income. Her mother is frustrated and anguished, not only over the lost income but also over her own life. She has a strained and histrionic appearance, and in a key scene she tells Mick that all her aspirations and ambitions will come to nothing, that she will find a man and marry him and that if she is lucky there may be love. In another scene the parents tell their daughter that she may have to start attending high school at night so that she can earn money for the family during the day working at a general store. This is Mick’s context throughout the film, and she strains against it constantly, despite her love for her parents and her brother.

Mick is the archetypal young girl waking up to life, full of hope, interests, ambitions, running up again the pessimism and obstacles of the adult world. She is awkward and gangly, a tomboy, alternatively loud and horsey, sensitive and yearning. She never quite fits in with other girls her age, and when she has a party to which she invites other friends her age, the outcome is a disaster. She is fascinated by Mozart, and her love of music suggests that McCullers, a musician of some accomplishment, invested herself in Mick’s character. Sondra Locke is not quite successful with this character. She seems too old for the part, and she overplays it. But the film as a whole is overplayed.

Analogues to this film’s portrayal of small-town life are numerous: Dylan Thomas’ voice play Under Milkwood (1953), Sherwood Anderson’s novel Winesburg, Ohio, Thomas Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel. Hidden secrets, grotesque characters, repressed sexuality, jealousy, envy, poverty, small aspirations and smaller abilities, these are the bywords of small-town American life.

The source of lyricism in the film is the deaf mute John Singer. Alan Arkin is wonderful in this role. He never speaks, but his expressive, interested, eager face displays his longing and his need for connection. He is an empath who absorbs and fully feels the emotions of the people around him, who suffers from his ultimate inability to help others, especially the people who matter most, such as Mick. At a crucial moment, her rejection of his attempts to communicate leads to the tragic conclusion of the film.

Singer befriends a retarded Greek young man, Spiros Antonapoulos, a drunk winningly played by a young Stacy Keach, an African American doctor disappointed in his daughter’s decision to settle for being a made rather than making something of herself, and Mick. The doctor, Doctor Copeland, is a complex and difficult man. He’s socially ambitious, devoted to his patients, a hater of whites, a man who yearns for material success and security for his daughter, who has married a man he feels is beneath her. She in turn hates him and recognizes his cowardice in crucial moments. He is also dying of lung cancer, a secret that only John Singer knows. Singer, the white deaf mute, is the one man who is able to break through Copeland’s intolerant, unwelcoming exterior.

Doctor Copeland is similar to Sergeant Waters of A Soldier’s Story. He’s trapped by race and racial categories, by his own inability to fit into any niche, by his own unhappiness within his own skin.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter gives some acknowledgement to the race problem of the mid-20^th century American South. But mostly it exploits the small Southern town as a setting for examining the mysteries of human character. We see through this film (and through the novel) that McCullers views the South as a place where the individual suffers in silence from community pressures, family traumas, and human failings. She is far more interested in the inner lives of her characters than their exterior lives and how geography and social pressures that derive from geography affect them.

John Singer is a kind of Christ character who takes on the suffering and sins of those around him and ultimately dies for them. He is an extreme example of isolation—his inability to communicate coupled with his need for connections with other human individuals makes him a pathetic and sad figure. He is a modern figure rather than a Southern figure. He reminds me of characters in Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, as well as in William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. It is the modern human condition this film and the novel on which it is based are most deeply interested in displaying.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter as a title describes both Mick and John Singer. Mick is isolated from the world by her awkwardness, her ambitions to be significant, and her family situation. John Singer (who sings through his face and his behavior towards others rather than with his voice) is isolated by whatever sad medical or biological misfortune left him disabled. Life is full of unkindness beyond the reach or correction of human effort. This is the sad message of the film and the novel.

Two Thousand Maniacs

Two Thousand Maniacs (1964) exploits in an almost perverse way numerous Southern stereotypes: north vs. south hostilities, southern nationalism, hillbillies and rednecks, violence, humor, hijinks, decay. Production values are so low, acting so poor, the narrative itself so implausible, that it is difficult to view the film as little more than a sustained joke. The director Herschell Gordon Lewis made numerous films of C-level sex, violence, gore, and inanity during the 1960s. They offered titles such as Blood Feast, Moonshine Mountain, Sin, Suffer, and Repent, Blood Feast, A Taste of Blood, and Color Me Blood Red. Two Thousand Maniacs was often considered part of a triptych of films by Lewis, the “Blood Trilogy,” the others being Blood Feast and Color Me Blood Red (they are not set in the South).

The film’s premise is that the citizens of Pleasant Valley in an unnamed Southern town are celebrating the centennial anniversary of an event that occurred near the end of the civil war, in April 1865. At first the nature of the event is unclear, but eventually we learn that 100 years before renegade Northern soldiers had wiped out the town, killing or maiming most of the townspeople. Now, in April 1965, the townspeople have returned to avenge the massacre. They do so by waylaying six Yankee tourists whom they convince or compel to serve as the special guests of the centennial.

One by one, four of the tourists are killed: one has her limbs chopped off with an axe—they are later barbecued; a second is drawn and quartered; a third is rolled down a hill in a barrel laced with nails; and the fourth has a boulder dropped on her. There are the requisite severed limbs, episodes of horrified screaming, and ample amounts of fake blood.

The townspeople all behave as demented buffoons, laughing and guffawing over their plans to avenge themselves on the Yankee tourists. The tourists themselves have not a clue as to what is going on, until one of them, a school teacher, manages to discover the nature of the centennial celebration. He and a young woman escape to tell the tale.

The central image of the film is the Confederate stars and bars flag, whose blood red background is linked with the blood so often seen in the film. Not surprisingly, since most of the people in the film are temporarily resurrected Confederates, there are no black people in the film at all. Instead we find the sorts of white people stereotypes that appear in Lil Abner comic strips and in TV series such as The Beverley Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Gomer Pyle. In this film, however, those stereotypes take on decidedly violent and macabre dimensions. By modern standards, the violence in this film is tame, and though it involves horrible acts against the Yankee tourists, the fake blood and primitive effects, not to mention the bad acting, eviscerate the horror.

Two Thousand Maniacs presents the American South as a self-evident joke. Though no one would take the movie in a literal way as a serious representation—most of the characters are absurd parodies and, after all, ghosts—in a more metaphoric sense the film presents the South as a geographical and cultural Other, a remote and marginal hinterland unknown and inaccessible to the outer world, a place that brings gruesome death to those unfortunate enough to enter it. More mainstream films such as Deliverance and Southern Comfort present a similar if more complicated view of the South.

Films of this type were fairly common in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of them were B- and C-grade films with titles such as Macon County Line, Bloody Mama, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Redneck Zombies, The Alien Dead, and so on. The list of such films is lengthy. These films helped perpetuate the notion of a violent and backwoods South, a notion that many were eager to accept since it accorded with the image of the South promulgated through accounts of racism and civil rights struggles in the South of the 1950s and 1960s.

For Director Lewis, who is not a Southerner, the South provided a handy setting for many of his exploitation films—a stereotypical place of violence and barbarism, a natural context for the content he wished to portray.

Suddenly, Last Summer

Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), based on a one-act play of the same title by Tennessee Williams, was written and produced in a decade when psychiatry had become the solution to all human problems. Montgomery Clift plays Dr. Cukrowicz, a psychologist who is asked to examine Catherine Holly (Elizabeth Taylor), a young woman who has been hospitalized since a traumatic event the summer before, an event she cannot remember. The event involved the death of her close friend , Sebastian, whose mother, Violet Venable (Katherine Hepburn) is intent on having Catherine lobotomized so that she will be cured of her insanity. As events unfold there are hints of another reason why Mrs. Venable wants Catherine to have a lobotomy--so that she won’t disclose the true nature of her son’s death.

Cukrowicz’s challenge is to decide whether Catherine is truly insane, and therefore in need of a lobotomy, or whether she can be compelled to remember the details of her traumatic ordeal and therefore be cured. Oh that life were so simple. The film treats psychiatry, lobotomies, and insanity without much accuracy. The Freudian psychology that underlies the film’s notion of how Catherine’s insanity can be cured—by Dr. Cukrowicz’s forcing her to remember the horrible events of “last summer”—is presented in a simplistic, reductive way.

In Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, the main character Jack Burden watches brain surgery performed by his friend Adam Stanton. For Adam, the brain is merely an organ, the physiological center of the mind, but for Jack it is the place of human identity, of the self, the soul. After observing the surgery, Jack decides that human life can be reduced down to a Big Twitch, the sort of twitch that can be prompted by an electric shock in the severed leg of a frog—a naturalistic expression of life’s meaninglessness and God’s absence.

The same notion is at issue in Suddenly, Last Summer. If Clift performs the surgery, Catherine may be cured, but she may also be left permanently disabled. If he performs the surgery, Mrs. Venable will donate enough money to renovate and modernize the state mental hospital. The hospital director pressures him to perform the surgery. The small fortune that Sebastian left to Catherine in his will has been signed over to her mother and brother because of her purported insanity. Catherine is reduced to object level: her sanity, her mind, and her life are caught up in the web of intrigue surrounding Sebastian’s death and his mother’s wealth and power.

The film’s Southernness is incidental to the plot, but we find several characteristic elements here: the deranged old Southern matriarch, power and corruption, insanity, the obsession with a hidden event from the past, the broken down, decrepit hospital where society’s disfigured and unwanted are conveniently hidden away. But for Tennessee Williams, one of the fundamental aspects of Southernness is repression. Mrs. Venable, the film gradually and obliquely reveals, doesn’t want the true nature of her son’s death divulged because her son’s homosexuality will be revealed. He attracted men by relying on his mother, and later Taylor, to attract them: Catherine says that she “procured” for the boy. In some cases, at least according to the film, he paid for sexual favors from men and boys. This element was more explicit in the one-act play, but in the film it is camouflaged and toned down. I have not read the play, but the treatment of homosexuality in the film implies self-loathing on Williams’ part.

Nonetheless, the film makes clear enough Sebastian’s personal preferences. The film itself was significantly edited to remove overt references to homosexuality. Even so, it was one of the earliest films to deal with homosexuality in a way clear enough that the audience could actually recognize the subject. A Streetcar Names Desire treats the subject indirectly through the repressed character of Blanche DuBois, and though Stanley Kowalski’s intense sexuality. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof dealt with Brick's former attraction to his dead friend in relatively candid fashion, though the film version virtually removed all references to the nature of their friendship.

Taylor’s acting is excellent in this film. Katherine Hepburn is mannered and eccentric, and effective, and Montgomery Clift, in a post-accident performance, is wooden and repressed. He lived the life, of course, that the film is about.

Suddenly, Last Summer is more about hysteria than anything else—especially in the performances by Taylor and Hepburn. The way that Sebastian supposedly dies—torn to shreds by a group of men and boys—seems hard to accept. Maybe it is supposed to be Catherine’s hallucination, a delusion that stands for something else, but what? The ending shows the psychologist and his amazingly cured patient walking off together in a way that suggests a romantic future for them. This was clichéd, formulaic, and implausible.

And Hepburn, raving, ascends on her personal elevator to the upper floors of her mansion. For me, this was the overwhelming image in the film.

Hugh Ruppersburg
Athens, Georgia

Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte

Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) opens with various views of the plantation house where Charlotte Hollis has lived all her life. The house signifies her family’s former wealth and prominence in the community. It also signifies a moment in 1927 when Charlotte became essentially stuck in time, blamed for the meat cleaver murder of her lover, John Mayhew, whose head and hand are never found.

This film offers a horror-movie gothic view of the South as a place of violence, insanity, intrigue, and decay. Charlotte essentially lives in the past, alone with her housekeeper Velma (Agnes Morehead) and house servants.

Progress looms heavy from the opening scene when we learn that a bridge is being built across the nearby river and that Charlotte’s house has been requisitioned by the Louisiana government. She’s going to have to move, and the house will be torn down. So the film also incorporates the collision of tradition and progress, the old ways vs. the new.

An underlying question that lingers throughout concerns whether Charlotte is insane. As the film progresses, she starts seeing things that lead the audience to wonder whether she is in fact insane or headed that way. But then there is the possibility that someone is trying to drive her insane, or at least to convince local authorities that she needs to be committed.

There is also the unanswered question of whether Charlotte actually killed her Charles Mayhew, the husband of a family relative. Or did someone else do it? Joseph Cotton plays the family doctor Drew Bayliss, who treats Charlotte when she is ill. And Cousin Miriam Deering shows up, after decades, to help Charlotte move.

In considering the issue of Charlotte’s possible insanity the film evokes Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and the governess who might or might not be seeing ghosts. The film is not nearly as subtle as James’ novel, but it does maintain a high level of deception and intrigue until the last scene. There are numerous scares, twists, and turns, though having seen recent films such as Sixth Sense and movies in the Halloween, Jason, and Freddy Kruger vein, modern audiences could predict many of the surprises and turns before they happen.

Set on an old plantation, this film uses iconic actors from earlier films about the American South so that their earlier performances become a subtext. Bette Davis herself appeared in Little Foxes, based on the Lillian Hellman play. That performance itself was building on Davis’ performance as Julie Marsden in Jezebel. Olivia Dehavilland, of course, played Melanie in Gone with the Wind. Davis’ earlier films portrayed the South as a place of competitiveness, financial and sexual jealousy, and intrigue. Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte carries forward with those traits, though Charlotte herself is the victim rather than the perpetrator. Dehavilland’s character at first seems directly descended from her part in GWTW, though later events in the film eventually overturn that notion. Rather than paragon of solicitous virtue, she becomes the symbol of rapacious self-interest, Mrs. Mayhew correctly describes her character when she observes that the only person Miriam has ever been interested in is herself.

The Gothic horror at the center of this film is the murder that occurred in 1927. Rivalries and jealousies undermine the close-knit community, and they are an emblem of the larger traditional Southern community’s collapse. Returning after so many years, Miriam is an agent of progress. She is in public relations, we are told, and as it turns out, she is an agent of immorality and evil that is associated with the modern world and that is undermining tradition. In effect, she is allied with the forces of progress that are building the bridge, displacing Charlotte and her kind, and destroying the past.

The Skeleton Key (2005) seems to draw heavily from this film, but Hush . . . Hush, Charlotte itself, with its emphasis on insanity and psychological innuendoes, seems to work squarely in the film tradition of Tennessee Williams. In fact, when Charlotte rides off at the end of the film either to the police station or the insane asylum, there are clear echoes of A Streetcar Named Desire, with Charlotte affecting the same air of feigned aristocratic hauteur as Blanche DuBois. Unfortunately for Bette Davis, Vivian Leigh was more credible in her role than Davis. Davis was never capable of a great range of emotions, but within her range she could be very good. In this film she plays her role effectively, but she is more caricature than tragic victim.