Socialite Judith Traherne lives a lavish but emotionally empty life. Riding horses is one of her few joys, and her stabl | dG1fMVJCanlESjN2ck0
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Short filmTranscript
00:00 Hi, I'm Robert Osborne. I'm joined once again by tonight's guest programmer, actor and friend Gene Wilder. Welcome back, Gene.
00:06 Thank you.
00:06 Nice to have you here.
00:07 I'm glad to be here.
00:09 Good. Now, Gene's chosen a really interesting lineup of films for us, and his final film tonight is from 1939 and stars Betty Davis.
00:17 Betty Davis also with George Brent, Humphrey Bogart, and Ronald Reagan. It's Dark Victory, and I'm very curious as to why you picked this.
00:24 I've seen Betty Davis in films since I was very young, and I never cared for them. Then I saw some of them, and I said, "Well, that's better. That's better. She's good. She's good."
00:40 Then some of the really scary ones, "Well, that's okay. That's good. She is good. She is a good actress. Yes, she is a good actress." Then I saw Dark Victory and now Voyager, and I said, "That's brilliant." What she's doing now I call brilliant acting.
01:05 Also, I think Dark Victory is a very dangerous film to make because it's not about an upbeat subject, and yet it becomes a very entertaining film to watch, a very watchable movie, an engrossing movie.
01:20 All the people in it are so good. Geraldine Fitzgerald is so good, and George Brent, who never got much credit as a leading man, but he was always kind of sturdy and stable.
01:29 You get Bogart, a couple of scenes in there. It's just a wonderfully made movie. Did you see that late? When you're talking about the scary movies she did, are you saying that you'd see things like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
01:45 No, not that. I didn't mean that kind of stuff.
01:48 You saw them in sequence?
01:50 Yeah.
01:51 Okay.
01:52 But after having this feeling about what kind of work does she do, when I saw Bette Davis in Dark Victory, I said, "But this is a different person."
02:11 I think the thing that you really need to do with Bette Davis is see a range of her films. If you see now Voyager and Dark Victory, and you see Mr. Skeffington, where she's this terribly vain woman, and then you see Little Foxes, where she's a very mercurial, nasty Southern lady.
02:34 And you see The Man Who Came to Dinner, where she's a secretary to Monty Woolley in a comedy. And you see these different Bette Davises. They're all Bette Davis, and they all have a lot of her mannerisms, but they're so different. And I think that's the remarkable thing about her.
02:50 Well, one of the things that I loved the most about her was that she fell in love with George Brent, the doctor, and it changed her life. And then when she found out that it wasn't going to be that way, she turned into something else for a while.
03:09 Don't give too much of the story away.
03:10 All right.
03:11 Too much.
03:12 Well, I'll tell you. Then she got into a circus and she did some...
03:16 Okay, let's see the film.
03:18 Here it is, directed by Edmund Goulding, earning Bette Davis an Oscar nomination for her performance. Also with Oscar-nominated music by Max Steiner. From 1939, Dark Victory.
03:28 dark victory.
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