“Mr. Skeffington” is a hollow kind of film on which Bette Davis, the makeup and costume departments, and Director Vincent Sherman have ganged up to do some excellent things. The film records the career of a great, cold, narcissistic beauty of the early 1900’s named Fanny, who lived in New York and was beautiful up to the age of about sixty-five, whereupon she became ferociously ugly. Her ugliness is hobgoblinish and mask-like, but the above individuals and departments have created a spectacularly beautiful woman for the prettier part of her life, and have done a diverting job of showing her change in styles and fashion from period to period. Miss Davis transforms herself with great effect into a girlish, tantalizing prettiness with a high petulant voice that is the best part of the portrait, and then for some reason drops completely back to her old stereotyped self—with the hitched walk, the dance-like business with her arms and hands and the heavy, hysterical voice—for the latter part of the film. “Mr. Skeffington” is dominantly dependent for its interest and suspense on the physical change of its people over a period of time, and to a lesser degree on how they looked and acted in particular events of the time, and it shows an unusual talent for doing this.
It is a good family album, but something less as a movie about Fanny and her Jewish husband, Mr. Skeffington, who masochistically stands by while she collects a horde of admirers, and finally gets the love he has patiently waited for when she is sixty-odd and has grown as ugly as she deserved. It is a meager, somewhat frivolous sketch of their lives, showing you the comic-opera exits and entrances of the various male admirers into the Skeffington mansion, and brief, unimportant chats whose main purpose is to get across some comical lines. You are teased with the idea of a love affair between Fanny and her brother, and the problem of a daughter who has a Jewish father and a Gentile mother, and you are illuminated almost not at all about either fact, just as you are left in a rather suggestive fog about everything else concerning the Skeffingtons.
For all but its last half-reel, the swimming-pool epic called “Bathing Beauty” is a mild entertainment composed of Red Skelton’s antics, the kind of situations that usually come up in movies in which a man is caught in a girls’ school, and music by a woman named Ethel Smith, who plays quick, corny whirling noises on the organ, and music like Muzak by Harry James and Xavier Cugat’s symphony-sized orchestras. At the end, though, there is one of those spectacular chorus numbers, which is performed in its most difficult medium so far, a swimming pool the size of a stadium where the usual human cartwheels, flower designs, and fountains in the number are made with amazing facility, with no difference at all from the way they are made on land. Then Esther Williams does a wonderful interpretation of under-water ecstasy that is the most aesthetic swimming I have ever seen. The only mediums left to be conquered by the dance directors of Hollywood after this water ballet are lava and quicksand, and I don’t think they will be any more difficult than swimming-pool water.
The people who play in another musical, “And the Angels Sing,” are bright and brassy enough, the spirit of the piece confident enough that it is the greatest all-out farce in years, and the situations promising enough to cause you only surprise and a mild let-down at the repeated thuds the picture makes. A typical kind of gag is that four people in succession (one of the troubles is that everything is done four times because there are four sisters who are heroines) will walk up to a violently steaming kettle, burn their fingers lifting its lid, and squeal in exactly the same way; not until the third person has done this will you believe that the kettle business is intended as a major gag, and that nothing funnier is going to be done with it, because you have been so taken in by the deceptive brightness. The people in it—like Betty Hutton, Diana Lynn and Raymond Walburn, its desire to jump on anything for a laugh, and the environments it chooses for jumping, remind you enough of Preston Sturges’ pictures to make you expect about the same returns. The only places you get them nearly equally are those in which Betty Hutton is allowed to explode to her best capacities. As a human flywheel she produces almost as much emotional effect as she puts in the performance.
July 31, 1944