(1949/Warner Bros.) VHS
Rave Reviews
“As hilariously overplayed as a Mexican soap opera!” —Channel 4, Britain
“Consistently (though inadvertently) hilarious. There’s not a sane, dull scene in this peerless piece of camp.” —Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
“Davis overplays this so much that she appears to be a female impersonator doing Bette Davis.” —TV Guide’s Movie Guide
Plot, What Plot? By 1949, convinced that her studio was “holding her back,” Bette Davis was willing to do just about anything to get out of her long-term contract with Warner Bros. Perhaps she knew Beyond the Forest would be enough of a stinker to finally get her fired by Jack Warner, and the studio, in their infinite wisdom, sold this one with the inadvertently apt tagline: “No one’s as good as Bette when she’s bad.” They were referring, of course, to the character Davis played—but they could just as easily have meant her performance.
As Rosa Moline, an egocentric, frustrated woman with delusions of grandeur—and a hideously obvious black wig that makes her look like Dracula’s daughter—Davis plays this role with every one of her trademark cigarette-flicking, hips-twitching, head-bobbing trademark gestures on rampant display. As gossip columnist Dorothy Manners remarked in the Los Angeles Examiner, “No nightclub caricaturist has ever turned in such a cruel imitation of the Davis mannerisms as Bette turns on herself in this one!” Davis turns in such a ludicrous performance that one begins to suspect she’s commenting on the idiotic dialogue by making her character even more absurd than the words in the script. Whatever Davis may have been thinking, this is one of the all-time great ridiculous acting jobs.
The absurdity is abetted, in no small part, by Lenore Coffee’s screenplay, which casts bigger-than-life Bette as a half-breed bride who can’t wait to escape the constraints of her doctor husband’s small Wisconsin town. Things start off with a bang as Davis’s very first line is one of her all-time most imitated. Frumping and hip-swishing into her cabin, Bette puts her overemphasizing all into the declaration, “What a dump!” We quickly learn that her “Rosa” will do anything—at least, anything the film censors in 1949 would allow—to escape her home and marriage.
When hubby Joseph Cotten pays her off to leave him, Rosa goes to Chicago, starts an affair, and winds up with no man—and a baby on the way. She is then forced to return home, terrified to tell her spouse what a louse she’s actually been. Soon the “boyfriend” shows up, saying he’s now ready to marry Rosa, and that she must get a divorce. In a perfect example of plot-driven coincidence, their conversation is overheard by a friend of Cotten’s, who threatens to blackmail her about both the affair and the pregnancy. How does she plan to escape this awkward situation? Simple … first, kill the blackmailer and claim it was a hunting accident, then throw herself over a highway embankment to induce a miscarriage. Pretty racy stuff by 1949 standards, but hokey in the extreme today.
The baby is miscarried, but in the process Davis contracts peritonitis and, although supposedly on her deathbed, will move heaven and earth to catch the next train for Chicago. At this point, Max Steiner’s inexplicably Oscar-nominated musical score really starts “going to town,” with overuse of the old tune “Chicago (That Toddlin’ Town)” fully orchestrated and thundering away under images of Bette first weakly ambling, then literally crawling, toward the train station to meet her lover. Since it was made in 1949, Rosa must die for her sins, and she does so just as the nine o’clock train for Chi-Town, as massive and obvious a phallic symbol as ever was seen onscreen, steams off without her. Print ads for this film’s original release declared, “She was a midnight gal in a nine o’clock town.” But if you ask us, Davis’s performance in this film is several springs short of having a fully working clock in her belfry!
Title card from opening credits: “This is the story of evil. Evil is headstrong—is puffed up. For our soul’s sake, it is salutory for us to view it in all its ugly nakedness once in a while. Thus may we know how those who deliver themselves over to it end up like the Scorpion, in a mad frenzy stinging themselves to eternal death.”
Fun Footnote
Davis’s “What a dump!” line, endlessly imitated over the years, was also spoken by Elizabeth Taylor (impersonating Bette) in Liz’s Oscar-winning performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?