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 They say that this is "a scathing, cunning 101-minute catfight between a
wronged woman and the wrong kind of woman". Bette Davis plays Maggie and Mary
Astor plays Sandra. Maggie is the nice girl, while Sandra is the "arrogant
concert pianist who marries Maggie's one true love". This guy gets lost in an
airplane crash and Maggie agrees to raise Sandra's baby as her own. The back of
the box finishes up with this line: "It's The Great Lie... and great cinema." 1941, 101 minutes, VHS
It was purely coincidence that out of all the bazillion movies out there and
out of all the gazillion movies out there that starred Bette Davis, that I
watched The Great Lie a few months after watching The Old Maid. I was positive that I had some descriptions of The Great Lie and somehow I had gotten the idea that it was going to be one of those weepy
"woman's films" from the forties that would be simply hilarious, with Bette
Davis' anime-sized eyes rimmed with fake tears and her voice raw from pining
audibly for some lost love that either died in the war or ran away with her
sister or something. In retrospect, I don't know why I thought that (maybe I
was confusing it with my misconceptions about what Ms. Davis' Mr. Skeffington was all about), but even though Bette did some pining, had a good cry or two,
and had some broad try and steal her worthless man, it all made me long for the
handwringing that went on in The Old Maid. We all remember The Old Maid, don't we? That was the one where Bette's boytoy got killed in the Civil War,
left her preggers and somehow she ended up having her cousin raise the child as
her own while Bette assumed the role of prune-faced Aunt Charlotte all in an
effort to give her daughter a better life, while assuring herself of martyrdom
or something. Yes, it's all coming back now, isn't it? Overwrought beyond
words, but oddly compelling in the way that any dysfunctional family's travails
are to the outsider (you all should come over to my mother's for Thanksgiving
some time - the bookies in London regularly set odds on who is going to ruin
it) the ridiculousness of the plot is self-evident. It was not without some
amount of jawdropping then that I watched The Great Lie unfold and quickly realized that Bette was recycling this same plot, only this
time she was the one raising the kid that wasn't hers and lying to everyone
about it. Figuring that you need someone who knows their way around this type
of material, Bette also brings along director Edmund Goulding from The Old Maid to direct this one as well. The queerest thing (aside from the fact that I'm
out there buying Bette Davis movies) is that The Old Maid was based on a play
while The Great Lie was based on novel written by someone else. Obviously,
this "I'll secretly raise someone else's daughter" plot is as old as "boy meets
girl" and "cop who plays by his own rules gets put on suspension".  Having watched all of Universal's Invisible Man movies, I don't have a
problem with re-using the same story again and again, especially when it
involves some
invisible guy framed for a murder he didn't commit, but The Great Lie's
great sin is that its use of the whole Jack Nicholson family story is so
damn gimpy. I don't think I've seen this little drama since I waited to see if
George W. would be awarded the state run by his brother in the 2000 election
(Memo to Al Gore: If you're going to make another run in '08, lay off the
Moonpies and start watching those Tae-Bo tapes so that you can lose that double
chin like it was your home state or something. I can't stand my presidents
being all sloppy and stuff. The ideal president would be on steroids and make
speeches at the U.N. that had lines in it like "can I get an "uhhh" from all
the starving nations out there" and "where my bitches at?"). I know you'd find
it hard to believe that in a movie where there's a bogus wedding, a husband
lost and presumed dead in the Brazilian jungle (say "hi" to Umberto Lenzi and
Ruggero Deodato for us!), a baby traded for cash, and the revelation of the
baby-selling scheme, that these various revelations of lies and treachery were
treated with as much emotion as not
bothering to tell your husband that you had a fender bender when you were
coming home from the nail salon, but it was! Even with all those gaudy details
I just listed out, you'll also find that remarkably little actually happens in
this movie. People come up with idiotic schemes quickly and other folks agree
to the them almost as fast, with little explanation or reason beyond the sense
that they wanted to get on with selling the baby. I never really figured out
why Bette needed to lie about the kid to her husband anyway. Her husband had
plenty of opportunity to be with the real mother and in fact was so
disinterested
in being with her (played by Mary Astor who inexplicably won an Oscar for
Supporting Actress in a completely mundane and forgettable role and
performance) that he broke up with her when he demanded to get married on a
Tuesday and she couldn't because she had a concert in Chicago that day (Why not
just get married there?).  The object of everyone's affection is Pete Van Allen, who is played by George
Brent. George was born in Ireland and apparently served as an IRA guerilla
(I'm not Catholic or Protestant so don't read any politics into that and I'm
not going to make up my mind about this particular squabble until I can sit
through that Michael Collins movie) under some guy named Michael Collins. Sure, that's pretty interesting,
but
the shocking thing to me that I only just now noticed as I perused his film
credits is that he was in The Old Maid as well! In fact he also played the
object of Bette's affection and father of the kid in question in that movie! I
ain't going to lie to you here. When I noticed that, I just about
caught the vapors! At this point I'm tempted to just stop the review, direct
you to The Old Maid review and go back to watching cannibal movies where at least animals are
killed for real, so I know for sure that I'm dealing with a different cast,
even if the story is the same. By the way, I realize that Going My Way and White Christmas may fall into this category as well, but those were Christmas movies and
starred Bing (plus I actually liked those - when are they going to do another
remake?). So Clem Spender or Pete Van Allen or whatever name he's taken on for
this version of the "guy involved with psycho broads" role, is some type of
aviator as well as being a bit of a souse. We know all this because he got
hisself all hitched when he was blitzed and then went on a week long bender
with his new bride, the very nasty Sandra (Astor). Yes, this is one of those
deals where the guy marries the mean skank, even though there is a good-hearted
Bette Davis down in Maryland wallowing in self-pity over being dumped by Pete.
Why don't these movies ever have both women be a little bit of both? This one
goes so far as to give Mary Astor one of those very butch "I'm a coach for a
women's college basketball team" haircuts to get the point across that we
aren't supposed to like her. Well, that and the fact that she's so
career-minded that she's willing to sell her kid so that it doesn't interfere
with her piano concerts. Never trust a woman that has aspirations beyond
motherhood. That's one of the life lessons I've picked up from old movies.
The other one is to never to date Bette Davis and another women at about the
same time.  After a week long bender with his new wife, Pete is told by his lawyer that
there was little foul up and that his new wife's divorce from her last husband
isn't really final until next Tuesday and that his marriage is bogus and
they'll need to be remarried next week at the earliest. Pete goes down to
Maryland to see Bette. She's upset by Pete's marriage, but she still loves him
and tells him that he needs to sober up and that he should take some vague job
in Washington flying planes for the government for some reason or another.
Pete flies back to NYC to talk to his almost-wife and tells her that they need
to get married again next Tuesday and she tells him that her concert is more
important (they've probably already printed up the concert t-shirts with tour
dates or something) so they apparently split up, he goes back to Bette, they
get married, and he goes to work flying secret missions over the Brazilian
jungle,
which never made any sense to me, other than the fact that it gave him a good
place to get lost for about a year or so. So Pete gets himself all crashed and
stuff in the jungle and Bette finds out from Sandra that Sandra is preggers
with Pete's baby, presumably from that week of drinking and humping when they
were almost married. She says that she was going to use the kid to steal Pete
back, but with Pete becoming headhunter chow, that plan's all shot to hell.
You can practically see the 25 watt light bulb dimly glow over Bette's head as
she proposes that Sandra give her the kid and Bette will use some of Pete's
money to make sure that Sandra is "taken care of". Of course Sandra agrees to
this dimwitted plan and the next thing we know, Bette and Sandra are hunkered
down out west where they can have the baby without anyone knowing whose it is.
Bette probably just used her regular room at the same place she pulled this gag
when she went out west to have her secret baby in The Old Maid. I never quite
figured out how anyone explained the absence of the world-renowned pianist
Sandra for all those months, but who really is going to complain about not
having to deal with an old battle axe complete with bad haircut for several
months? It's not like she had a magazine named after her or something. There's some unintentionally amusing moments out west when Bette is monitoring
Sandra's bad habits and telling her that while its okay to have an ounce of
brandy a day while preggers and to try and not smoke an entire pack of cigs
before lunch that she can't eat pickles or onions. Pete, it sounds like your
kid is in good hands! Once Sandra has the kid, Bette raises it as her own (She
wants the kid so that she'll have something of Pete's. Can't she just roll
around in his clothes or something?). Then Pete gets rescued from the jungle,
comes home and settles in to help raise their child. Sandra shows up and makes
lots of snarky comments about Bette and her kid and then threatens to tattle to
Pete on her about the kid and that then Pete will take her back and ditch the
lying Bette. Because, you know, guys are attracted to dames that sell their
kids to someone without a second thought. I'm just wondering why Bette didn't
tell him when he got back, but then she just goes ahead and tells him toward
the end of the movie and we see Pete sitting their, embarrassingly rehashing
everything that had just gone on (So that's why you made all those snarky
comments? And so that's why Bette was upset when you showed up? And that's
why I'm in a remake of a movie I was in a couple of years ago?). The movie
doesn't even make a pretense of having a dramtic ending. Bette just tells
Pete, whimpers, then Pete tells Sandra to take the kid and leave, and then he
comforts Bette. Sandra still doesn't want the kid, so she leaves and Pete,
Bette, and Pete, Jr. live happily ever after, while the audience is fearful
that there may still be another Bette Davis movie lurking around out there with
yet another version of this plot. A very unaffecting and emotionally remote
affair, summed up perfectly when Pete is pretty much indifferent to the fact
that Sandra is threatening to take the kid. Uh, Pete, okay, you see,
regardless of who the mother of the kid turns out to be, there's no question
that you are the father. Bette keeps up the lie for no reason, Sandra must be
at least mildly retarded to think that by taking back a kid she doesn't want
she is
going to get Pete back, and Pete must be rethinking his newly reduced
intake of alcohol (Can I just marry the black maid and sharecrop or
something?). This is a movie
that takes an already dopey premise and is somehow unable to even muster up the
fake emotionalism that at least The Old Maid was capable of. A bizarrely-bland twist on an already bizarre concept.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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