MR. SKEFFINGTON

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 364, 14 June 1946, Page 29

MR. SKEFFINGTON

(Warner Bros.)

HE first point to be made about Mr. Skeffington is one which I expect most critics of the picture have made already,

since it is so obvious. This is that the film will certainly come to be remembered — indeed, is probably remembered already-as Mrs. Skeffington, and that a movie producer would for once have been fully justified in changing an author’s original title (MR. Skeffington is from the novel by "Elizabeth’). This predominance of the film’s distaff side is no reflection on Claude Rains, who plays the role of Mr, Skeffington: it is due entirely to the emphasis which the script lays on his empty-headed, viciously vain wife, Fanny (Bette Davis). I am, in a way, sorry that this should be so, for Job Skeffington is, by all counts, much the more interesting, more worthy, and more human character, A really good story could have been developed round this kindly Jewish financier. It would have been interesting to know much more about those early struggles of his which brought him from the New York gutter to a dominating position on Wall Street. There is, in the Mr. Skeffington we see, just a trace of the financial ruthlessness and opportunism which alone could have made such success possible: but would he have been

able to remain, in spite of these qualities, still the endearing, devoted, selfeffacing character we meet here? Again, it would have been interesting if something more than a few vague hints were supplied about the racial theme; if the antipathy encountered by Job Skeffington in New York society because of his Jewish blood were given precise treatment (this might well, indeed, be used as the central theme of a whole picture -but would any producer have the courage to make it?) And above all, it would have been fascinating to know a lot more about what happened to Mr. Skeffington when he went with his young daughter to Germany on business in the early 1930’s, was embroiled with the Nazis, and finally escaped from a concentration camp, returning blind and broken to New York and a wife whom he still loved, even though she had driven him from home in the first place by her callous selfishness. Yes, the character and the soul of Job Skeffington would, I feel, have been infinitely more worthy of detailed study than the character and soul (if any) of Mrs. Skeffington. As it is, all we get is a sketch of the little Jew which lacks definition but which, thanks largely to the skill of Claude Rains in drawing it, makes us wish that we could have had the complete portrait, * * % [Tt is, for that matter, little more than an outline we get of Fanny Skeffington herself, in spite of the fact that more than two hours are spent in showing it to us. The fault in this picture is the fundamental one which I have drawn attention to before: the inability of the average producer to make up his mind about the mood in which he wishes to develop his theme and, having made his decision, to stick to it. Mr. Skeffington should have been, and in fact sometimes is, a sharply-etched satire on the taste and manners of this century. Some of the early sequences in particular are very good, with Miss Davis as a vapid society beauty, closely modelling herself on early film star types. But the audience, having been put in the mood to regard as good fun the coquetry with which she accepts the tributes of her many admirers, is abruptly switched into neartragedy by the discovery that her equally useless brother has been embezzling from Job Skeffington. So she marries the Jewish broker to save the beloved brother from jail (would any woman as selfish as Fanny is made to appear be capable of enough affection to make even sucha sacrifice as this?) And then we watch her through the years as she devotes herself single-mindedly to the task of defying age and remaining perpetually young and beautiful. As she uses all the cosmetician’s skill to combat the threat of growing old, and surrounds herself with younger and younger admirers to convince herself that she is still attractive, the film merges from satire into caricature, and finally from caricature into semi-burlesque. Miss Davis’s concluding make-up as an overpainted, over-perfumed, and over-dressed old harridan is too exaggerated to believe in; so is the behaviour of her exadmirers. If the film were consistently a (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) satirical farce, such overstatement might be in order: but it ends on a note of tragic melodrama with the return of Job Skeffington from Germany and the profound observation that "when a woman is loved she is still beautiful." x * * HERE is consistency of a kind, to be sure, in Miss Davis’s performance, but it is the consistency of artifice rather than of true art. The star cannot give much depth or feeling to the picture because the central character is essentially shallow and heartless; and the only two genuine human beings in the story, the husband and the family friend (Walter Abel), are mere sketches of characters-but she certainly succeeds in making Fanny Skeffington a superficially interesting figure. Every detail of dress, decoration, and posture has been given close attention; the star even pitches her voice several tones higher than usual and keeps it up throughout the picture to convey Fanny’s vacuity. Such devices, and there are several, are brilliantly calculated and contrived-but the point is that they are contrived. What other actress than Bette Davis, I wonder, would be willing to play so unsympathetic a role, and revel so obviously in the playing of it?