Talk about movie "bad girls"-- here's one of the most sordid. In this Our Life is a doppelganger story of two sisters, one good and one evil. Roy (sic) Timberlake, played by Olivia de Havilland, is too good to be true. Stanley (sic) Timberlake, embodied by Bette Davis in an eye-popping, raucous performance, is wicked at the Lady Macbeth or Goneril level. She steals her sister's husband just for the heck of it and then drives him to suicide. Quite the scandal anywhere, but especially in 1940s class-conscious suburban Virginia. Her very good sister Roy marries the decent man whom Stanley betrayed -- and then Stanley tries to seduce him back. It doesn't work, I'm glad to say, and Stanley, failing and frustrated, runs her car into two pedestrians, killing one, and then frames a young "colored boy" (we might say "black man") for the murder -- and almost gets away with it. There's more in this competent soap-opera romance melodrama: a touch of incest, some distasteful bigotry, crass materialism, morbid hypochondria. A couple or three weak, enervated men, upon whom we wait for ninety minutes to grow backbones.
The movie was directed by John Huston and Raoul Walsh and written by Howard Koch (Casablanca), so it has classy bloodlines. It's so overcrowded with events and loose ends that I guessed that it must have been adapted from a novel. And sure enough, according to Wik In This Our Life was adapted from a famous-in-its-time Pulitzer prize book by Ellen Glasgow -- which I should have known but didn't.
In This Our Life piqued my curiosity enough to download the novel onto my Kindle. I'm intimidated, though. Kindle says 745 pages.
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