If Bette Davis had stayed with Warners after Beyond the Forest ...

Maybe Stage Fright with Hitchcock instead of Marlene? It might have been an alternative to Margo Channing, but then again she would have been required to sing in the role. So not so good.

But, she fervently believed she could sing.

What about Caged?! Didn't Crawford want Bette to do that with her?

I never understood Bette's claim of being cast against her will in Beyond the Forest. Surely by that time she had enough clout to decline the offer?! Anyway, she is very entertaining in it, even it is unintentionally bad.

In the old studio system, actors could not legally decline any role.

It just meant they went on suspension during it's making and their contract was extended for that time. Unless they made another film for the studio instead.

Was Olivia de Havilland first offered A Streetcar Named Desire because Bette had left? Granted ODH was 8 eights younger than Bette but no match as an actress. Can you imagine Bette as Blanche Dubois??

What about the Ginger Rogers part in Storm Warning, as Doris Day's older sister?

Warners could have bought The Country Girl for Davis after the play appeared on Broadway in 1950 - 1951. Uta Hagen played Georgie Elgin on Broadway and she was 11 years younger than Bette.

Bette Davis playing Blanche Dubois is an intriguing idea. It's not like she hadn't played Southern belles before and she was certainly faded enough at the time to be believable. But would she have been willing to submit to Elia Kazan's style of direction? Vivien Leigh had the advantage of having done the role on stage prior.

Liquor turned to fat on her. By 1956 she could have played the title role in Warners' production of Moby Dick.

She secretly liked to sing Bette Davis Eyes and even considered doing a recording of it with Kim Carnes.

I imagine Bette would have been a fine Norman Maine in "A Star is Born" in 1954. No stretch for her to play a washed up has been by then!

[quote]Can you imagine Bette as Blanche Dubois??

Absolutely not. The movie would have flopped for sure.

[quote] Vivien Leigh had the advantage of having done the role on stage prior.

But she also had the disadvantage of Kazan not wanting her for the role.

3 for Bedroom C was a stinker comedy but made by Warners with Gloria Swanson in a role that Bette might have played.

R15 - who did Kazan want as Blanche? Jessica Tandy?!

Blowing Wild was another campy potboiler akin to Beyond the Forest but we would have had Bette opposite Gary Copper, instead of his reunion with Stanwyck.

I'm surprised that A Streetcar Named Desire was a hit as a film, since it is hardly a date movie. I guess there was an audience for high-brow entertainment in the 1950s after all.

Streetcar was the film version of a successful play with a mix of actors who had done the play and a movie-star for the other part. Brando had made his movie debut in the lead role in The Men and it had been a hit.

R17, yes, Kazan initially wanted Tandy to reprise for film.

I guess Warners wanted Vivien Leigh as some kind of box-office insurance because they felt just the Broadway cast would not pull in the masses.

We should be thankful that Warners didn't insist on John Garfield as Stanley. Eech.

Bette was not rapeable!

Warners thought Tandy was Che Brutta (and she was). Kazan thought Leigh was a shitty actress (limited was the word he used) but because her Blanche had been such a success on the London stage, he reluctantly agreed. I think he wanted DeHavilland, but I don't know why he didn't get her. I'm going to assume it was because she turned it down. She would have been horrendous as Blanche.

If Rita Hayworth would have been a better actress, I think she would have made a great Blanche. I could also maybe see Susan Hayward in the role. I always found Hayward and Leigh pretty much interchangeable during that time, anyway. Leigh was fine, though.

I read that ODH turned down the part because she didn't think Blanche was a lady.

If she too hadn't left Warners, I can see Ida Lupino as Blanche. As long as she kept her Brit accent in check.

Bette Davis as Blanche certainly would've been interesting.

Not sure Susan Hayward is right. She could be the alley cat but don't know about the lyrical side of Blanche.

Bette as Blanche reminds me of the review of Fay Dunaway's performance in an LA production- "Her Blanche doesn't rely on the kindness of strangers, she damn well demands it."

RE Olivia de. One also has to remember the hard time Montgomery Clift gave her on The Heiress so perhaps the prospect of Kazan and 3 Method actors was too much for her to contemplate. Also I don't think Kazan would have directed her the way William Wyler did.

Leigh was more than just "fine" as Blanche.

She gave the greatest female performance in film history.

For many years, "the greatest female performance in film history" was given to Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara, until Gone With the Wind went completely out of fashion.

Waterloo Bridge was Vivien Leigh's favorite of her own movies.

These greatest performance contests are so silly because how are they measured? However Vivien captured all the colors of Blanche. But Bette might have been just as capable.

There was talk that Bette was interested in doing the film of Come Back, Little Sheba. Warners might have grabbed the rights before Paramount which would have denied Shirley Booth the chance to repeat her Tony Award winning performance.

In interviews in her later years Bette said she actually turned down Come Back Little Sheba and she always regretted it.

The Innocents was another 1950 Broadway hit but it didn't reach the screen until 1961. However Bette could have played the ex-con Miss Madrigal, known in the film as Miss Giddens.

I would liked to have seen Mother Goshdamm as Hazel!

1951 saw a Broadway revival of The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare's comedy about a headstrong woman who no man wants to marry. Can you see Bette as Kate? She certainly could play shrewish.

[quote]Can you see Bette as Kate? She certainly could play shrewish.

(KATHERINE taps unfiltered cigarette on cigarette case.)

KATHERINE: If I be waspish --

(KATHERINE takes long deliberate drag on cigarette.)

KATHERINE: Best beware my sting.

(KATHERINE exhales cigarette smoke through her nostrils.)

I left out the bit where Petruchio lights Katherine's ciggie for her, but you get the point.

Claudette Colbert would have been good as Margot Channing.

More subtle, anyway.

What about Strange Lady in Town in the part that Greer Garson played?

How about the Jo Van Fleet part in East of Eden? It was small but important to the plot.

The Bad Seed in the Nancy Kelly part? At least that was a starring role.

What about a film version of her Broadway show Two's Company?

The Iron Petticoat?

R38. you're confusing two plays. Miss Madrigal is The chalk gArden. The innocents is based on The Turn of the Screw. Different governesses.

OMG R41, you're killing me here! LMAO

Not sure Bette was right for Christine in The Bad Seed. She was best at playing a no-nonsense gal and Christine was an emotional mess. Patty McCormack may have been right when she commented that the play had not been revived because the mother character is unbelievable. She felt modern audiences would just tell her to 'Get a grip'.

Bette always said her dream was to star in a film version of Ethan Frome.

Bette Davis IS Calamity Jane!

Caught much of "In This Our Life" on TCM the other day. Jesus, what a stinker! No wonder Bette often said in interviews that it's the one film of hers that she would most like to burn.

She could have been Hortense Daigle, but only if she'd been Claude's grandmother. It's hard to believe she had a 10 year contract, when 7 years was the gold standard for the biggest stars before the end of the 1940s.

This from the TCM article on In This Our Life gave me a chuckle - "In later years Davis was highly critical of In This Our Life, and blamed the script and Huston's direction. If there was any real-life catfight connected with the film, it happened when Bette Davis met author Ellen Glasgow. The outraged novelist minced no words in telling Davis how much she hated the film. Davis tried to lighten the atmosphere: "You should have been an actress, Miss Glasgow - you're so volatile!" "If I had chosen acting over writing," Glasgow shot back, "I wouldn't be the overacting ham you are!"

In This Our Life is awful. You'd think with Davis, DeHavilland and John Huston directing it would be a good movie, but it's practically unwatchable. No wonder Davis hated it.

I really wished that Edward Albee's recommendation for Bette to play Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was taken seriously. She probably would have won her third Oscar in that role.

I love Liz, but I can't help but imagine how wonderful Bette would've been in the role.

Edward Albee wanted Bette and Henry Fonda as Martha and George. Can you imagine how electric that would've been? It's too bad they couldn't film two versions of the movie. Bette was just born to play Martha.

I just watched in This Our Life. I think Bette made some brilliant choices and I would assume that she didn't like the film because she is photographed quite unflatteringly in it. There is something off about her makeup and the way it makes her teeth look. Olivia DH is also photographed badly, looking chubby-faced. The best scene is when the family confronts Bette about whether or not she was driving the hit-and-run car, and seeing her eventual admission. Huston was always good at these kind of group scenes - think of those in The Maltese Falcon.

I can 't think of another actress of her time who could deliver a tirade as well as Bette could. She has a good one ridiculing Olivia DeHavilland playing her sister in In This Our Life where you can see the force of her attack and feel sorry for the one receiving it.

The filming of WAOVW would have been around the time Bette was making "The Nanny". Bette would have been 57 and looked even older. Even paired with contemporary Fonda, wouldn't she have looked and actually been too old for the role of Martha?

Martha is aged 52 in the play and her drinking could make her look prematurely aged. Also remember Davis learned some anti-aging tricks for Dead Ringer so it could have worked.

I just re-watched In This Our Life, too , and wondered about Dennis Morgan's mysterious disappearance from the plot. We see him drunk and fighting with Bette and next we hear he has committed suicide off-camera and Bette is bedridden with despair. Something seemed to be missing.

After he slapped Bette you knew he was doomed.

Stanley told him "Why don't you go back to Roy?! She's just fool-enough to have you!"

Davis was longgone from Warners by the time of "Come Back Little Sheba".It wouldn't have mattered which studio owned it, if she wanted it. "All About Eve" was made by 20th.

Fonda would have brought more subtlety to George, but the idea of Martha, herself, a bit of a Bette Davis-ish character (and not just the "what a dump" line) actually being played by Davis would have been too much. If Davis had wanted to become truly bankable again, she would have found a less shrill star turn after Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte. Virginia Woolfe would have been just the opposite and she's be even more typecast as a psychobiddy.

Bette Davis said in interviews that Hal Wallis urged her to make Sheba, but she felt she couldn't pull off the feyness that Shirley Booth did so well in the role on Broadway. Bette also felt that if she had done Sheba, Sidney Blackmer would probably have been given the role of Doc, which he performed so well on Broadway, as Burt Lancaster's name/stardom wouldn't have been needed with Bette in the lead.

Love Sidney Blackmer!

It was obvious that Dennis Morgan wasn't going to be good a good match for Bette in In This Our Life. I don't know why Stanley couldn't see it. But maybe she was just excited about taking him away from Roy.

Claudette Colbert is darling but I think Bette was better suite to play Margo Channing.

suited.

It's difficult to know what Colbert would have been like because Mankiewicz edited the script to make it better suited to Davis.

Absolutely not true. The script that Mankiewicz sent to Bette in Maine to read was the shooting script to the letter. There wouldn't have been time for Mankiewicz to rewrite or edit the script, as he had no idea Colbert would injure herself and they could only use the Curran Theatre in San Francisco for one week between productions, so he needed Bette's yes or no immediately. Bette always said the script she read was the script that was shot, with no changes.

I watched a bunch of Colbert films recently but I just don't see her as Margot. She doesn't have Bette's bite.

It's really unlikely that "no changes were made'.

Joe M. rewrote the script after Davis signed on to make Margo more sarcastic and abrasive.

Kenneth L. Geist in his book on Mankiewicz, Pictures Will Talk, says that Davis was a last-minute replacement for Colbert, and does not mention any script changes to accommodate her. However that does not mean there were none.

Bette was going to take the Vivian Vance role in The Lucy Show in the 1960s, but Gary talked both of them out of it.

Bette should have joined a soap. She would have been perfect as Ada on Another World. And she and Vicky Wyndham would have made a convincing mother-daughter.

I think Bette in "East of Eden" is the best idea so far.

She passed on another role that Jo Van Fleet later played, Paul Newman's mother in "Cool Hand Luke".

Her dream project in addition to "Ethan Frome" was "Mrs. Lincoln", playing Mary Todd Lincoln opposite Gary Cooper or Gregory Peck as Lincoln. The focus would have been on Mary's troubled life after Lincoln's death. That's one I wish she had done. She had a period in the mid 40s when her contract allowed her to produce a film a year but the only one she did was "A Stolen Life". Too bad she didn't make either of her dream projects.

I like "The Heiress" just as it is but also like to imagine Bette in a Warner's version circa 1939 opposite Errol Flynn and with Claude Rains as Dr. Sloper and Fay Bainter as Aunt Penniman. Also directed by Wyler.

The Heiress wasn't produced as a play until 1947 though the novel on which it was based, Washington Square, was published in 1880.

Then the novel could have been adapted by Casey Robinson for Miss Davis. It was her kind of story.

Olivia DeHavilland asked William Wyler to direct her in the film of the play, so I guess he felt an obligation to cast her. Bette chose to do June Bride at the time but she would have been better.

I understood that Colbert had to withdraw from All About Eve because she had injured her back on Three Came Home. However she made The Secret Fury from October to December, 1949, after having completed Three Came Home in June, 1949. All About Eve went into production in April, 1950, but then Colbert didn't work again until November, 1950 on Thunder in the Hill.

Bette might have made Come Back Little Sheba's Lola more tolerable than Shirley Booth who is annoying as hell in the role. Also there is a basic flaw in her casting. Lola is said to be a small town former beauty queen who has now gotten old and sloppy, however Booth is just too homely to fit that brief. Joanne Woodward in the British 1977 made-for-TV version was passable because she retained some of her looks and she hadn't got as heavy as Booth was. Also Woodward makes the character less annoying so that we have sympathy when she gets attacked by Doc when he is drunk, rather than feeling glad when Booth gets it.

r86 Geraldine Page had the same problem in "Sweet Bird of Youth." Alexandra Del Lago is supposed to be a faded, beautiful movie star. They say the make-up artists at MGM worked on Page for hours and hours just to make her passably attractive for the role.

who?

R18, "Blowing Wild" is a title that MUST be re used for a gay pron set in the wilderness. Perhaps a gay pron version of "The Revenant" .. with ears AND "bears".

Or maybe about the Oregon "militia"...

r88 Reference the post darling, and we'll gladly answer your question.

r90 I think r88 means r87. Here it is just in case.

r89 Get ye to the porn threads!

Page is incredibly glamorous and stylish in The Happiest Millionaire.

I know Disney was a master of special effects but I doubt he had Ellenshaw working on Page for that film.

[quote] For many years, "the greatest female performance in film history" was given [bold]by elderly queens with no taste[/bold]to Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara, until Gone With the Wind went completely out of fashion.

Fixed it for you.

Now I've heard everything. Shirley Booth as Lola in "Come Back Little Sheba" wasn't attractive enough??? You've reached an impossibility: the true depths of shallowness.

Leigh's performance in Streetcar is what makes it a classic.

Endlessly surprising and compelling.

As Jack Warner said, 'Who would want to fuck Jessica Tandy?'

Leigh stole the film away even from an egotist like Kazan. Not surprising he wasn't crazy about her.

And considering his obsession with Brando would love to know if they fucked.

Especially considering either would have fucked a 2 by 4 if it was available.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Davis as James Dean's castrating, nagging mother in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE.

At the time of "Beyond the Forest" Davis was pushing 40 and had a bad reputation for bullying directors at the Warners lot. Jack Warner really wanted her out, so I don't think anything was planned for her really. Interestingly enough Bette Davis had been considered for "The African Queen": (from NotStarring.com) "Top choice for the role of the prim missionary "Rose Sayer" when the film was to first to be made in 1938. When the project didn't come together until 1949, Davis was again offered the role but couldn't accept due to pregnancy." Another possible role Anna in "Anna and the King of Siam": "Twentieth-Century Fox attempted to borrow Bette Davis in 1946 to appear in Anna and the King of Siam; however, Bette's home studio, Warner Bros., said no." Also supposedly Bette wanted to play Vera Charles in the Lucille Ball version of "Mame" in the 1970's - another musical. I think she might have been good opposite Rosalind Russell in "Auntie Mame" in 1958.

I have also heard that Albee wanted James Mason to be George to Davis' Martha in WAOVW. Personally, I wonder if Davis wouldn't have been good in some of the

After Garland's exit, was Bette ever considered for the role of Helen Lawson in VOTD or was Hayward their desired replacement?

I would pay money to see Bette Davis lipsync to "I'll Plant My Own Tree"

Bette Davis "sang" several times in her career, even though she could not sing. At all. She even attempted a Broadway musical! I guess nobody had the balls to tell Bette she couldn't sing a note.

10 years left on the contract? We thought those contracts were for only 7 years.

In her later years, Davis herself commented on what a piece of shit Beyond the Forest was in interviews, and how awful the script and her performance was. She also admitted she was much too old for the part. She did develop a sense of humor about it as she got older.

R102 - Bette in an interview gave the years as 10.

Bette said that she was 15 years too old for the role of Rosa Moline and the Warner's contract player Virginia Mayo would have been good in it.

I agree with all that but I still treasure "Beyond the Forest" for the camp classic that it is.

One of the "service" or women's magazines in 1962 had an interview with Joan Crawford saying that she and Bette Davis didn't feud during the making of :Baby Jane" because they were too professional. However, Joan said in the same article that the studio (Warner's) had wanted them both for "Ethan Frome" but didn't think "the chemistry would be right."

BETTE DAVIS IS MRS . ROBINSON

BETTE DAVIS IS PUSSY GALORE

BETTE DAVIS IS KLUTE

BETTE DAVIS IS LOLITA

BETT...ER JOAN CRAWFORD IS DEEP THROAT

So even at that point in her career, Bette couldn't turn down a script she didn't like? I thought the really big stars under the studio system had some veto power.