Beyond the Forest *** (1949, Bette Davis, Joseph Cotten, David Brian, Ruth Roman) – Classic Movie Review 7664

Director King Vidor’s trashy 1949 film noir romantic drama Beyond the Forest stars a weirdly posturing, unattractive looking, black-wigged Bette Davis, and she is far from her best as Rosa Moline, a 1940s-style American Madame Bovary who hates her mild, colourless and bloodless doctor husband Louis (Joseph Cotten) and their drab Wisconsin small town. Louis neglects Rosa, so no wonder she is bored. Instead, Rosa becomes infatuated with the visiting Chicago industrialist Neil Latimer (David Brian), who owns a nearby hunting lodge, and she longs to escape to the big-city excitements of Chicago (‘if I don’t get out of here I’ll die!’).

Nevertheless, despite, or because of her weird, off-key, campy, exaggerated performance, Davis still easily, effortlessly commands the attention, and so does Vidor’s lurid, unbelievable movie, which is so bad it is very good camp fun. It is a bit of a trash classic. The kitsch, none too impressive screenplay is by Lenore J Coffee, based on the novel by Stuart Engstrand.

However, that screenplay has one immortal piece of dialogue. Davis utters her memorable famous bitchy line ‘What a dump!’ parodied by Elizabeth Taylor in the 1966 movie Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Beyond The Forest is the ‘goddam Bette Davis movie’ referred to by Taylor. It is the AFI’s number 62 in its top 100 movie quotes.

Beyond the Forest was nominated for one Oscar: Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture (Max Steiner), a score that provides some touch of quality that is missing elsewhere.

Ruth Roman also stars as Carol Lawson. Also in the cast are Minor Watson as Moose Lawson, Dona Drake as Jenny, Regis Toomey as Sorren, Sarah Selby as Mildred Sorren, Mary Servoss, Frances Charles, Joel Allen, Gail Bonney, James Craven, Ann Doran, June Evans, Bess Flowers, Hal Gerard, Creighton Hale, Jim Haward, Bobby Henshaw, Hallene Hill, Charles Jordan, Ralph Littlefield, Eve Miller, Frank Pharr, Buddy Roosevelt, Olan Soule, Eileen Stevens, Harry Tyler and Judith Wood.

After 18 years of difficult, often troubled employment, it is Davis’s last film as a Warner Bros contract star. The studio refused to release her from her employment contract though she tried several times to quit the film, causing the production costs to sky-rocket. She longed to leave Warner Bros, but was it such a good idea? Luckily, All About Eve was in her immediate future.

[Spoiler alert] She recalled it as ‘a terrible movie’ and described the climax in which Rosa attempts to abort her baby by throwing herself down a hill, gets peritonitis and dies as ‘the longest death scene ever seen on the screen’.

It got hit by censorship, receiving a ‘C’ classification from the Legion of Decency because of its abortion elements. This classification affected the film’s box office, so the studio negotiated cuts for it to be reclassified as a ‘B’. It ended up taking $1,331,000 in the US and $407,000 abroad (= $1,738,000), marginally in profit on a cost of $1,589,000. So Bette’s reign ended respectably.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7664

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