The Corn Is Green *** (1945, Bette Davis, John Dall, Nigel Bruce, Rhys Williams, Mildred Dunnock) – Classic Movie Review 1332

‘Moderation is a vastly over-rated virtue.’ – Miss Lilly Moffat.

Director Irving Rapper directs Bette Davis in the 1945 drama The Corn Is Green as Miss Lilly Moffat, a middle-aged English schoolteacher dismayed by the conditions and illiteracy she finds in a Welsh coal mining village. So she decides to set up a school to teach basic education to the villagers and sets about running it.

But she is strongly opposed by her housekeeper and daughter as well as her neighbours, especially the local squire (Nigel Bruce), who will not rent her space so she uses part of her own home to establish Miss Moffat’s School. Eventually she even almost considers giving up. But then she discovers a promising student, Morgan Evans (John Dall), a miner destined for a life of hard work and harder liquor.

This gives her new hope, so she works hard grooms her new most favoured pupil for Oxford University and help him to realise his potential. As a young prodigy, Morgan comes alive under Miss Moffat’s tutelage.

Davis and Dall both turn in meticulously detailed performances under Rapper’s sensitive direction. Both actors are battling basic miscasting, and quite successfully too. Davis is hardly ideal for her role. At 36, she is still far too young-looking, even though she is padded in a fat suit that adds 30lb, wearing a grey wig and heavily made up to play a character who is supposed to be in her 50s. Rapper recalled that Davis this time tried very hard to not use the mannerisms that had made her famous. Also hardly ideal for his role, Dall is a New York City type, not truly at home in the Welsh valleys.

Warner Bros were not truly at home in the Welsh valleys either. The story may be set in Wales but it is shot entirely on the Warner Bros sound stages, even for the outdoor scenes, partly accounting for the film to seem so stagey.

As a stage to screen transfer, the movie is still a bit wordy, stagey and infused with the flavour and atmosphere of the theatre. Yet it has much value in preserving the many old-fashioned cultured and civilised pleasures of Emlyn Williams’s famous semi-autobiographical 1938 hit play (which originally starred Ethel Barrymore). So it emerges as a decent if uninspired film of the work.

Holding her own against Davis, Joan Lorring makes a strong impression as Bessie Watty, Davis’s cockney housekeeper (Rosalind Ivan)’s daughter, whom Dall falls for. Both Dall and Lorring were Oscar nominated, as Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress, but alas didn’t win and Davis’s much expected Oscar didn’t happen either as she wasn’t even nominated, to her considerable chagrin.

It was a very popular success, $1,545,000 and earning $3,649,000.

Rhys Williams, Mildred Dunnock, Arthur Shields, Gwyneth Hughes, Billy Roy and Thomas Louden co-star.

Despite the villagers being illiterate, every time a poster is put up people gather round to read it.

Lorring died on May 30 2014 in the New York City suburb of Sleepy Hollow, aged 88.

Davis and Rapper formed a bond at the time of The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), advising her to have original director William Keighley replaced by Michael Curtiz. Rapper also directed Davis in her classic 1942 soap opera Now, Voyager, ‘the picture that made me’, he said, as well as Deception (1946) and Another Man’s Poison (1951), in which Davis acts with The Corn Is Green playwright Emlyn Williams.

London-born Irving Rapper passed away on 20 December 1999, at the age of 101.

A more ideal Buckinghamshire-born Richard Waring was originally cast for the part of Morgan Evans, but was drafted into World War Two.

Warner Bros signed Dall to a contract to make The Corn Is Green but they let him go in 1946 despite his Oscar nomination and the fame the film had brought him. Rapper discovered Dall, but thought he did not have a major career and became typecast as a villain because he was ‘androgynous’ and ‘the public mood and cinema censorship of the time would not allow such an actor to be a star’. Dall is remembered as the cool-minded intellectual killer in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, the trigger-happy lead in the 1950 noir Gun Crazy and in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus.

Lorring reprised her role of Bessie Watty in a 1956 American TV movie remake with legendary stage actress Eva Le Gallienne. Wendy Hiller played Miss Lilly Moffat in a BBC Play of the Month version in 1968. The Corn Is Green was remade again for TV by director George Cukor in 1978 starring Katharine Hepburn.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1332

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Bette Davis as Miss Moffat in The Corn Is Green (1945).