Winter Meeting * (1948, Bette Davis, Jim Davis, Janis Paige, John Hoyt, Florence Bates) – Classic Movie Review 2706

Director Bretaigne Windust’s 1948 movie is a ghastly romantic drama vehicle for Bette Davis. After so many brilliant movie and so many brilliant performances, this is the very kind of film that lost her her fan base and sent her career nose-diving in the Fifties and it is one of Bette’s worst movies.

In a mannered turn where you can see all the technique, she works desperately hard as spinster poetess Susan Grieve who falls for US Navy war hero Slick Novak(Jim Davis), who, it turns out is not aiming at her but at the priesthood.

Slick comes to Susan’s Manahattan apartment for a nightcap. Next morning they visit her Connecticut farm where Novak tells her he always intended to be a priest.

Catherine Turney does her best to make the dialogue-heavy, character-led screenplay work, but it really doesn’t, and lots of the lines are tedious, hard work. It might just about have worked on the page in its source novel by Ethel Vance (aka Grace Zaring Stone, or perhaps on the Broadway stage familiar to the director, but then again it might not.

It all depends on the chemistry between the two stars, but Jim [James] Davis (no relation to Bette), who played patriarch Jock Ewing in the TV series Dallas three decades later, is uncomfortable and wooden as leading man in a romantic drama here. And Windust kicks up no dust as director. Only Bette and her theatrical, histrionic performance stop it from being actually boring, but it comes close.

Bette picked Jim Davis out of 14 actors considered for the role. New York theatre director Windust was hired because of his intimate knowledge of the Manhattan social scene, but Bette felt that he was responsible for her leading man’s lacklustre performance.

‘Because of the over-analytical approach of Bretaigne Windust,’ she said, ‘Jim Davis never again during filming showed any signs of the character he portrayed in the test that made me want him for the part. No help I tried to give him could offset the effect of the detailed direction of Windust. He was lost and openly admitted it.’

Also in the cast are Janis Paige, John Hoyt, Florence Bates, Walter Baldwin, Ransom Sherman, Hugh Charles, George Taylor, Lois Austin, Douglas Carter, Russ Clark, Mike Lally, Harry Lewis, Paul Maxey, Robert Riordan, Laura Treadwell, Leo White and Cedric Stevens.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2706

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