Ava Gardner, vividly

In contrast to my little rant of the other day where I claimed that Bette Davis looked wrong and just plain weird in color photographs, here are several of another icon of classic Hollywood.  No competition to Miss Davis in the acting department, but the beautiful Ava Gardner looked just as gorgeous in color - still photography or film - as she did in black and white.  If not more so.

Not my Bette Davis

Bette Davis had a face designed for black and white film; she only really exists in our consciousness as a black and white image.  But here are some of the fairly rare color photographs of the actress taken in the Forties and Fifties.  (I trust that the images that I've included here are from actual color photographs and not just the cheesy "colorized" images with which the internet is rife.  Ugh.)

I'm sorry but, though there's nothing really wrong with these pictures, she doesn't look like herself; something's off.  To me, she just looks weird.

Of course, sometimes that's the point.

Bette Davis, two sittings by Hurrell, 1938 and 1939

Bette Davis' Face: Mr. Skeffington, 1944

French poster for the film.  The French title translates as, "woman, loved and always pretty".

We recently re-watched Bette Davis and - the always wonderful - Claude Rains in Mr. Skeffington, a pretty good, fairly effective film, which still comes close to being ruined by inept direction and the ferociously overactive scoring by the usually brilliant Franz Waxman.  Davis plays the eternally young Fanny Trellis Skeffington through four decades and I don't know what's more fascinating, discerning the efforts of the make-up, hair, and costume departments to turn Davis into the standardized "great beauty" the role calls for, or her high-pitched, fluttery impersonation of a dim-wit.  I think they all pull it off, brilliantly.

But in the third act, when Fanny comes down with a pesky little case of diphtheria which annihilates her famous beauty, and she has to resort to the extremist of "extreme make-overs"... well, that's when the fun really begins.

I mean, what other actress of Hollywood's "Golden Age" would allow herself to look like this on screen?

The madness of Empress Carlota, cinematic and otherwise

Juarez, 1939.  Bette Davis as Mexico's ill-starred Empress Carlota, now returned to Europe and lost to the mental illness - paranoid schizophrenia? - that would persist for the rest of her long life.  I think this is the perfect Old Hollywood visual representation of high-tone "madness".

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Of course, there was a real-life Carlota, born Charlotte of Belgium (Marie Charlotte Amélie Augustine Victoire Clémentine Léopoldine; June 7, 1840, Brussels – January 19, 1927, Meise).  A Belgian princess, she married an Austrian archduke, and became empress of Mexico.

Never a particularly attractive personality, restless and ambitious, Princess Charlotte was fully invested in her husband Archduke Maximilian's rash decision to assume the rule of a vast ungovernable foreign country.  As the Mexican Empire inevitably began to collapse, Carlota returned to Europe to plead for her husband's cause, first in Paris - the French Emperor Napoleon III had been the instigator of the "Mexican Adventure" - then in Vienna, and finally at the Vatican, where the extreme strain she had been under resulted in a complete mental collapse.  She was declared insane and spent the rest of her life under guardianship, secluded at Miramar Castle in Trieste, and then at the Castle of Bouchout in Meise, Belgium.  She lived to the age of eighty-six.

A very rare photograph of Carlota in old age, with her attendants.

The Empress Carlota on her death bed.

On the subject of Bette Davis and lace

In one of my favorite of her roles, that of the icily greedy Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes, 1941.  Her beautifully feminine exterior hides a fierce ambition.

Bette Davis was a fairly ferocious character - both on-screen and off - and not the sort that one would expect to find lavishly swathed in lace, that most delicately feminine and ephemeral of materials. And yet, in some of her best, most memorable roles, she was costumed in lavish amounts of the stuff - always to dramatic effect.  Sometimes the lace signals the fragile nature of the part she was playing but, most often, I find it's employed to make an ironic visual contrast with the steely drive of those most iconic of the Davis roles.

In Juarez, 1939, Davis played the neurotic, unstable Empress Carlotta of Mexico.  (With Brian Aherne as the Emperor Maximilian.)

In most of her scenes, she wears a trailing veil of some sort, alone or attached to a hat.  Often lace - both light
and dark -they seem to indicate both her emotional delicacy and her increasing detachment from reality.

By her frilly, sequined lace dress - not to mention the feather aigrette and fan - her Fanny Trellis
in Mr. Skeffington, 1944, is shown to be the silly, vain and thoughtless woman she is.

In The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, 1939, the heavy, stiffened lace is used not only to exemplify the extravagant
display of Davis' Elizabeth I, but to give us an idea of the vanity and insecurity of the aging, unbeautiful queen.

In two of her best known films, the material in question becomes an actual plot device.  On a whim, her fiery, contrary Julie Marsden in Jezebel, 1938, refuses to wear this beautiful, frothy white lace gown to the Olympus Ball.  She wears a red satin one instead, causing a scandal and in the process losing her fiancé, played by Henry Fonda.  Later in the film, she tries to win him back by wearing the abandoned gown and throwing herself at him; she finds his new wife a major stumbling block to the planned reunion.

Uh, but no, this is not how it turned out for Julie and her "Pres"; only in the happy world of the publicity photograph.

And in The Letter, 1940, both the light-filtering properties of lace and its intricately patterned and web-like nature seem to indicate the flawed psychological restraint of the film's protagonist.  The self-contained, ladylike murderess Leslie Crosbie actually makes lace and, after her death, a shot of her abandoned lacework is one of the last images in the film.