The movie Bette Davis always regretted starring in: “I begged not to play it”
Bette Davis spent most of her career fighting, and while that made her an easy target for the ‘difficult woman’ label at the time, it now makes her look like one of cinema’s greatest badasses. She spent the most prominent part of her career trapped in the studio system. Like pretty much every other star actor from the 1930s to the 1950s, she was under contract with a studio that asserted dominance over nearly every aspect of her life. In Davis’ case, the studio was Warner Bros, the scrappy one of the so-called Big Five, which included MGM, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, and RKO.
Run by Jack Warner, the studio was known for making gangster movies with its ensemble of tough in-house stars like James Cagney, George Raft, Edward G Robinson, and Humphrey Bogart. But starting with the 1932 film The Man Who Played God, Davis was Warner Bros’ most lucrative cash cow. She was tiny and had almost doll-like features, but she emanated a ‘don’t fuck with me’ attitude that could intimidated just about anyone. She was like this off-screen, too. Any time Jack Warner forced her to take a role she didn’t want, she’d let him know.
In the late ’30s, she retaliated against him for refusing to loan her out to another studio by not turning up to work and demanding that he double her salary. At the time, she was earning $1,250, which is a decent amount even by present-day standards. Things escalated when she hopped on a plane to England, signed on to a film without Warner’s consent, and ignored their threats.
She took the battle all the way to court, where she claimed to be an ‘underpaid slave’ living with a ‘life sentence’. She lost that round of the war and had to pay tens of thousands of dollars to the studio, but she would stick it to the man more successfully about a decade later because Warner made one of his worst judgment calls of her career.
In 1949, she was the highest-paid woman in the country, pulling in over $10,000 a week. But Warner still got to choose which movies she starred in, and when he cast her in Beyond the Forest, a film noir about a bored housewife who has an affair, she had had enough. She knew it was a terrible script and felt that she was too old to play the part. “I begged not to play it,” she told Johnny Carson decades later, but, as usual, he ignored her.
One of the infuriating things about Davis’ career at Warner Bros is that she was almost always right. When she refused to make a picture, it was because she knew a bad script when she saw one. The trouble was that vindication came at the expense of her reputation as an actor. Such was the case with Beyond the Forest. It was panned by critics, many of whom directly blamed her for ruining her own career by starring in it.
Finally, Warner got the memo and let her go after 18 years under contract. A year later, as one of the only freelance stars in Hollywood, she played Margo Channing in All About Eve, a role that would make her immortal in a film that went on to become the first movie to earn 14 Oscar nominations. Only two other films, Titanic and La La Land, have matched it. If there is a moral to this story, it’s that Davis really should have owned her own studio.
