| Bankhead and Davis re: dark victory | |
| Last Edit: Marlo*Manners 09:39 am EDT 09/12/24 | |
| Posted by: Marlo*Manners 09:31 am EDT 09/12/24 | |
| In reply to: re: dark victory - schauspieler 04:15 pm EDT 09/11/24 | |
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| "Dark Victory" (a flop) and "The Little Foxes" (a hit) were not the only Bankhead related materials that Davis appropriated for the screen. Miriam Hopkins appeared in the stage play of "Jezebel" on Broadway (a flop). (Hopkins and Davis were originally friendly - they had appeared in stock together in the late twenties - but their relationship soured over Davis' affair with Hopkins' husband Anatole Litvak. From then on bitter enemies and rivals. The hit "Jezebel" movie probably exacerbated the rivalry.) The "Jezebel" play was written as a vehicle for Bankhead but she passed. Like "Dark Victory" the source play was much improved in the Hollywood screenplay adaptation. Also, many felt, including Bankhead herself, that Davis' Margo Channing in "All About Eve" was a thinly veiled representation of Bankhead herself down to the hairstyle and volatile over the top persona. Bankhead decided to put her oar in and played Margo in a Theater Guild on the Air adaptation of the "All About Eve" film. Let's just say that Bankhead is fun but she seems a drag queen parody of Margo while Davis plays a layered person with an insecure, frightened woman under the prima donna façade. An equally legendary but more elusive actress that influenced Bette Davis and her movie roles was the ill-fated Jeanne Eagels. Many felt that Joyce Heath in "Dangerous" was a fictional "slash fiction" representation of the self-destructive Eagels. Davis won her first Academy Award for that role in 1935. Also in 1935, Davis starred in a bowdlerized adaptation of the 1914 play "The Outcast" called "The Girl from 10th Avenue" where the streetwalker heroine is changed to a low class shop girl. Jeanne Eagels had toured in "The Outcast" and her success as the redeemed prostitute (created on Broadway by Elsie Ferguson) led to her being considered for Sadie Thompson in "Rain". Leslie Crosbie in "The Letter" was a role played by Eagels in a 1929 movie just before her death. Davis appeared in the 1940 remake. Davis probably saw Eagels on the stage in the twenties. Marlo Manners (Lady Barrington) |
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| Link | Tallulah as Margo |
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