Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Three Review: The Old Maid

No matter how wildly the theme of TCM's Summer Under Stars varies from year to year, one thing remains the same: they will always, without exception, devote a day to at least one of the following five actors: Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, James Stewart, Cary Grant, or Humphrey Bogart. (This year, they're featuring four, with only Hepburn left out.) The reasoning behind this is pretty obvious -- although TCM doesn't depend on advertising dollars to sustain itself, it does, like any television channel, depend on viewers, and the average person is more likely to stop and watch Katharine Hepburn in The Philadephia Story than, say, Maureen O'Sullivan in Anna Karenina, or even Greta Garbo in Anna Karenina. Garbo's name has survived; her visage, less so. In the case of the five actors mentioned above, their names and their faces have persevered, and all of them made films that even the most casual viewer might want to see: Woman of the Year; All About Eve; Vertigo; To Catch a Thief; Casablanca. They also all had personas bigger than themselves, personas that over the years made them into cultural icons, so that even a guy who typically doesn't like "old movies" might see Bogart's face and think, "This is going to be about gangsters. I'll watch it." As nice as it might be to have an entire month dedicated to people like Jean Gabin and Lon Chaney, viewership would almost certainly go down.

Which is not to say I'm disappointed they dedicated the third day of August to Bette Davis. I never mention Davis when asked about my favorite classic actors, but that's only because I assume that liking her is a given. Of course I like Bette Davis. Most people like Bette Davis. (I say "most" because I, for one, would not want to be lumped into the assertion that "everybody" likes Cary Grant, or "everybody" likes Gene Kelly.) I would say that Davis is my favorite of the actors listed above, and when I sit down to watch one of her movies, I feel safe in assuming that she'll be good in it and that, at the very least, I'll be entertained.

The Old Maid does nothing to dispute that assumption. Adapted from a short story by Edith Wharton, it tells the story of two cousins, Charlotte and Delia (Davis and Miriam Hopkins), looking for husbands during the early days of the Civil War. Delia marries for money, setting herself up comfortably for life, but when Charlotte becomes pregnant by one of Delia's former suitors, she finds her own chances for marriage greatly diminished (the former suitor, of course, falls victim to one of the great classic film plot devices and DIES IN THE WAR.) The rest of the story is typical women's film fare: Charlotte attempts to raise her daughter Tina on her own, but knowing she is setting up the child to be shunned by society, she eventually moves in with her cousin and allows Delia to become Tina's mother, relegating herself to the position of the old maid aunt. Commence Charlotte's tableau of self-sacrifice.

The Old Maid is a good film, but it's not great. Both Davis and Hopkins outshine the material, which seems to spend more time skipping ahead through the decades, turning Charlotte's hair grey and bringing her daughter from pigtails to high heels, than it does showing what happens during the years in between. No really satisfactory explanation is given as to why Charlotte feels she has to go to such an extreme in making herself an old maid, nor does Delia ever truly establish herself as an antagonist -- she's tricky, manipulating Charlotte through ostensibly "kind" acts, but she's an angel in comparison to the selfish characters Hopkins plays in The Heiress and The Children's Hour. The film can't seem to decide whether Delia is the ultimate in passive-aggressive villainy, or simply latching on to chances to help herself at the same time she helps her cousin. In the final scene, when she instructs Tina to save her very last kiss for Charlotte on her wedding day, it's hard to say for sure whether she is being kind or once again manipulating her cousin, knowing that with both of their children married off, they'll only have each other for company for the rest of their lives.

This is where I should probably talk about how Davis and Hopkins hated each other in real life; how Davis slept with Hopkins' husband, the director Anatole Litvak; how Hopkins did everything she could to upstage Davis in their scenes together, down to messing with her makeup so she would appear younger in the scenes where Charlotte and Delia have aged; but the same story comes up every time anyone talks about The Old Maid, and I don't have anything new to add to it. Davis and Hopkins did hate each other, but both Davis and Hopkins hated many of their costars, and both had reputations for being difficult on set. Both were also excellent actresses (even Davis admitted as much), and in the end, The Old Maid probably benefitted from their rivalry, infusing every scene between Charlotte and Delia with an undercurrent of dislike and mistrust.

Grade: A-