A gleefully macabre and intensely suspenseful movie based on the Lillian Hellman play. Bette Davis sinks her teeth into the role of icy bitch Regina Giddens with such relish that you can practically hear her sighing with satisfaction at getting away from the noble sufferer roles that had so recently made her famous in films like "Jezebel" and "Dark Victory." She's monstrous here as the frigid wife of Herbert Marshall, waiting impatiently for him to die so that she can get her talons on his inheritance. A group of conniving brothers are trying to outsmart her and claim the inheritance for themselves, but they have no idea who they're dealing with. We ultimately can forgive Davis for her reptilian selfishness, because she's driven to it out of survival. If you want to play with the big boys, the movie seems to say, you have to learn to be one yourself.
This is a lesson her sister-in-law, Birdie, hasn't learned, and as a result is a fluttering, neurotic mess of a woman, bulldozed by her husband and supreme example of exactly the kind of woman Regina refuses to be. Birdie is played by Patricia Collinge in a devastatingly heartbreaking performance. Just watch her in the scene where her husband slaps her; you can almost literally see the life drain out of her as she accepts her misery as a cage from which she doesn't ever really hope, or feels she deserves, to escape.
And as the moral conscience of the film, Teresa Wright plays Regina's daughter, Alexandra, slow to pick up on the treacherous games her own mother is playing.
The classic scene in this film is the one in which Regina's husband actually dies. She's sitting feet away from him, watching him gasp for breath while refusing to get the medication that could save his life, and Davis's creepy, empty expression shows us just how little compassion or sympathy, or even any emotion other than greed and vengeance, remains in this grotesque, twisted creature. Marvelous!
Grade: A+
