federovsky Bette Davis is trouble looking for a target. A Richmond girl bored with her declining family, running off with her sister's husband is only the beginning as she leaves a generally destructive trail behind her, though it's more recklessness than malice.As with The Little Foxes, the film links immorality and economics. Davis is aligned more with her shrewd businessman uncle - and a pretty lewd relationship that is - than with her own father, whose escutcheon, at the beginning, we see knocked off their former home. Davis may overdo it a tad with the wide-eyed hysteria but she's given the dramatic leeway - everyone else is rigid - and she's pure entertainment. Good sister Olivia de Havilland has a relatively dull part but makes something quite beautiful out of it.It's obscure to everyone why the two women have man's names (Stanley and Roy) and it certainly creates an odd effect. Huston's directing is immaculate, craftsmanlike, crisp and disciplined. The music is a also feature. If Davis isn't sashaying to the jukebox and the Victrola, she's being smothered by Max Steiner's symphonic score that has a fateful down-stepping motif like a staircase to hell.In the best Warners style it takes you by the lapels, slaps you about a bit, and pushes you back into a chair.

Claudio Carvalho In Richmond, after the Great Depression, the industrialist Asa Timberlake (Frank Craven) is cheated by his brother-in-law and partner William Fitzroy (Charles Coburn) and loses his business to him. His spoiled daughter Stanley Timberlake (Bette Davis), who is the pride and joy of William, is going to marry the idealist lawyer Craig Fleming (George Brent). However, she flees to Baltimore with the surgeon Peter Kingsmill (Dennis Morgan), who is the husband of her sister Roy Timberlake (Olivia de Havilland). After a short period of happiness, Peter cannot afford to support the shopping of Stanley and commits suicide. Meanwhile Roy divorces from Peter and gets close to Craig that proposes to marry her. The black teenager Parry Clay (Ernest Anderson) that worked to Timberlake, dreams in becoming a lawyer, and Craig hires him to work in his office. Stanley returns home and unsuccessfully tries to seduce Craig, inviting him to have dinner with her in a tavern. However Craig does not show up and the upset Stanley drives back home at high speed. She hits and run a mother and her daughter and kills the girl. When the police comes to Asa's house, Stanly accuses Parry of driving her car and the youth is arrested and put in jail. What will happen to the innocent Parry?"In This Our Life" is a film directed by John Huston about a selfish and evil woman. His tight direction saves the dramatic and tense story from becoming a melodramatic soap opera. Bette Davis steals the show with a fantastic performance. The rest of the cast is also magnificent. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): "Nascida para o Mal" ("Born to the Evil")

calvinnme ...regardless of how badly and wildly you behave. That's probably why Davis' character, Stanley, always has to be dancing or listening to music or doing something. She dare not be left alone with her thoughts or her conscience. So at first, you think you are watching the story of a woman who has never grown up, who is emotionally two, who wants what she wants when she wants it. Instead, you are watching a layered tale in which an American film does something rare during WWII - it airs the nation's dirty laundry, such as institutionalized racism and how cheaters do prosper and often did during the Great Depression, and even some implied incest. Let me explain. Olivia de Havilland plays Stanley's sister Roy (nobody ever comments on the odd sisters' names). Stanley runs away with Roy's husband (Dennis Morgan), leaving behind a perfectly serviceable fiancé (George Brent,) and then drives Morgan's character to suicide. Meanwhile Roy takes up with Stanley's old boy friend. They become engaged. And even though it was Stanley who destroyed Roy's marriage and ultimately Roy's husband, Roy brings her back home after the suicide. Then Stanley gets ideas she can get her old fiancé away from Roy, After all, she has done this before.The girls' parents are a broken-down business man (Frank Craven) and an invalid mother (Billie Burke). Craven has been cheated out of the family business by his partner and brother in law (Charles Coburn) who seems to have an awfully familiar relationship with Stanley, as in he seems to want more than just daughterly love from her. Blech. Stanley seems to get her "it's okay to rob from family with a song in your heart" ideas from her uncle, but in the end, even the uncle sees Stanley's real face. She is really not there for anybody. She could have easily coined the phrase "What have you done for me lately?", and good riddance if the answer is nothing.So reckless driver Stanley mows down a mother and child on her way back home from a tavern where her old boyfriend Brent has stood her up, just like he said he would in the first place. She then panics and just drives straight home. When the police come calling, she blames the accident on the housekeeper's son (Ernest Anderson), whom she claimed borrowed her car. This is where the racism angle comes in. Anderson's character tells Brent that the police do not care what he has to say. Because of his race they would always take Stanley's word over his own. His mother (Hattie McDaniel) backs up her son's story, so Roy and Brent start to dig around and find out the truth.This may be Davis' most unsympathetic role. The entire cast is quite good and the story is fast paced. Walter Huston, Lee Patrick, Mary Servoss, and William Davidson co-star. Anderson was particularly good in a very atypically humanizing role for an African American in 1942. His character wants to be a lawyer, and his speech about why he wants to be a lawyer is particularly insightful dialogue for its time. He says that a white kid can take any job and work his way up, but a black kid can either keep a job or lose a job. So he wants to be an attorney, something that cannot be taken away from him...in Virginia...in the 1940's. Bette didn't like this one, but it is one of my favorite Bette Davis films after she hit stardom.This is Bette's movie all the way. Say did you notice that the same Ernest Anderson who is the wrongly accused housekeeper's son sells ice cream to Baby Jane Hudson in "WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?". Check that out. Don't tell me Bette didn't have anything to do with that casting.

tieman64 "Your creeds are dead, your rites are dead, your social order too! Where tarries he, the Power who said: See, I make all things new?" – Matthew Arnold Ellen Glasgow's novel, "In This Our Life", opens with the above quotation from Matthew Arnold's 1867 poem, "Obermann Once More". Read that quote again, because it sums up John Huston's filmography perfectly and perhaps highlights best what attracted the director to Glasgow's novel.Surprisingly, however, Huston's film completely revokes the tone of Glasgow's novel in favour for super melodrama. This is Douglas Sirk or Max Ophuls territory, Huston laying on the melodrama fast and thick.Beneath the schmaltz (and the interferences of the Hollywood Production Code, which pandered to the anticipated preferences of white audiences to such an extent that Glasgow's intelligent novel is supremely butchered) one can nevertheless tease out the usual Huston themes. Here we have the birth of the "new southern social order", Huston helming one of the very first films in which a black character is presented in a relatively complex light (or rather, in a role other than comic buffoon, fat mama, salivating animal or domesticated servant).The black character in this case is Parry Clay, an African American youth who is blamed for a hit-and-run accident on a child. The real murderer, however, is a character called Stanley Timberlake, a wealthy white woman who employs Parry as a law clerk. Of course, eventually the truth comes out, Parry is released and Stanley attempts to flee. She runs for it, is pursued by the police, and dies in an auto wreck. Poetic justice.Hilariously, the production code required Stanley's death not because of her false statements, lies, or hit-and-run accident, but because she wrecks her sister's marriage. In the novel, Stanley remains alive, proof of how hard it will be for the New South to overcome the white prerogatives of the Old South. Huston fought hard for this ending, but of course didn't have enough clout (this was his second film as director) to win such a battle.The film's other big flaw is this: Glasgow's novel wasn't a melodrama, but a stream-of-consciousness war between a black family and a white family (the Clays and the Timberlakes). For a novel to give equal consideration to a white and black family was unheard of at the time (people preferred Margaret Mitchell's racist, yet Pulitzer winning, "Gone with the Wind"). Huston's film, however, doesn't heed Glasgow's narrative structure and instead relegates the Clays to the peripheries of the action. "In This Our Life" therefore became just another in a long line of flicks which diminish the African-American experience by making it a footnote in the white experience. Huston tries to make up for this by having Bette Davis, who stars as Stanley Timberlake, play Stanley as though she is "telling the truth". The idea here is to manipulate white audiences to "look on" as the race-rationalising white community would. This helps the film somewhat, but it's not enough.7/10 – Bette Davis is great at performing these larger than life devil women. She's always entertaining. The rest of the film, though well meaning, is bogged down by hokey on screen melodrama and off screen concessions. It would take directors like Fuller and Lumet to further chisel away at Hollywood's "racism" (too strong a word, I know), before exploitation cinema, a product of various civil rights movements, kicked the last bastions of the old order down. Of course a new order was quickly built right back up. But that's another story.Worth one viewing.