While they are dealing with this nightmarishly demanding house-guest, Maggie falls in love with Bert, a local newspaperman and aspiring dramatist she agrees to marry him and promises she will show his latest play to Sheridan. She is Maggie Cutler, a self-effacing spinster who is assistant to a preening critic called Sheridan Whiteside who, while on a national lecture tour, slips on the ice and breaks his hip outside the house of a prominent local family, and then persuades them to let him to stay with them while he recuperates. This screwball romp, adapted from the Moss Hart-George Kaufman stage play, gave Davis a rare outing in the world of comedy. His confrontation with his wife causes violence and a political scandal, leaving Davis endowed with an aura of martyred innocence and romance. Her employer, the Duc de Praslin (Boyer), tormented by his unhappy marriage, falls in love with this sweet-natured young woman, whom his children adore. Davis hits her mousy, gentle, submissive persona (so different from her sardonic villainess style) to play a governess, Henriette. The exquisitely handsome and sonorous Charles Boyer is a great pairing for Davis in this true story from pre-revolutionary 1840s France, although maybe these two stars are too similar in their diva-like self-consciousness to be a really great screen romance. Davis’s Carlota has a desperate, hysterical moment as she returns to Paris to persuade Napoleon to change his mind.īette Davis in a studio portrait from the early 1930s. But this brings Maximilian and Carlota into conflict with the Mexican populist Benito Juaréz, played by Paul Muni, whose American-backed army induces Napoleon to withdraw French forces, leaving the pathetic puppet king and queen exposed. She has no less a title than Queen Carlota of Mexico, the wife of the 19th-century Austrian Archduke Maximilian (Brian Aherne), who has been installed as Mexico’s monarch by Napoleon III (Claude Rains). Here was a queenly role for Davis in her “melodrama” phase, giving plenty of scope for portraying hauteur, neurosis and an embattled, tragic sense of entitlement. Guinness plays a timid Englishman who finds he has an exact double – a mysterious French count who switches places with him and forces him to deal with his family, including the inevitable cantankerous countess (Davis), who is deeply suspicious at her son’s unfathomable new behaviour. Working with Alec Guinness and the distinguished British director Robert Hamer in this Daphne du Maurier adaptation, Davis gives us one of her ripest bedridden roles, but with some great staircase work when she wants to come down to make an entrance in the drawing room. Photograph: Richter/Cinetext/Allstar/MGM 18. Davis as the cantankerous countess in The Scapegoat, with Alec Guinness.

This 'n That by Bette Davis