Bette Davis, The Star

The challenge in digesting a performance like Bette Davis' in The Star lies in the fact that it inherently conflicts with two dimensions of who I am as an individual. A moviegoer with a more modernist, art house-leaning eye might view Davis' performance as a relic of its time, one riddled with such grossly melodramatic narrative devices that it veers into farcical parody. A more lax moviegoer (dare I say, of the homosexual variety) might see Davis' performance as a fun, campy joyride - the film a befitting vehicle for an inherently dramatic diva to showcase all the qualities to which her fandom admires her for.

One can't fully appreciate a Bette Davis film if one does not bear a certain threshold for high drama. Sometimes, Davis straddles this threshold with expert balance, creating performances that subsist beautifully with her larger-than-life persona. Other times, Davis comes in with so much audaciousness that she ricochets far beyond this threshold, blurring the line between what is good and what is bad. Her work in The Star most certainly falls into the latter bucket. The film itself is a poorly written bastard child to All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard, complete with a narrative which layers on so many gimmicks that the end result is something of a fever dream, one as joyously campy as it is an opportune breeding ground for Davis to run amok with her more exaggerated thesping tendencies. To give you a gauge of how histrionic this film is: Davis' Margaret Elliott starts yelling at her agent around the two minute mark of the film, which, if you discount fifty seconds of opening credits, means she goes out guns ablazing with just over a minute of screentime.

Screenwriters Dale Eunson and Katherine Albert reportedly modeled the lead character after Joan Crawford. Watching the film with that context, it seems as though their modus operandi was to stack the story with as many opportunities to humiliate the actress as feasibly possible. The film essentially boils down to an hour-and-a-half of Davis reacting to an endless stream of unfortunate events inflicted upon her character, a woman who flirts with Norma Desmond-esque levels of delusion. Eunson and Albert have Davis undergo a number of outrageous scenarios - from driving drunk whilst providing a scrappy Starline tour to her Oscar statuette, to being jailed overnight for DUI, to shoplifting a bottle of perfume out of erratic impulse, to working as a lingerie saleslady at a department store only quit after she bitches out two elderly customers, to insisting on playing "sexy" during an audition for a supporting role in a film because she's convinced that her sexiness will land her the younger lead part instead, Davis does all of the above while chewing just about as much scenery as one could possibly expect with such material, all the while barking that she's a star and how dare you not know who she is.

To say that this is a lot to handle is an understatement, and it's almost a shame to witness an actress of Davis' stature submit herself to this sort of garbage, especially when you consider that she most likely felt this to be substantial, quality material at the time. I say that it's "almost" a shame because, as absurd as it all ends up being, it is still highly watchable. While the film likely believed itself to be an allegory of the darker side of fame and celebrity, it is so far removed from reality that one can't really view it with a serious eye, as that would take away some of the pleasure of watching Davis (who is completely committed to the role, if anything else) play out what is essentially Lindsay Lohan's entire career post-Mean Girls.

Her mother-daughter subplot with a young Natalie Wood (who is flat-out awful, by the way), while  unnecessary, gives Margaret some much needed warmth, especially considering she spends the entire film so stubbornly delusional that it often makes it difficult for the viewer to like her. Her diva fits, of which there are many, are drenched in ego and almost read as though she's breaking the fourth wall to the viewer ("Well if you're a star, you never stop being a star," and "you don't win an Academy Award for nothing," may as well have been accompanied with winks). Her screen test scene is one of the most perplexing acting moments I've ever witnessed from her - is it horribly cringeworthy? Expertly realized in how cringeworthy it is? Both? That scene, packaged together with the scene in which she watches said screen test, are the zenith and nadir of The Star.

She is turbulent. She is over-the-top. She is affected. She is jarring. But damn it all to hell if she doesn't show up, ready to throw down with her signature Bette Davis panache. This very panache, layered with ego, is what makes her a sure-fire entertainer, even when she's entertaining for the wrong reasons. Ultimately, that's what keeps me from outright hating The Star.