Probably a better name for this movie would have been "The Sister" as, although we are initially introduced to the three daughters of small-town pharmacist Henry Travers and his fretful wife Beulah Bondi, it pretty much concentrates on the story of the eldest sister, Louise, Bette Davis's character. The doings of the other two sisters flit in and out of the narrative, but in truth, it's pretty much all about Bette.
Adopted from a popular romantic novel of the day, the timeline is framed by the elections of the first two US presidents of the 20th Century, Teddy Roosevelt and William Taft, in 1904 and 1908, as well as bracketing the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Punctuated throughout by close-ups of introductory chapter pages from the original book, no doubt to indulge the novel's fans although possibly for expository purposes too, what we have here is a glorified period soap-opera.
It has to be said right off that the attitudes shown in the film to women are very condescending indeed. One sister enters into a loveless marriage with a wealthy older man, presumably to keep her from remaining on the shelf, the other forgives her husband for running around with another woman even as we learn that the same scarlet woman has had flings, it seems, with every other so-called respectable male in the town. Talk about sauce for the gander.
Which brings us round to Bette, who's swept off her feet by Errol Flynn's handsome, ne'er-do-well sports reporter who breezes into town to meet up with his censorious old chum played by Donald Crisp. Soon enough, the star-crossed couple marry and set out for San Francisco, but naturally Errol can't change his wicked, wicked ways and before you can say Jack Daniels, is hitting the bottle and generally wallowing in self-pity, the final straw apparently being when his long-suffering wife takes the initiative and actually gets a job to earn the money her husband is drinking away. The very thought of a woman working and being the main breadwinner in a household! It all ends up a little too happily with a patched-on ending which apparently contradicts that of the novel.
Apart from the excitingly realistic earthquake scene, a coyou ple of voguish montage sequences and chaste sister Louise's unusual encounter with the local madame, I felt that director Anatole Litvak seemed rather constrained by the confines of the source material, subsiding too easily into a cosy, episodic, linear approach to the narrative. Davis enlivens things with a typically sparky performance but Flynn somehow never seems to engage with a part that on the face of it seems to reflect some of his real-life character traits. Travers and Bondi are appealing as the girls' parents, but neither of the other two sisters or their various beaus made much of an impression on me, which perhaps explains why none of them, male or female are much remembered today.
Still, in their different ways, the star-power of Flynn and Davis goes a long way but I've seen both in better movies than this.
Adopted from a popular romantic novel of the day, the timeline is framed by the elections of the first two US presidents of the 20th Century, Teddy Roosevelt and William Taft, in 1904 and 1908, as well as bracketing the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Punctuated throughout by close-ups of introductory chapter pages from the original book, no doubt to indulge the novel's fans although possibly for expository purposes too, what we have here is a glorified period soap-opera.
It has to be said right off that the attitudes shown in the film to women are very condescending indeed. One sister enters into a loveless marriage with a wealthy older man, presumably to keep her from remaining on the shelf, the other forgives her husband for running around with another woman even as we learn that the same scarlet woman has had flings, it seems, with every other so-called respectable male in the town. Talk about sauce for the gander.
Which brings us round to Bette, who's swept off her feet by Errol Flynn's handsome, ne'er-do-well sports reporter who breezes into town to meet up with his censorious old chum played by Donald Crisp. Soon enough, the star-crossed couple marry and set out for San Francisco, but naturally Errol can't change his wicked, wicked ways and before you can say Jack Daniels, is hitting the bottle and generally wallowing in self-pity, the final straw apparently being when his long-suffering wife takes the initiative and actually gets a job to earn the money her husband is drinking away. The very thought of a woman working and being the main breadwinner in a household! It all ends up a little too happily with a patched-on ending which apparently contradicts that of the novel.
Apart from the excitingly realistic earthquake scene, a coyou ple of voguish montage sequences and chaste sister Louise's unusual encounter with the local madame, I felt that director Anatole Litvak seemed rather constrained by the confines of the source material, subsiding too easily into a cosy, episodic, linear approach to the narrative. Davis enlivens things with a typically sparky performance but Flynn somehow never seems to engage with a part that on the face of it seems to reflect some of his real-life character traits. Travers and Bondi are appealing as the girls' parents, but neither of the other two sisters or their various beaus made much of an impression on me, which perhaps explains why none of them, male or female are much remembered today.
Still, in their different ways, the star-power of Flynn and Davis goes a long way but I've seen both in better movies than this.