• Re: Bette Davis style

    From gggg gggg@21:1/5 to luisb...@aol.com on Sun Oct 10 22:36:21 2021
    On Sunday, May 7, 2017 at 12:06:20 PM UTC-7, luisb...@aol.com wrote:
    So there was a TV show in the fifties called "Suspicion." Anyone familiar? I knew nothing about it, but it was an anthology show that Bette Davis appeared on more than once. The one I watched was called Split Second, an eerie psychological story from a
    Daphne du Murier short story about a woman (Davis) who takes her young daughter to the bus stop one morning and then returns home only to find that it's been turned into a boarding house with a set of complete strangers living in the different rooms,
    including a photographer of children and her husband. She confronts them, the cops are called, and escalating weirdness develops. All Bette Davis wants is to have her home, her daughter, and her housekeeper back--in that order. (The house is more than a
    house--it has Jungian symbolic overtones of the 'self'.) But it isn't that simple.

    This is not live TV. It's a cut show shot in LA. Evidently there was an audience for this kind of material in the late '50s. Shows about the inexplicable are rare (and, of course, Hollywood being Hollywood is DOES get explained at the end, though the
    explanation doesn't fully answer everything). Shows about the inexplicable done well are even rarer. That's what made this fairly enjoyable, if somewhat creaky.

    I found it on youtube. Production values not great, supporting players not great, Bette Davis quite good. Script gets repetitious--they had to stretch to fill the hour, I assume. But still enjoyable for its love of story, plot, and suspense.

    (Recent Youtube upload):

    Bette Davis--60 Minutes Profile, Mike Wallace--1980 TV

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