Der Stachel des Bösen

I have seen this film many times and it never fails to get me in. I am also aware of all the negative reviews it has received with plenty of trash talk using terms such as 'banal', 'overblown' and 'incredibly artificial'. But one description is definitely a backhanded compliment "One of the most enjoyable bad movies ever made".

Anyway, who cares about all that, beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all.

Recently - instead of getting a life - I watched three Bette Davis movies in one weekend: "All About Eve", "The Letter" and "Beyond the Forest". She was different in each one. Bette Davis had such a distinctive personality that it would be easy to think she just played herself in film after film, but not so. Her Rosa Moline in "Beyond the Forest" is a one-off; I don't think she ever played any other role that way again. Some say she was sending herself up. Apparently she didn't want to play the part and maybe her bad mood helped shape her character.

I couldn't help thinking of "Madam Bovary" as I watched this film about a woman who leaves her husband to chase her dream. In Madam Bovary's case the dream was a romantic one; in Rosa's, the dream is more superficial; in both cases the dream turns into a nightmare.

Rosa is married to the nice Doctor Lewis Moline (Joseph Cotton), but to her he is just poor and boring. Lewis is the respected doctor in the Wisconsin mill town where they live. Rosa latches onto Neil Latimer (David Brian), a rich businessman from Chicago, and plans to dump Lewis. He is about the only person in town who can't see through her, even their young Indian maid, Jenny (Dona Drake), has her measure. The scenes between Rosa and Jenny are very funny - the film needed a light touch to relieve the angst. It all ends in tears of course, played out in the flickering light of the massive incinerator that dominates the town.

Bette Davis thought she was too old for the part, but doesn't that make her character just that much more pathetic? She feels life has passed her by, and she is making a last desperate grab for what she thinks she deserves.

Much of the film was shot on location and has a rich look. Max Steiner contributed a powerful score, incorporating the melody "Chicago"; the theme for Rosa's yearning. His music actually has sympathy for Rosa; it understands her, even as it accompanies her to the inevitable tragedy.

"Beyond the Forest" is a movie where everything is larger than life, including the emotions. I still think it is fantastic cinema.

Only Bette Davis (along with Joan Crawford) could take a trashy film and make it absolutely compelling. No, this isn't a good movie, probably not even a fair movie but oh, Bette, you make it all worthwhile.

Bette wears the worst wig of her career, some really surrealistic make-up and was years too old for the part......so what?? When she delivers those famous lines "What a dump", you could jump for joy. This is Davis at her campiest and you can bet she knew it.

The story line is fairly simple. A small town bitch wants to be a big city bitch and takes a lover to attain that goal. She couldn't care less that she has a husband, played by Joseph Cotton, when she sets her sights for the boyfriend played by that perpetually bland actor David Brian. All hell breaks loose as Davis chews up the scenery and her fellow actors. The final scene as Davis drags herself to the train station is the raison d'etre for the cult following that has developed around this film. It is a film lovers delight. She was some dame!!!

It was interesting seeing this soon after seeing The Man Who Wasn't There, the Coen brothers would-be 40s film-noir. Both movies are set in small towns, have way-out plots involving violent crime and illicit love, and feature main protagonists trying to get out of a rut. But whereas the Coens' nouveau-noir plays it deadpan, philosophical and slow, and thereby risks boring the audience stiff; the genuine article with King Vidor at the helm, races along, goes way over the top, and glues the viewer to the screen.

Melodramatic and flawed though it may be, I don't go along with those who regard the movie merely as a camp vehicle for some arch Bette Davis overacting as the "evil" Rosa Moline. This film has genuine substance and potency, and Hedda Gabler-like Rosa's near-hysterical exasperation with the suffocating small town atmosphere - symbolised by the ever-present smoke and dust from the local sawmill - and with her dull, worthy, medico husband (Joseph Cotton), must have rung a bell with many American and other women in the stifling post-war years. Her "What a dump!" quite probably echoed their inner thoughts, as may her reluctance to have a baby (contrasted in the film with another woman's eighth, delivered by the good doctor). Moreover, despite Davis playing a woman at least 10 years younger than her actual age, her scenes with David Brian as her wealthy lover are truly erotic, and some of the lines may raise eyebrows even today.

Those who dismiss this film should perhaps give it another chance, try to place it in the context of its era, and possibly ponder on how some of the "cool" masterpieces of today will be viewed by their grandchildren in 50 years time.

Bette Davis gave many great performances, but she did not make many great films or work with many truly great directors (with the exception of William Wyler & Joseph L. Mankiewicz). King Vidor ranks as one of Bette Davis' greatest directors and Beyond the Forest is her most underrated film (another underrated film is The Private Lives of Elizabeth & Essex, directed by the superb technician Michael Curtiz). The eminent film critic Pauline Kael wrote that "there's not a sane dull scene in this peerless piece of camp." And I agree that this film is never boring. It has elements of film noir, melodrama, comedy and stands the test of time, as it is not sentimental like so many of Bette's soap operas (The Great Lie is a great bore). I challenge anyone to watch this film and be bored by it. Impossible. It starts off slowly, but after the first 20 minutes, it is compulsively watchable: a hoot! And although Bette in her later years said she "loathed" this film, it is clear that she relished the part of Rosa Moline and was living the part as she played it. She poured into the part all of the frustration & fury with Jack Warner and the studio for giving her bad roles & bad scripts, her own fears of aging after she had her baby and she was no longer box office, and all the emotional turmoil (both the sexual electricity & the physical & verbal abuse) of her marriage to William Grant Sherry. Ruth Roman (who played a small role in this film) said that she watched Bette on set and it was all too REAL for her that she was terrified of Bette. And indeed, this is one of Bette's most real performances, however over the top it may be. Rosa Moline is a precursor to Margo Channing in All About Eve, yet I find Beyond the Forest more interesting because King Vidor is more of a stylist than Joseph L. Mankiewicz. All About Eve is theatrical, not cinematic; Beyond the Forest is pure cinema. Savor every frame of this fading femme fatale in this film noir farce. You will laugh at Rosa, be moved by her, feel sorry for her, but ultimately admire her for her courage, pride & determination. She was just a dame who was trying to get out of her own personal prison & hell.

Is BEYOND THE FOREST an overripe and over-the-top potboiler or a potent, underrated film noir? Both, actually, with an emphasis on the latter. This is film noir's MADAME BOVARY wherein a provincial housewife's romantic fantasies and big city dreams bring tragedy to everyone in her orbit and it's the "twisted sister" of Vincente Minnelli's ode to Flaubert's driven, deluded anti-heroine, released the same year. Nineteen forty-nine was the year of the desperate housewife in Hollywood- in addition to Bette Davis & Jennifer Jones, there's also Audrey Totter in TENSION and Lizabeth Scott in TOO LATE FOR TEARS, postwar noir women who "expect and demand a better life and plan to achieve it by any means necessary".

Forty year-old Bette Davis "with her low-cut peasant blouses, long black wig, and carmine lips" is unquestionably miscast but, like the film itself, that actually works in a perverted sort of way. If Virginia Mayo had been cast (Davis actually lobbied for her), it would have begged the question, "why doesn't this beautiful girl just hop a bus to New York or Hollywood or something?" but with a not-so-young-anymore Rosa -out of options and rapidly running out of time- there's a palpable sense of entrapment as the irrational resentments that have simmered for far too long are ready to erupt. Still, the movie also has its amusing aspects and you can't help but smile as Rosa sashays down the street and all the men stop and stare. How could a past-her-prime, dimestore siren like that keep Joseph Cotten and David Brian in such thrall? Why, sex of course. Rosa no doubt did things in bed they couldn't get enough of, much like the hold Wallis Simpson had over the Duke of Windsor. The crime of Rosa Moline was similar to that of Phyllis Hochen in THE UNHOLY WIFE (desperate for a way out, she ends up shooting her husband's best friend) and from the overblown opening prologue scroll to the mounting hysteria and rampant symbols of Hell that culminate in a "shocking conclusion", Vidor's "Bovary" casts a spell as well. Written off as a "camp classic" for years, BEYOND THE FOREST has been reassessed of late:

Bette Davis tires of life married to a small-town doctor, so she takes off to Chicago for an affair, hopping the most monstrously phallic train in film history. Her frenzied performance is met on the other side of the camera by director King Vidor, who matches her excesses shot for shot. The "What a dump!" line quoted in WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? originates here, though it's actually one of the film's more naturalistic moments. Much of Vidor's late work flirts dangerously with camp; this 1949 effort, I'm afraid, frequently succumbs, though it has a weird kind of power and integrity. With Joseph Cotten and David Brian. -Dave Kehr

BEYOND THE FOREST, with its main character's dissatisfaction with small- town middle-class morality, its big-city expressionistic mise-en-scène, and Davis, with the most extreme portrayal of a malignant bitch of the forties, we have a work that is firmly rooted in the tradition of film noir...this paean to amour fou is one of the most operatic of all films noirs -at once both moralistic and obdurate, grandly emotive, overbearing, and magnificent. -The American Film Noir

A TV perennial back in the day, legal hassles prevent King VIdor's unsung noir from being shown today. As of this writing, it's not in the Warner Archives and TCM hasn't aired it in well over a decade. That's a shame.