Flor marchita

Get out your handkerchiefs! Bette Davis, the queen of black-and-white tearjerkers, outdoes herself in The Old Maid. I dare anyone to make it through this classic without bawling. Bette Davis starts the movie in love with her cousin's fiancé, George Brent. Her frivolous cousin, Miriam Hopkins, got tired of waiting for George to come home from the war, so she marries someone else. When George comes back and finds out, he's devastated but gets comforted by Bette. He was her favorite leading man, after all.

Years later, George has died in battle and Bette never remarried. She runs an orphanage for children whose fathers died in the war, in order to hide her own illegitimate daughter from George. When Miriam, now a widow as well, comes with her own little girl and lives with Bette, a bedroom ritual starts. Miriam's daughter says, "Goodnight Mummy. Goodnight Aunt Charlotte," to Bette. Bette's daughter starts saying it, too. It pains Bette terribly to hear her child call Miriam "Mummy", let alone to be called "Aunt Charlotte." I'm sure you can imagine the tearjerker scenes that follow.

I always said it was a tragedy that Bette didn't win her Oscar for this movie. At the Hot Toasty Rag, she was the one and only person to gain a triple nomination in the same category. In 1939, she was nominated for Dark Victory, The Old Maid, and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, winning the Rag for the latter. While she absolutely deserved a Rag for playing Aunt Charlotte, her performance as Queen Elizabeth was remarkable.

If you like sacrificing mother stories like Stella Dallas, you'll love this one. You'll get to see some beautiful costumes, great age makeup on the leading ladies as the story travels through the decades, and you'll go through at least one box of Kleenexes as Bette tears up your heart. And if you like the dynamic of Bette and Miriam fighting over the same man, check out their follow-up Old Acquaintance.

A soap opera from 1939 starring Bette Davis & Miriam Hopkins. In the lead up to the Civil War, one of a pair female cousins is about to marry when her old beau shows up. Davis, the loyal one (who also carries a torch for the jilted suitor), rushes to the train station to break the bad news to him. When the war breaks out, Davis feeling the now available man is fair game starts to see him & as he leaves to the war & tragically dies there, we find out she was pregnant by him & decides to mask the potentially scandalous offspring among a throng of war orphans which she is in charge of. Hopkins, the other cousin, discovers this & fearing her kin may become a social pariah decides to take her daughter as her own to raise along w/her brood (her husband has passed on since the end of the war) making her think Davis is an aunt rather than her own mother. Davis, ever the selfless one (I guess self crucifixion was considered taboo in those days), agrees to the ruse & has to bite her tongue as she has to see her child raised by her scheming cousin only letting out the occasion outburst when she finds any fault in her 'niece's' deportment. There's a lot of suffering for suffering's sake occurring when all Davis had to do was probably move away w/her child rather than endure such an unspeakable act of betrayal but she agreed to it & to a certain extent, we the audience have as well as we swallow this foulness whole all for the sake of shedding some precious tears.

With Warner Bros. studio chief Jack L. Warner himself in charge of the production, "The Old Maid" is a fine example of what that studio's "stock company" was able to produce in the late '30s and early '40s. Here is Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, assisted by George Brent and Donald Crisp acting up a storm a very soapy piece of melodrama, and making it all very engrossing. Based on Zoe Akins' Pulitzer Prize play and Edith Wharton's novel, this drama of sacrifice, deception, and raging emotions is given a superlative treatment by this impressive company. The film even has the services of Max Steiner's score, underlying every scene with original and adapted source material. Edmund Goulding's direction is sure-footed and he has managed to curb histrionic accesses of the two stars nicely; their acting is quite restrained, yet powerful. Whatever sparks flew between the two ladies off-screen may be justified by what on-screen legacy is left for all to appreciate. Further, the drama depicts the limited and restrictive social/class mores of the period, undoubtedly imported from strict European values.

This film would be just another period melodrama: over-scored,sugar-coated, and glossy-slick (especially for a Warners' film) -- except for two things: Bette Davis and Bette Davis.

Bette is truly a revelation in this film, which required her to age twenty years in the flesh but many more than that in spirit - as she turned from a fresh, extremely sympathetic young girl to an "old maid" of forty or so, a bitter, intimidating woman.

Her ability to integrate completely disparate human traits into one cohesive character is amazing - a must see.

Here is a classic film which I have never seen. According to lore, Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins detested each other during the filming of this. Both actresses were forces of nature to be reckoned with, and, if anything, Miriam was even more of an upstager than Bette was. Both actresses however overcome their dislike for each other to turn in thoroughly terrific performances. Bette Davis is marvelous as the initially lovely and later repressed woman with a secret. Bette never turned in a bad performance, so it's natural to expect and get one here. Miriam Hopkins is, these days little-known to contemporary audiences and that's a shame, since she was really a terrific actress. The two stars spar subtly and not so subtly like two dogs circling each other for a fight. There is a satisfying ending which will bring a tear to your eye. The glossy Warner Bros. production has a marvelous Max Steiner score which dosn't hurt one bit. Two great actresses for the price of one, 23 years before "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?"