The Great Lie

An amazing unfolding story that arises out of a ridiculously implausible plot that nevertheless is a classic film. Who needs a plot anyway when you have Mary Astor and Bette Davis fighting over the quietly cool George Brent? Throw in an unexpected pregnancy and a trip to the Arizona desert to keep the mother from having a miscarriage due to her bad habits, with boredom, sand storms, and endless cigarettes. The way it sounds is not at all like the impact it produces. There's one point in the film's second half when people might be thinking that it would be a good place to end the film, keeping the lie intact. But Edmund Goulding makes the absolute most of what follows, hitting the real ending with power and precision.

A rich woman Maggie (Bette Davis) is in love with Peter Van Allen (George Brent) who is married to famous concert pianist Sandra Kovak (Mary Astor). Them Van Allen finds out his marriage to Kovak isn't legal--they got married before her divorce was final. So he marries Maggie which infuriates Kovak. Then Kovak discovers she's pregnant and Van Allen disappears when his plane crashes in the jungle...

As you can see this is more than a little silly. The above plot just covers the first 30 minutes or so--the story gets even more ridiculous. This is wildly overly melodramatic and has an ending where reality totally disappears, but production values, music and performances pull it over.

It was lushly made (Warners Brothers spared no expense on this one) and there's some great music here--LOVE the piano solos that Astor is supposedly playing. Brent is good in his role--handsome and intelligent. Davis is (as always) good--she ALMOST overdoes it but is pulled back. Astor is GREAT--she deservedly won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for this. She takes her role and runs with it--she's playing an almost totally evil, self-absorbed woman and enjoys it.

So it IS silly but worth seeing. I watched the film with a smirk on my face the whole time but I DID keep watching. I give it a 7.

Bette Davis and Mary Astor take place in one of filmdoms greatest bitch-fests, The sappy sweet Davis and obnoxious concert pianist Astor both love the same man(George Brent). He goes back and forth between them. Slick and soapy, the performances are great and Astor walked away with an Oscar. Great classical score, too.

The Great Lie (1941)

This is really a fabulous mixture of great movie themes, and it pulls it together to make its own amazing statement about fidelity and love. And class. And pre-war America, seemingly isolated but actually trapped by world events.

Within ten minutes there is first an echo of My Man Godfrey (George Brent in this case making a more mainstream Powell) and then a swoop down for a taste of Gone with the Wind or even closer, Jezebel (the plantation south, even though it's 1940 or so). Then it's a melodrama straight up, and tragedy, and even if the plot is improbable, you go with it and get swept away.

Brent plays Pete, a man caught between two women, both of money, but one cosmopolitan and used to being in charge, and one a lively, warm woman living a more earthy life. At the start it seems Pete is married to the urbane one, a concert pianist, Sandra, played with typical poise and ice by Mary Astor (compare this to her more famous role in The Maltese Falcon from the same year). She's a professional woman, in charge of her life, and, lately, Pete's. She wants independence and culture, and man with his feet on the ground.

But Brent's country girl, an ex-love (and true love, it seems) Maggie is played to perfection by Bette Davis. The music here, and the support cast is African American, which makes for a more heart warming, and wrenching, background. He pays a visit to Maggie the day after his wedding (for reasons that slowly clarify) and the dynamic is set. And the twists begin. We have a contemporary drama between recognizable stereotypes as World War II looms for the U.S.

Early on, Sandra asks Pete after his visit to Maggie, "Did you get it?" He says, "What?" Sexual innuendo intact, the Hays code chaffing, she clarifies, "The air?" What a great simple example of how movies so often played brilliantly with innuendo because the code wouldn't allow a straighter interplay.

Director Edmund Goulding is not as well known as some of his contemporaries, but he has a few masterpieces in his lot, including the Bette Davis Dark Victory and the later Razor's Edge. For me, The Great Lie is maybe short of perfect--the plot does intrude on our sense of suspending disbelief--but it's really fast, moving, well written, and well directed. No question.

The chief reason to watch this highly implausible melodrama is the bravura supporting performance of the stunning Mary Astor, ably abetted by Bette Davis, the lead actress, both at their cinematic peaks. Astor plays a passionate but emotionally fickle concert pianist with lusty appetites who battles decent and simple Bette for the affections of George Brent. No need to detail the plot about one woman persuading another to give up her baby. Suffice it to say that whenever these two powerhouse actresses occupy the screen, especially together, the viewer can accept anything. Outstanding is a sequence shot at least in part on location in the desert where the battling ladies reach a climax of sorts in their emotional duel. It is said that the two performers rewrote some of Lenore Coffee's script to spike it up; if so, they succeeded brilliantly. Their contrasting natures - physically, vocally, emotionally and, thanks to wise costume design, sartorially - make them an exciting and volatile combination. Astor has never been more ravishing and even Davis photographs unusually well in many scenes. The always entertaining Hattie McDaniel and Lucile Watson are on hand as the maid and a matronly aunt, respectively, though they do nothing here they haven't done better elsewhere. Astor, in addition to her expert histrionics, is said to have actually played – as opposed to faking - classical piano pieces throughout, adding substance, emotional coloring and much-needed authenticity. If she was faking, then it was dazzling fakery!