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Beyond the Forest
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by MGM (Warner)
Sales Rank: 4393
Price: $19.98
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"Evil is headstrong - is puffed up," note the titlesthat preface this fleapit classic, arguably the definitive high camp hootenanny. <br />Legend goes that mighty Jack Warner hauled out the tackiest script in his story files and forced it on Bette Davis, double-daring her to walk out again on her studio contract. Well, Hollywood didn't nickname the star Mother Goddamn for nothing, and Davis called Warner's bluff. It's hard to say who came out ahead, except for dyed-in-the-wool fans of Bad Movies We Love. <br /> <br />Riotously miscast as trashy mantramp Rosa Moline, a milltown Emma Bovary, Davis runs rampant, tweezing her brows, toying with her Morticia Addams wig, undulating her hips and breasts shotgunning porcupines ("I don't like `em," she snarls), and spitting out what would become her signature phrase, "What a dump!" as she surveys the home she shares with mealymouthed doctor Joseph Cotten. Leaving no co-star or piece of scenery unchewed, Davis murders a witness to her torrid affair with Chicago millionaire playboy David Brian, gets pregnant, and gulps poison. <br /> <br />It doesn't kill her, however - it seems nothing can because she's driven to one day make it to the Big City and Live It Up. "If I don't get out of here, I'll die," Davis says, in chest-heaving closeup, then adds, "If I don't get out of here, I hope I'll die." Take it from a character in Lenore Coffee's "I-can't-believe-I'm-hearing-this!" screenplay: "It's tough on a girl like Rosa living in a town like this." Shoots back another: "It's tough on the town." Ain't it the truth, girls. <br /> <br />Finally, frustrated Davis whips herself into such a frenzy, she dumps her hubby and sashays to Chicago - the locale Max Steiner's loco music evokes whenever wanderlust overtakes Davis - where her rich beau jilts her, largely, one suspects, because of such crimes of fashion as grisly makeup and godawful frocks. <br /> <br />Back to helltown she slumps, but we'll be damned if by the time that Davis, dying - of lust fever or something - drags herself one final time to the railroad tracks, where she expires, she hasn't grabbed you by the throat with full-throttle star power. "You're somethin' for the birds," says a character of Rosa Moline, to which Davis spits back, "And you're something to make the corn grow tall." Exactly. <br />
Viewer Reviews
Beyond the Forest is the story of Madame Bovary by Flaubert, and so it is going to be over the top all the way, as is the novel. This film is much loved in Europe, especially France, and this is so because Bette Davis captures the the spirit of Emma Bovary when she thrashes out against men at every turn, beginning with her husband, who is a doctor as in the novel.
In this version Bette Davis is not lured by the opera or by fashions of Paris; she wants to go to Chicago and frequent cocktail lounges and slick bars, with her well-heeled tycoon lover, who likes passionate women, who kiss with gusto(their kisses are unbvelievable), and dress for always for sex. Bette does this, and with tremendous enthusiasm and great artistry.
She is always working her way up to sexual encounters in this film; every move, gesture, outburst, tells us of her hot desiures. Near the houise she lives in are papewr mills with large phallic smoke stacks that bellow smoke and fire, like a hell for sex-driven dames.Beyond the forest lies that great encounters with men, in Chicago or any place where the atmospehere suggests heat and dirt.
The lines from this film are famous all over the world (What a dump!", immortalized in Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", and the ending, with the exchanges with the maid, is something that no version of Bovary could ever match. It is surreal, almost horrific,but youy cheer for this womman, crawling to the rail road station to get out of this town. It is extremely intense, almost Hitchkockian in its suspense.But then, King Vidor is dircting, in that late 40s style of his, showing raw passion outdoors on the ground, as in Duel In the Sun(see the ending to that one!) Bette Davis plays every key, if you will, to bring this version to your attention forever. She is never hampered by exaggerations, and so she uses them to great effect, and gives us a very feminist portrait of a woman on the verge of everything bad, who lets herself fall into the abyss(she literally jumps off a hill) with our applause. Who would want to live in Loyalton, Wisconsin? Noone, after bette Davis tells us abouit it. You'd have to be lobotomized to live in a dump like it.
Rosa Moline, Bette's character, wants everything, and in the big way; she has no class, no taste, no Christian goals, because she has been denied access to the male treasure chests, and wants her share of the goodies.
This Emma Bovary goes understandably mad with frustrations and needs that must have plagued every woman in 1949 who had a brain. The conformity, the same clothes, the same roads, restuarants, nosy people, small town bigotry and violence, the sheer noise of it all..Bette fights against this Norman Rockwell psychosis with great conviction.
See this film and know why Miss Davis is the greatest actress in the world.
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