Vincent Sherman (1943)
The play Old Acquaintance was first staged in 1940; its author, John Van Druten, adapted it for the screen three years later, in collaboration with Lenore Coffee and Edmund Goulding. Decades on, Hollywood film-makers were still drawing on Van Druten’s essential scenario – without acknowledgement in Herbert Ross’s The Turning Point in 1977, more explicitly in Rich and Famous, George Cukor’s last film, in 1981. You might naturally expect the Golden Age progenitor to be well defined in ways that its successors – products of a less self-confident era of American movie-making – struggled to be. Not so, at least as far as Old Acquaintance versus The Turning Point is concerned (I haven’t seen Rich and Famous). The Ross film is no great shakes but at least Arthur Laurents’ spell-everything-out screenplay has the merit of clarity – unlike the script for Vincent Sherman’s picture.
The action opens in 1924, when Katherine ‘Kit’ Marlowe (Bette Davis), a young New York-based writer, returns in triumph to her home town – the latest stop on a lecture tour, following the publication of her book ‘Bury My Soul’, which has caused quite a stir. Kit will be staying with Millie (Miriam Hopkins), her best friend from girlhood, who’s now married to Preston Drake (John Loder) and expecting her first baby. Millie will soon give birth to something else, too. Although initially excited by the prospect of Kit’s arrival, she’s instantly irked by the adulation her friend receives, and has already taken retaliatory action by writing her own novel. We never find out much about Kit’s work, except that it’s ‘serious’ stuff that takes time to write and doesn’t sell. In contrast, Millie churns out romantic fiction at speed and with great commercial success.
Eight years and as many published novels later, Millie’s husband and even her daughter Deirdre (Francine Rufo) take second place to her career. The family visits New York for the opening of a play by Kit but the focus is on the accelerating demise of the Drakes’ marriage, and Kit’s increasing closeness to Preston and little DeDe (as her father and Kit call her: Millie insists on Deirdre). Preston walks out on Millie and wants to start a new life with Kit but she selflessly says no, out of loyalty to her old friend. Ten years later, the US has just entered World War II and Kit takes part in a radio broadcast to promote the American Red Cross. Preston, now an army major, hears the broadcast and gets in touch with her. By now, Kit has a much younger boyfriend, Rudd Kendall (Gig Young). On the point of joining up, he wants to marry Kit before he goes off to fight. She asks for a few days to think the proposal over – time enough for Rudd, miffed by her hesitation, to transfer his affections to the now eighteen-year-old Deirdre (Dolores Moran).
When she discovers Kit has not only met up with Preston but also invited Deirdre along to the reunion, egomaniacally delusional Millie sees an opportunity for rapprochement with her ex-husband. She’s horrified that he agrees to see her only in order to request joint custody of their daughter and tell her he has a new fiancée. Preston also takes the opportunity to inform Millie he was once in love with Kit. This sends Millie into paroxysms of recrimination: she tells Deirdre that Kit is a Jezebel; when Kit announces she’s going to marry Rudd, Millie also brands her a cradle-snatcher. Once she finds out what’s happened between Rudd and Deirdre, Kit also goes into overdrive, though of an altruistic kind, rescuing Deirdre from a rake called Lucian Grant (Phillip Reed). I can’t remember why, now that she’s Rudd’s preferred choice, Deirdre is in Grant’s clutches. The men in the story are a dreary bunch (even Gig Young) and it’s obvious when Deirdre’s a little girl that she’ll always be a spoilt brat. I got increasingly impatient with scenes involving her and the male characters – I couldn’t see why we were expected to be interested in what happened to them.
A very few minutes into the film, you’re wondering how Kit’s friendship with inane, intensely selfish Millie survived even nursery school – and, for that matter, what attracted dull but civilised Preston to the woman he married. You spend the rest of Old Acquaintance waiting for an explanation that never arrives – beyond Kit’s response to Preston, when he asks why she puts up with his wife, that Millie’s parents were kind to orphaned Kit when she was growing up. (The heft of this emotional debt is never again mentioned.) Once the action has moved to New York for acts two and three, it’s no easier to understand why Kit and Millie, who appear to have nothing in common, live in each other’s pockets. Deirdre might seem to be the child that Kit has never had but her maternal feelings for the girl are less an expression of parasitic mothering than of a generous sense of responsibility – in the face of Millie’s self-absorption and consequent negligence of her daughter.
In her mid-thirties when the film was made, Bette Davis is completely convincing as the twenty-something Kit. Her wit and vibrancy are elating in these early scenes and Davis is entertaining throughout – Old Acquaintance would be a miserable affair without her – but her character makes less and less sense. Kit – to Millie’s chagrin – becomes a leading light of New York literary society, and a publicly respected figure, but there’s little evidence of either; most of the time, she might as well be Millie’s self-sacrificing, unmarried sister. Preston and Rudd are the only men in Kit’s life (though it’s hard to see how the latter arrived in it). I couldn’t buy the received wisdom that Davis’ and Miriam Hopkins’ off-screen enmity gives an edge to the set-tos between Kit and Millie: Hopkins’ hammy monotony persistently gets in the way.
Kit’s eventual loss of patience is worth waiting for. She’s about to take her leave, after an exchange of home truths with Millie, when the latter comes out with a straw-that-breaks-the-camel’s-back remark. Kit puts down her shopping, walks back across the room; in exasperation, she takes hold of Millie’s shoulders and shakes her vigorously. Kit then calmly says ‘Sorry’, picks up her shopping and exits. Davis plays this wonderfully but the moment is powerful largely because what Kit does to Millie is what the viewer wants to do to Miriam Hopkins. The leading ladies’ last-scene reconciliation – for the sake of and to the strains of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ – feels quite mechanical. It’s not just that Millie is in no way a reformed character. There’s never been plausible substance to the women’s enduring friendship – supposedly the heart of the story.
11 August 2021
