Mr Skeffington (1944)

Directed by Vincent Sherman; produced by Julius J and Philip G Epstein

In 1914, Fanny Trellis (Bette Davis) is the most popular girl in New York. She is courted by numerous suitors, all determined and all disarmingly dismissed by the object of their affection. However, when her beloved brother, Trippy (Richard Waring), is caught embezzling money from his employer, Job Skeffington (Claude Rains), Fanny uses her charms to woo the smitten man into marriage. Thus begins the intriguing, sad and eventful relationship that carries the pair over the next twenty years.

This is a drama that both highlights, and is carried by, the actors, in particular the two leads. Davis certainly did not shy away from playing unsympathetic characters in her career, and Fanny Trellis fits very well into that category. She is vain, superficial and empty; her self-love is shared only with her brother and, perhaps, her sensible and good-hearted cousin, George (Walter Abel). She may like others, even admire them, but she has no warmth for them, and, consequently, the audience has little for her. But Fanny is not meant to be sympathetic. She conveys a story to the viewer; she does not win his heart.

Rains, on the other hand, is much more likeable, and the audience almost instinctively wishes his character a better life. It’s interesting that he changes gradually – at first, he indulges his new wife’s shallowness, then is disappointed by it, and finally frustrated – while Fanny changes abruptly when confronted with a crisis. This is true to their characters.

The other actors do well – Waring’s overly dramatic interpretation of his part is likely due to direction – though their characters are much more sketchily drawn than Davis’s and Rains’s.

The story is a good one, an adult story. Skeffington is Jewish (“Skeffington. That's a strange name for Market and Cherry”, Fanny remarks – the movie’s writers came from that part of New York) and people react to that heritage differently. Trippy is clearly anti-semitic, but Jewish or gentile means nothing to Fanny, indicative more of her indifference to people than to ethnicity. The adultery characters engage in is handled obliquely, due to censorship of the times, a quality which often creates better and more imaginative scripts than does the later permissiveness. Even so, these sins in themselves illustrate character: Fanny bounces from one good-looking, exciting man to another, while Skeffington takes up with plainer, intelligent women.

The movie is not without flaws, the biggest being Davis herself. She was in her mid-30s during filming, and never looks convincing as the young Fanny. Nor was she ever attractive enough to represent the most desired woman in Society. Hedy Lamarr’s was a name bruited about for the role; she would certainly have been a convincing beauty, but her acting would not have sufficed. Davis’s overcomes the incredible scenes.

As well, the score, by Franz Waxman, is over-wrought, used too loudly and strongly at melodramatic moments. And the film, at two and a half hours, is a little too long.

Despite the problems, Mr Skeffington is an involving tale of two people who should not have met, should never have married, and the trials they go through because of their unsuited temperaments and lives.