Over the Top Part I
Even critically acclaimed actresses such as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford took a few trips over the top. This is the sort of movie that many people call "so bad it's good" to cover up their guilty pleasures, but why feel guilty about being entertained? I'm willing to bet that any one of them would be crying honest tears by the closing scenes of Imitation of Life (1959).
To start off, here is one of the most outrageously over the top (and to many simply horrible) movies that Bette Davis ever made.
Beyond The Forest (1949)
Bette Davis began her career (and nearly ended it) in a series of drab "good girl" roles. She fought the typecasting, and with her tightly wound performance as a destructive Cockney waitress in Of Human Bondage (1934), she finally proved that she was much better as a bad girl. Still, Davis was unhappy with the poor scripts she received from the studio, and she walked out on her contract in the mid-thirties. Though she lost the court battle to get out of her contract, she did win better roles.
When Jack Warner assigned Beyond the Forest to Davis he might as well have challenged her to a dual. He knew that the script was horrid and he used it to dare his top star to walk out on her contract as she had before. She despised the role, and she threatened to walk off not before filming began, but in the middle of the production if her contract was not cancelled. Warner was forced to comply, and Davis ended nearly two decades at Warner Brothers with one of the worst, and most entertaining, films of her career.
Coifed in a long, black wig, Davis plays Rosa Moline, an angry woman struggling to escape her small town world. With her eyes on the good life in Chicago, she rips through every scene with such viciousness that you wonder what her kindly doctor husband (Cotton) ever saw in her in the first place. She has an affair, commits murder, gets pregnant and spits out lines such as the famous, "what a dump!" with razors and nails in her voice.
The movie is sordid, trashy and the worst miscasting Davis ever endured, but she barrels through her scenes with such campy intensity that it is also great entertainment. Though the role didn't suit Davis, some of the dialogue was humorously appropriate to her real life situation. In one scene, Rosa looks out the window and says, "if I don't get out of here, I'll die". According to Davis, when the scene ran in the screening room, everyone broke into laughter. Fortunately, Davis did survive Warner Brothers, and the next year she would star in All About Eve (1950) one of the best films of her career.
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