Review of Dark Victory (1939) by Mark S — 27 Dec 2008

Judith Traherne (Bette Davis) is rich and young, but also has been having dizzy/ fainting spells. She is all but dragged to the local brain surgeon, Dr. Frederick "the Animal" Steele (Brent) who tells her he needs to pop her melon open for a look-see.

He goes in there, takes care of what he can (it's all very vague), but the results are pretty bad, in fact, it's "prognosis: negative". Judy only has months to live, so the doctor conspires with her friend/ personal assistant (Fitzgerald) to keep it from her, and let her live her life as always, without imminent death looming over her head.

If you think this all sounds like an excellent musical comedy, while I'd agree with you, you'd best think again. Dark Victory is played pretty straight, and while there is some unintentional humor (Humphrey Bogart as an irish horse trainer replete with bad, phony accent?), it's not exploited to the point of being thoroughly enjoyable.

I'm also convinced that Ronald Reagan was the David Arquette of his day, in that he's quite convincing at playing the 'dumb' guy, to the point where you're not so sure he's acting.

Reagan was really... wow. And that guy got to be our president??? Dr. Emmett Brown's incredulity at Marty McFly's flippant remark that "Reagan is president in the future" seems completely warranted and even logical to me now, as I'm sure I'd react the same way if some kid from the future came back to tell me about President Arquette.

Also, I realize that back in the 30s, smoking was seen as a health exercise, much in the way we treat juicing machines today, but watching the doctor smoke while talking to the patient who's lying in bed and smoking, it's a little too much.

If you were to edit out the smoking scenes from this movie, it would be about 30 seconds long. Anyway, at the end of the movie, she dies, but you already knew that. What's amazing to me is, the doctor marrys her, drags her off to Vermont of all places, and then holes up in his laboratory to do unrelated research.

He's so engrossed in his work, he even gets annoyed when she dares bring him his lunch. Gee, what a way to spend your last remaining days on earth, as a subservient wife to an asshole doctor in the middle of nowhere Vermont.