Old Acquaintance

Old Acquaintance

Old Acquaintance

Old Acquaintance_720p(480P)

source: Old Acquaintance

Trailer—Old Acquaintance

Old Acquaintance

What a surprise to see Bette Davis playing a completely positive character. She looked gorgeous as well. Excellent writing and direction. Miriam Hopkins is an equal partner to Bette Davis but her over the top performance made we want to shake her, well, Bette took care of it too.

Enjoyable melodrama is even more so if you are aware of the back stage tension between the stars. Having costarred with Miriam Hopkins in The Old Maid several years previously and finding it a wearing situation Bette had no desire to do so again. She really wanted to make this with Norma Shearer but Norma turned it down and retired so Miriam was in and it became an ordeal that Bette bristled about whenever asked to the end of her life. That conflict seems to have fed into the spark between the actresses on screen and gave a lot of energy to their scenes. That energy is missing from the rest of the movie whenever either lady is not on screen because the other featured players John Loder and Dolores Moran while attractive are missing that spark that makes a star and their contributions are minor. Anne Revere, glamorized for once, has an amusing scene as a reporter who respects one of the ladies as a writer and not the other.

Just why this unusually literate, fairly intelligent and very well-acted film isn't yet available on video is a mystery. Bette Davis does a beautiful job playing writer Kit Marlowe and Miriam Hopkins, while a little overripe at times, does a fine job as her best friend and sometime nemesis, Millie Drake. The supporting cast is first-rate: Gig Young is very appealing and handsome in one of his earliest film roles, Dolores Moran is both sensitive and cheeky as Hopkin's confused daughter, and Esther Dale is splendid as Ms Marlowe's maid. The film revolves around Davis and Hopkins, their mutual friendship, jealousies via a love triangle, and their rivalry as authors: Davis is the noble, staid serious writer of quality literature, whereas Hopkins becomes wildly successful as the writer of sensational trashy love stories. The rather bland John Loder plays Millie's husband who takes a shine to Kit.

Davis admitted to enjoying very much a scene in "Old Acquaintance" in which she shakes Hopkins hard.(Wikipedia).She also wrote that her co-star (with whom she also made "the old maid") felt insecure and that there was a good dose of rivalry between her and "Millie" .As the story is thoroughly the depiction of a rivalry (as writers,as lovers and even as mothers -Kit is also Deirdre's mom in her heart ),everything works out fine. The first sequences may be deceptive :Kit appears as the superstar with a fan club in her friend's home town and people are led to believe that she's got an inflated ego and that good housewife Millicent has done the right choice.But actually the desperate housewife is eaten with envy and she too wrote a book (Harlequin romance style).Time will show the wiser although the last sequence tends to show that,all in all,friendship survives everything ..