Winter Meeting

One of the movies TCM ran during Bette Davis' turn as Star of the Month that I hadn't seen before is Winter Meeting. So I recorded it and watched it to do a post here.

Bette Davis plays Susan Grieve, a poetess who comes from old money and is basically spending down that old money by only being a poetess and working a couple of days a week at a publishing house, not getting married and raising a next generation to continue building the family wealth. One night while coming home she runs into old friend and editor Stacy Grant (John Hoyt), who was looking to go to a dinner party but got on the subway in the wrong direction.

No big deal, though, because he's got a favor to ask of Susan anyway. War hero Slick Novak (Jim Davis) is going to be in town, and Stacy, who is going to have access to Novak, wants to set Slick up with his secretary Peggy (Janis Paige). However, it would be awkward for it to be a threesome, so Stacy wants a partner of his own for the dinner. Susan would be the perfect person to come. Reluctantly, she accepts.

This being a Hollywood movie, you might be able to guess what happens next. Susan's always been a bit reserved, what with being a poetess and living alone. Slick, it turns out, is uncomfortable with being a hero and just wants to get on with living. Peggy is loud and brash, and you can see that Slick is rather uncomfortable with her. But he's not that way with Susan. So when the taxi home gets to Susan's apartment, Slick gets out to help her in the door, and spends the evening with her!

This leads to an affair of sorts, with the two ultimately spending time at the old Grieve farmhouse in Connecticut. It's here that we learn what's made both of them the extremely reserved people that they are. Susan's dad married down, and her mom badgered Dad for years, leading to Dad ultimately committing suicide in the farmhouse as a result. Slick's secret is even wackier. At the age of about 16 he felt "the calling", which for a Catholic means he felt like he needed to become a priest -- which of course would preclude a relationship with Susan, or any woman. But that was before the war, and now Slick isn't so sure what he wants to do. Can our two lovers life happily ever after, either together or apart?

Watching a movie like Winter Meeting, you can see why the material might appeal to actors. It's psychological material that's well suited to the live stage. But in this movie adaptation, there's something seriously wrong with it.

Well, actually, there's a lot wrong with it. It all starts with Jim Davis as Novak. This isn't the Jim Davis who created the Garfield comic strip, but it might as well be considering Davis' wooden performance here. Paige is supposed to be unsympathetic, but she overdoes it, which I think is probably down to director Bretaigne Windust, who only made a couple of movies before switching to TV and dying relatively young.

The movie also feels like it's borrowing from a whole bunch of sources. Warner Bros. couldn't get Clifton Webb for the part of Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead, if they even tried, but this movie has the Stacy character be pretty clearly modeled on something Webb would have fit perfectly. With a B actor, the role comes across as a parody. Then there's the morning after scene between the two Davises, a breakfast scene that felt like it was lifted shamelessly from the one between Dana Andrews and Teresa Wright in The Best Years of Our Lives.

And then they go out to the country, and it feels like Douglas Sirk came from several years in the future to shoehorn material into the plot, notably the nonsense about Slick wanting to become a priest which feels like it would fit in Magnificent Obsession. (To be fair to Sirk, the novel had been written 20 years earlier and already been turned into a movie once. Also, the book's writer Lloyd Douglas wrote several other books with strong religious themes, although the source material for Winter Meeting is not by Douglas.) I was laughing inappropriately at how overheated it all became.

With all that in mind, I have to say that I wouldn't recommend Winter Meeting to people who are new to Bette Davis. But for people who are looking for a different experience, this is one they might want to try.