In the season I did see her play the titular lead in Jezebel (1938), which was given to her as a consolation prize for missing out on the lead role in Gone with the Wind as it provided her with an opportunity to play a Southern belle. I'm not sure it is a great film but it was striking how negatively the white Southerners are mostly portrayed (the men are honour-obsessed idiots who spend their time fighting duels and scoffing at anyone suggesting the South would lose in a civil war), while the various enslaved African Americans (all admittedly minor characters) come across as real people and not the "Lawdy massa" stereotypes seen in other films of the era. All About Eve (1950) meanwhile could be seen as Davis's Sunset Boulevard, with Davis playing an ageing actress (all of 40 years old) facing a young rival. All About Eve is something of a camp classic and might also represent the point where Davis herself pivoted to playing full-on older ladies, somehow making a successful career of this in a business that is not normally considered too welcoming of older women.
The final film I saw was Another Man's Poison (1951), a British made film in which Davis plays a successful crime writer who finds things getting a bit awkward when the criminal accomplice of her estranged husband shows up at her house looking for him. I felt that it maybe suffers from a moralistic ending (the same might be true of All About Eve) and if it weren't for that the film would be almost like Bette Davis appearing in a Patricia Highsmith adaptation. It also features Emlyn Williams in a supporting role, a man whose other claim to fame is writing the book that formed the basis of The Smiths' "Suffer Little Children". There were other appealing films in the season (notably Now, Voyager and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?), but I skipped those as I had seen them relatively recently.
Being the age I am, the first I ever heard of Bette Davis was when Kim Carnes had a monster hit with the song "Bette Davis Eyes". Watching all these films had the tune going through my head all the time, so I've downloaded it and have been listening to it obsessively ever since. It's a great track, with Carnes' expressively raspy vocals combining with a very 80s backing to create an endearingly proto-goth sound. Carnes was herself a singer songwriter, but she did not write the tune. It first appeared as an album track on its co-author Jackie DeShannon's New Arrangement. It is worth giving the original a quick listen as it is so different from Carnes' version, sounding almost like something from a vaudeville show. It is a far less effective recording.
I became curious then about Kim Carnes. It is her performance and the production that makes her "Bette Davis Eyes" great, so could she perhaps have other hidden classics from that era lurking unheard by modern audiences? Sadly this does not appear to be the case, with the couple of other tracks I listened to from the album "Bette Davis Eyes" appears on not being that great: neither the songwriting, the production, nor Carnes' own performance is up to much on any of them. The one thing that did kind of impress me was a live rendition of the Rolling Stones' "Under My Thumb" I stumbled onto. As you know, that is a deeply problematic song with its lyrics about the kind of coercive control that is now recognised as a crime in many jurisdictions. On the live performance I saw, however, Carnes really gave it socks and there is definitely something interesting about a woman singing a song normally read as being about a man dominating a woman. It's not as good as "Bette Davis Eyes", but it's still worth a listen.
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