Dangerous (1935)

Davis Vehicle. - Dangerous review by Steve

Bette Davis didn't get an Oscar nomination for her sensation in Of Human Bondage and it seems standard to assume that a year later, the Academy gave her the award for Dangerous to make up for the oversight. But this scenario ignores that Claudette Colbert deserved her win for It Happened One Night, and that Bette was pretty good in Dangerous too.

There are signs that this film was jigged to offer the audience a few echoes of her star-making role, but her character is completely different. She plays an intelligent, high class girl, a great stage actor who has fallen on hard times and into alcoholism but finds a way back through the support of Franchot Tone's principled, wealthy, playboy-architect.

It is a melodrama and there are many sacrifices made before the characters manoeuvre towards a conclusion acceptable to the new Production Code. This hasn't the prestige of a Somerset Maugham adaptation. The plot is clumsy, though there is a splendidly witty script. The direction is dreadful, but this is Warner Brothers and there's enough talent on board to compensate.

Bette is fabulous and makes many archetypal situations a lot of fun. Including when she manipulates the engaged Franchot to kiss her for the first time in a thunderstorm. She is the sort of predatory girl you don't leave alone with your man. Her solution to her inconvenient marriage is to accelerate herself and her husband into a tree and see who survives! It's that crazy. And it's that irresistible.