Rent In This Our Life (1942)

Ahead of its time - In This Our Life review by areavie

This film has to be your ultimate crime drama, centring around a hit-and-run case and all the stigma that surrounds it in the early part of the century. Classic Davis plays the spoiled floosy who winds people around her little finger to get what she wants.

She pretty much succeeds too, with an ex-lover as an attorney and a rich influential uncle. A little persecution where she tries to shift blame for the offence to another person.

Fun Soap. - In This Our Life review by Steve

Bette Davis was famous for playing bad girls, but here she is poorly cast. She lack the looks her character is assumed to possess, and is about ten years too old. In fact she has on so much makeup it's not easy to recognise her. Stanley (Davis) is a sociopathic monster who ruins her forgiving sister (Olivia de Havilland as Roy) by stealing her husband. When Stanley has driven him to suicide, she comes back for Roy's new fiancé...

The source novel won the Pulitzer Prize so perhaps it was more highbrow than this entertaining soap. This adaptation feels like the Hollywood southern melodramas of the fifties. There's a jazz soundtrack. The dichotomy between the good/bad sister is classic fifties. There is a corrupt, dying patriarch (Charles Coburn) who has a transgressive longing for his childlike niece. It's full of sexual innuendo.  

This was John Huston's second film and it's not typical of his work. Though maybe his liberal politics allowed for the more enlightened attitude to race, for the time. After the drunken Stanley has killed a mother and child in a hit and run, she casually accuses an African American (Ernest Anderson) of taking the car. The film is explicit that her testament will be assumed true. Not his.

Amazingly the film wasn't allowed an overseas certificate because it represented USA as being racially biased! Possibly there is a much more intelligent film dormant within this production. What we get is a Bette Davis vehicle, and while she's grotesquely fascinating, this is not always for the intended reasons. It's a fun, implausible curiosity.