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List Price: $49.98 | | Label: Warner Home Video
Salesrank: 59446
Released: June 14, 2005 |
| Our Price: $29.97 |
| Used Price: $29.84 |
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
The Bette Davis Collection includes 3 new-to-DVD classics, featuring Davis in multiple Emmy-nominated performances as a captivating adulteress, a manipulative beauty, and a former Oscar-winning actress recovering from the end of her career.
Description of The Bette Davis Collection (The Star / Mr. Skeffington / Dark Victory / Now, Voyager / The Letter):
Critic Pauline Kael called this shamelessly enjoyable, vintage Bette Davis weepie a "kitsch classic," and time hasn't diminished its ability to give the tear ducts a good flushing. Davis plays a swinging socialite, living the fast life of booze, smokes, and--with the help of Humphrey Bogart as her Irish stableman--raising thoroughbred horses. When a brain tumor starts giving her headaches and eroding her vision, she falls in love with her surgeon (George Brent), who grows more determined than ever to cure her. Davis gives one of her most vibrant performances, and her costars also include Ronald Reagan and Geraldine Fitzgerald. The film received Oscar nominations for best picture, best actress, and for Max Steiner's score. --Jim Emerson
The Bette Davis Collection (The Star / Mr. Skeffington / Dark Victory / Now, Voyager / The Letter) Reviews:
Wonderful!! 
2009-11-17 - Loved it!! Excellent movie with lots of great actors. Loved Betty Davis Performance!! Millie
Dark Victory - A Classic
2009-10-21 - Bette Davis almost always fabulous is great here too. I love Dark Victory & Now Voyager the way I love Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce. Old Movie buffs this is one for you!Dark Victory (Restored and Remastered Edition)
One of Bette's Best
2009-10-07 - First things first:
The transfer is crisp and clean overall and the special features (which I usually don't bother with)are fun and interesting. Bette's heyday in the 30's and 40's in which she did her best work in my opinion (She was called "The 5th Warner Brother" and was the undisputed Queen of The Lot. Here, she's at once,willful,high-strung,and at the last,heroic. But what she is here is watchable and it should be no surprise to someone unfamiliar with her work (if such a one exists!) why she was so successful
Classic Drama/Romance. Another Oscar-Worthy Performance From The Queen Of Mean (Just Kidding).
2009-10-01 - Bette Davis, recently fresh from her Academy Award winning performance in William Wyler's "Jezebel," gives another Oscar-worthy performance in this searing drama, which reunites her with "Jezebel" co-star George Brent. Excellent film. Highly recommended.
The Victory is Assured
2009-10-01 - I'm watching this for the first time and I know it is a well-deserved classic film. Kitsch-fest according to Pauline Kael, I think it is actually the best pre-war propaganda film ever made. What subliminal stuff! It's released in 1939. Staged among the smart set on Long Island, in the usual way those enviable plutocrats were put before a Depression-ravaged public so that they could live vicariously in great houses and nightclubs while sitting in the darkened theatre. But here (and perhaps this is where "kitsch" may be said to come into it), the rich girl is very ill, more ill than any of the (mostly poorer) audience is likely to be in a lifetime. She is doomed. She has to change her attitude to one of hope, in the face of mortality. When this film was released, my father was a teenager on Long Island, waiting for what he knew was an eventual involvement of the US in the European war. Not as rich as Judith (the warrior princess) Traherne (Bette Davis), but secure, and from the stock which had originally settled the place, the Puritans from whom Judith confessed to have sprung (all the while resenting their inhibiting influence on her sex life). The tumor in her head is once partly excised (The War to End All Wars didn't quite put Europe into the shape it was supposed to), but it is coming back and it is going to blind her (and we are going to go to another war) and her social life is definitely going to be upended. Victory may be dark, but it is victory if you can face death without flinching. Ronald Reagan is in it too, playing Mr. Sang Froid (he will later quip in real life with the doctors who saved him from an assassin's bullet). This is about the quiet before the storm. But all the classes are united. "Where is peace?" Judith asks. Peace is within you, because it sure as heck isn't in the world or in the body itself, so prone to betrayal. Maybe the Puritans had something there. Recurrent wars and recurrent tumors, are just part of the fallen world. The people of spirit stand up to it. (Her doctor husband says, "We just pretend that nothing is going to happen", but the fact that this is said so explicitly, means that the fiction is understood by all parties as such). The script is full of all these allusions to how people were feeling, as peace was on its last legs. Many who watched the film were as doomed as the heroine, with just as many years of future survival to expect. There's a song in it about time and how fleeting it is. Judith sings along. "It is a victory (over the dark) because we're not afraid." The sick wife sends her doctor husband off to fight the foe of cancer, knowing he will never see her again. She plants the hyacinths so that in the spring, when she is dead, they will return (in Greek legend, they spring from the blood of a dying hero). "Give them champagne and be gay. Be very, very gay." When they celebrate the victory which is assured.
I am sure this is not the conventional view of the film, which is generally treated as a vehicle for Ms. Davis, who acquired it as such. But if you put on the spectacles of the people who lived when it was made, there is another interpretation which may in fact be valid too. Dah-Dah-Dah-DAH!
