Bette Davis

Bette Davis’s debut. Sidney Fox plays the titular opportunistic sister in an upstanding Ohio family who falls for a con-man played by Humphrey Bogart. Davis plays her long-suffering sister in a forgettable part. Bogie’s vulpine in his first heel role, but the predictable plot and flat performances from Fox and lead Conrad Nagel sink this effort.

Mae Clarke plays a showgirl reduced to prostitution in World War I London. During an air raid, she meets a naive but good-hearted soldier played by Douglass Montgomery. You can see where this is going.

A showcase for star Phillips Lord’s popular radio personality, this rural melodrama follows a pair of young lovers looking to elope and the return of an adopted boy’s brutish biological father. Bette Davis plays one of the young lovers.

George Arliss plays a renowned concert pianist who loses his hearing, learns to read lips, and discovers renewed purpose by playing anonymous benefactor to strangers he sights in Central Park. The sixty-four-year-old Arliss doesn’t convince as a fifty-year-old. The thick foundation and dark lipstick combined with his long features conjured visions of the Joker. Bette Davis has a supporting role as an admirer of Arliss. She charms, and I appreciated the script’s giving her character relatable dignity, but the material didn’t engage. When one of Arliss’s beneficiaries started hacking the melodramatic cough of cancer, I laughed.

A reform school drama buoyed by early charismatic performances from Pat O’Brien and Bette Davis. Junior Durkin plays Jimmy, a fourteen-year-old who travels to the big city to live with his aunt and uncle. He soon becomes enraptured by their smooth-talking boarder, played by O’Brien, who takes a shine to Jimmy and hires him to watch his office and take messages.

Barbara Stanwyck plays a young woman who leaves her Chicago finishing school for a rural teaching job after her gambler father dies. There she marries and has a son who grows to manhood and leaves the farm for Chicago, where he turns gigolo to secure a lucrative job selling bonds, to Stanwyck’s disappointment.

George Brent plays a writer in love with an heiress played by Ruth Chatterton. She loves him too, but can’t stop mothering her philandering husband. Bette Davis plays Chatterton’s kid sister who’s also sweet on Brent.

Richard Barthelmess plays a tenant farmer’s son who finds himself caught between worlds after the plantation owner affords him an education and job in the company store.

Until a 1948 Supreme Court ruling, the five major Hollywood studios controlled the entire movie business, from production to distribution. The studios contracted performers and paid them a salary. The performers worked long days, five days a week. If a film wrapped at lunch, they ate then began another. Thus, films like Three on a Match came stock-piled with current and future stars.

Spencer Tracy plays a smart but arrogant young convict entering New York’s Sing Sing prison, where he’s set to serve five to thirty years for armed robbery. There, he clashes with the incorruptible warden, but time sees the two develop a mutual respect and trust. This trust is tested when the warden grants Tracy twenty-four hours leave to visit his ailing girlfriend, played by Bette Davis.

William Powell plays a conman who recruits an artist played by Bette Davis into a fashion piracy scheme that takes them from New York to Paris.

A shady genealogist (James Cagney) tries to class up his act to impress a former employee (Bette Davis).

A reporter helps a young socialite investigate the disappearance of her older sister (Bette Davis).

A sensitive, club-footed man (Leslie Howard) can’t escape the promiscuous, lecherous woman (Bette Davis) he loves.

A housewife (Ann Dvorak) watches her ad-man husband (George Brent) fall for his copywriter (Bette Davis).

Dangerous is a passable melodrama that coasts along on the strength of its two leads, Bette Davis, who won her first Oscar for her performance, and Franchot Tone.

An outlaw (Humphrey Bogart) holds an intellectual (Leslie Howard), waitress (Bette Davis), and others hostage in a small diner in the Arizona desert.

In her first film following her failed lawsuit to escape her contract, Bette Davis stars in a plot ripped from contemporary headlines.

Looking to get back at a hood (Humphrey Bogart), a boxing promoter (Edward G. Robinson) and his girlfriend (Bette Davis) discover a bellhop (Wayne Morris) with a killer right.

In the pre-Civil War South, a woman (Bette Davis) uses a man (George Brent) to make her former fiancé (Henry Fonda) jealous.

A young socialite (Bette Davis) has just six months to live after being diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor.

Queen Elizabeth I (Bette Davis) loves the dashing, yet ambitious Earl of Essex (Errol Flynn).

In Malaya, a plantation owner’s wife (Bette Davis) shoots and kills a man in what she claims was self-defense, but an incriminating letter in her own handwriting may prove otherwise.

An oil tycoon pays a cash-strapped pilot (James Cagney) to kidnap his daughter (Bette Davis) in order to prevent her from marrying a musician.

With the help of a psychologist (Claude Rains), a Boston spinster (Bette Davis) breaks out of her shell and finds a lover (Paul Henreid) only to face complications.

Bette Davis plays a schoolteacher who arrives in a small Welsh coal mining hamlet and, over local objections and obstacles, establishes a school for the children and discovers a literary prodigy, played by John Dall.

An aging actress (Bette Davis) grows increasingly wary of the young woman (Anne Baxter) who seems to adore her.

A New York bootlegger (Glenn Ford) helps turn a destitute apple vendor (Bette Davis) into a lady for a day.

A former child star (Bette Davis) torments her crippled movie star sister (Joan Crawford) in a gloomy Hollywood house.

Alien youngsters Tia and Tony (Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann) return to Earth for a vacation, only to fall victim to the machinations of a power-hungry scientist (Christopher Lee) and his spinster financier (Bette Davis).

Agatha Christie’s Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov) investigates a series of murders aboard a steamship on the Nile.