All This, and Heaven Too

Henriette Deluzy-Desportes is engaged in Paris as governess to the children of a duke's family. The house is uneasy: the duchess is jealous, the duke distant, and the children afraid of their mother. Henriette gets on well with them, which enlarges the tension. The duchess is murdered. Henriette is arrested and all Paris talks about the case. Anatole Litvak directs. Bette Davis plays Henriette and Charles Boyer plays the duke. The source is Rachel Field's novel. The ground under the story is real. The Praslin murder in Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century was among the most discussed cases of its time and counts among the events that shook confidence in the monarchy. What interests the film is reputation rather than murder. Henriette has done nothing and her name is ruined, and the narrative is about how a woman is condemned in public. Bette Davis is in a very different register from her usual hard characters here: controlled, quiet, and almost never objecting. It was made for Warner Bros. as one of the large budget prestige films of the period and runs close to two and a half hours. The narrative is framed as a flashback in a schoolroom and the ending attaches to America. Who it is for: viewers who like classical Hollywood melodrama and Bette Davis. Who it is not for: it is very long, the pace is slow, and the narrative arranges the uncertainties of the real case in its own favour.