Dangerous

Don Bellows is a successful architect, engaged, with his life in order. In a bar he recognises a woman: Joyce Heath, once the brightest actress on Broadway, now drinking and unemployable. He decides to save her; he takes her into his house, pays her debts and tries to get her back on stage. Joyce does not want saving and believes she is cursed, that she ruins everyone she touches. Alfred E. Green directs. Bette Davis plays Joyce and Franchot Tone plays Don. Davis won her first Oscar for best actress with this part. The award was argued over; there had been a large protest the year before when she was not nominated for Of Human Bondage, and it was widely said that this was compensation. Davis said so herself. The shape is the Warner Bros. melodrama: short running time, fast scenes, and a narrative turning on one woman. Joyce is written hard for her period; she refuses to be rescued and the narrative does not present her as a victim. The ending, in which the woman accepts her fate, carries the influence of the Hays code and is the weakest thing about it now. It runs about seventy minutes. Who it is for: anyone curious about thirties Hollywood melodrama and the early Bette Davis. Who it is not for: the script is thin, the male character has no function, and the ending resolves into a moral correction.