Technically she’s from Lowell, not Boston, but it’s close enough, and any excuse to put up pics of Bette Davis is a good one.
One thing I love about the Warner Bros. DVD releases of their older films, is featurettes they include with interviews from some great film historians. It really puts the movie in situ and adds to my overall understanding of what I just saw.
Take Bette Davis here for instance. As I’m watching, I’m thinking to myself that her subtle facial expressions alone are what won her the Oscar, but in the featurette, I find out that director William Wyler, who was on loan from MGM to do this picture, wasn’t a fan of the close-up shot, and that it was only because he was using cinematographer Ernest Haller (who won an Oscar himself the following year for Gone With the Wind, and was nominated for Dark Victory), someone who was familiar with Davis and knew how to shoot her from close-up, that he went with those shots.
