Beyond the Forest (1949) Warner Bros./Drama RT: 97 minutes No MPAA rating (adult themes) Director: King Vidor Screenplay: Lenore Coffee Music: Max Steiner Cinematography: Robert Burks Release date: October 21, 1949 (US) Cast: Bette Davis, Joseph Cotten, David Brian, Ruth Roman, Minor Watson, Regis Toomey, Dona Drake, Sarah Selby. Box Office: $1.7M (US)
Rating: *
Few comedies today contain as many laughs (albeit unintentional ones) as Beyond the Forest, an overblown melodrama starring Bette Davis (Now, Voyager) as the unhappy wife of a small town doctor who feels stifled by her provincial existence. She wants more from life and is determined to get it no matter what the cost. Directed by King Vidor (Duel in the Sun), it’s basically Madame Bovary reimagined as a tawdry soap opera.
Vidor opens his scene in fair Loyalton, a tiny inconsequential town in Wisconsin where the whistle of the sawmill can be heard everywhere. A solemn narrator gives the ten-cent tour of the place, explaining why daily life has come to a halt on this particular day. Everybody’s at the courthouse waiting to learn the fate of Rosa Moline (Davis) who stands accused of murder. We don’t yet know who’s been killed. All we do know is Rosa claims it was an accident. So how did we get here? Let’s find out.
Everybody in Loyalton knows Rosa. She’s kind of hard to miss. She struts around like she’s better than everybody else. Her husband Louis (Cotten, Citizen Kane) is the town doctor. They live in the finest house in town. They’re the only family around that has a maid, a sassy Native American girl named Jenny (Drake, Kansas City Confidential). That’s still not enough for poor miserable Rosa. She’s bored and unhappy. She wants a better life away from all this.
Rosa thinks she’s found her ticket out of her personal hell. She’s been having an affair with Neil Latimer (Brian, The Damned Don’t Cry), a rich businessman from Chicago, for about a year. She wants him to marry her and take her away. When he doesn’t pop the question, she takes the initiative. Rosa leaves Louis and takes the train to Chicago to be with Neil. He, of course, rejects her. He tells her that he’s met somebody else and plans to marry her. A dejected Rosa goes back home with her tail between her legs. Louis, still angry over her betrayal, takes her back.
Things seem to be getting better between Rosa and Louis. She’s seemingly resigned herself to her life of boredom and inactivity. She even becomes pregnant. That’s when Neil reappears. He didn’t get married after all. He tells Rosa he made a mistake and wants her back. He says they can start a new life together right away. She accepts his proposal and plans to leave with the next day.
That’s when Louis’ best friend, a kindly old man named Moose (Watson, The Jackie Robinson Story), steps in to provide unsolicited moral guidance. He threatens to tell Neil about her pregnancy if she doesn’t. Fearing he will probably reject her again if he knew about the baby, Rosa shoots and kills Moose during a hunting trip.
At the coroner’s inquest, Rosa claims the shooting was an accident, that she mistook Moose for a deer. She’s acquitted, but she doesn’t get off scot-free. Remember, it was 1949 and the Production Code was still in effect meaning evildoers never got way with their bad deeds. Neil decides it’s best if they cool things down for now so as not to look suspicious. This sends Rosa off the deep end. She confesses everything to Louis who coldly tells her he only cares about their baby at this point and she can do whatever she wants after she gives birth. She tries to leave him. He drags her back home. She deliberately causes a miscarriage by throwing herself down a hill. She develops peritonitis as a result. This leads to what Davis herself described as “the longest death scene ever seen on the screen”. It’s also the funniest.
The Oscar committee is nowhere near qualified to judge a performance such as the one given by Ms. Davis in the dramatic climax of Beyond the Forest. It’s one for the books. A delirious Rosa, burning with fever, drags herself out of her deathbed to her mirror, smears makeup on her face, gets dressed and leaves the house to catch the 9pm train to Chicago. The disheveled woman, just minutes from death, staggers and crawls to the station while the tune “Chicago” plays on repeat in her head. She collapses and dies as the train leaves without her. THE END, fade to black.
Beyond the Forest is the film in which Ms. Davis delivers the immortal line “What a dump!” as she surveys the interior of the dull house she shares with her boring husband. Lenore Coffee’s (the twice Oscar-nominated writer of Street of Chance and Four Daughters) screenplay is filled with such priceless bon mots. Early on, Rosa makes this observation: “Life in Loyalton is like sitting in the funeral parlor and waiting for the funeral to begin. No, not sitting. Lying in a coffin and waiting for them to carry you out.” Later she says: “I don’t want people to like me. Nothing pleases me more than when they don’t like me. It means I don’t belong.” At the end, she makes this dying declaration to her not-broken up hubby: “You did this to me. I know you did. You’re trying to punish me for all the things I’ve done. I’m gonna fool you. I’m gonna live!”There’s more, but why spoil the fun of you hearing them first hand?
The on-screen drama in Beyond the Forest is matched by the drama that was unfolding off the screen. Bette wanted out of her contract with Warner Bros. They wouldn’t cut her loose until she did one more film. She took the role of Rosa knowing the picture was a stinker and would likely flop at the box office. She constantly fought with Vidor on the set, at one point demanding the studio fire the director. They didn’t. When the movie was finally finished, the studio bid the difficult actress a relieved farewell.
Bette Davis made several great films in her long career. Beyond the Forest is NOT one of them, but it is one of her most memorable. If you want to talk about high camp, it would be a main talking point. Bette is off-the-charts OTT as Rosa, the only femme fatale in a town of dutiful, post-WWII wives. She chews away at the scenery as she lies, cheats and schemes her way to a better life. That’s not all. The 41YO actress is too old to be playing Rosa by at least ten years. She looks it too. At times, I thought I was looking at an aging drag queen. All of this together makes for one of the campiest performances ever captured on film.
Cotten fares a little better as the saintly, super-patient husband who puts up with more crap than any good husband should. Louis isn’t the most exciting person in the world, but he’s a decent person. He doesn’t even charge most of his patients for his services, letting them pay him in produce or odd jobs instead. Brian is fairly wooden as Neil. Ruth Roman (Strangers on a Train) also co-stars as Moose’s long-lost daughter Carol who comes back into his life. This plot thread is introduced only to be dropped and forgotten. The only good that comes from Carol’s visit is her mink coat. Rosa shares a passionate moment with it, stroking and luxuriating in the expensive object of desire while its owner is otherwise occupied. Bette has more chemistry with the inanimate object than either of her male co-stars.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Drake’s performance as the housemaid. The non-Native American actress sports a black wig and a ton of heavy dark makeup in a portrayal that today’s overly sensitive audiences would call “culturally insensitive”. As for the performance itself, it’s passable. She has a couple of good exchanges with Bette who, at one point, calls her a “red Indian”. That’s not too offensive, no way.
Beyond the Forest wouldn’t be the classic bad movie it is without Max Steiner’s overly dramatic score. It underscores every pivotal moment, driving home their importance with the subtlety of a sledge hammer. That, along with everything else, makes the 1949 film a must-see for bad movie aficionados. I realize I’m 75 years late to the party, but you can count me among its fans.
