Mr. Skeffington is an extraordinary movie, both for Bette Davis’s transformation—visual and emotional—from a belle in her 20s to a fright in her 50s, and for its engagement, direct for its time, with the topic of antisemitism.
The film’s story opens in 1914 with Davis as Fanny, a frivolous and reedy-voiced society beauty surrounded by wealthy suitors. For mercenary reasons she sets her marital sights on a Jewish businessman, Job Skeffington, played with hangdog nobility by Claude Rains. He is smitten, and spends their marriage attending to her whims and trying to win her love, even as she continues to entertain male admirers and treat him offhandedly. While her cousin George (Walter Abel) tries to convince her to act more decently toward her husband, Davis is too addicted to the attention and obeisance aroused in men by her beauty and charm.
When she learns she is pregnant, she is upset, as this might affect her looks. She bears a daughter, whom she neglects as a reminder of her age, while Rains, by contrast, is a doting father. Rains is eventually driven to seek affection through discreet romances with various of his secretaries. When the unfaithful Davis learns this, she uses it as a convenient pretext to divorce him. He provides her with an astonishingly generous settlement, and goes to Europe to take up business there.
The years go by, and Davis continues her life as wealthy socialite and the object of men’s desire, until she contracts diphtheria. She survives the disease, but it has destroyed her appearance. Few actresses have reveled in the portrayal of feminine ugliness as Davis does here. Looking like a Kabuki witch or Frankenstein monster, she seeks to resume her place as a society beauty, undergoing a series of exquisite humiliations as she gathers her old suitors and learns what her effect on them is now.
In her growing solitude, she is beset with hallucinations of her ex-husband. The psychiatrist she visits has no time for her pathetic flirtations and egotistical pretentions. “Your romantic days are over,” he tells her, bluntly. “The only person who in the long run is of any use to a woman whose run has also been long. . . the only person who will stick to such a woman is her husband.” His solution to the hallucinations of her ex-husband is for her to try to reunite with the real thing, at which advice she leaves indignantly to seek second, third, and fourth opinions among her former admirers.
The movie is an adaptation of a 1940 novel of the same title, by the popular English novelist Elizabeth von Arnim. It is a character study of a woman who has spent all her life relying on her beauty and, at fifty and post-illness, must recalibrate her relations with the men around her, with her past, and with her innermost sense of self. The book is mordantly funny, and, rather than a pat indictment of a spoiled woman, allows us to see the world and herself from her point of view, including what we come to recognize are her intelligence, depth, compassion, and even bravery.
For this comic and poignant internal world, the film substitutes Davis’s tour-de-force of acting, hysterical imperiousness and arrow-sharp glances alike. She was nominated for Best Actress, and Rains for Best Supporting Actor, at the Academy Awards. The film also features an operatically high-tension score by composers Franz Waxman and Paul Dessau.
But, Davis aside, the most fascinating dimension of the movie is its relatively direct meditation on the antisemitism of the time, in Nazi Germany and, less overtly and in a different way, the United States. The screenwriting brothers Julius and Philip Epstein, who scripted Casablanca, develop this theme in ways that go beyond the source novel.
In the book, the marriage between Fanny and Skeffington is brief, and childless, and Skeffington, unlike the upright character in the movie, seems to have been somewhat prone to occasional infidelity without any push from his wife. At the beginning of the book, Fanny reflects on her former husband, a kind of defect in her life that she was relieved to correct:
At no time had she enjoyed her marriage. She was very sorry, but really she hadn’t. Among other things, he was a Jew, and she wasn’t. Not that that would have mattered, since she was without prejudices, if he hadn’t happened to look so exactly like a Jew. It wasn’t a bit necessary that he should. Lots of people she knew had married Jews, and none of them looked so exactly like one as Job (Mr. Skeffington’s name was Job, a name, everybody agreed, impossible to regard as other than unfortunate). Still, he couldn’t help that, and certainly he had been very kind. Being an upright girl, who believed in sticking to her vows and giving as good as she got, she too had been very kind. Her heart, however, hadn’t been in it. A marriage, she found, with someone of a different breed is fruitful of small rubs; and she had had to change her religion too, which annoyed her, in spite of her not really having any. So that when he offered her those repeated chances of honourably getting rid of him, though she began by being outraged she ended by being pleased.
If there is any flaw in von Arnim’s book, it is that her Mr. Skeffington is not a developed character but a symbol. His function in the book is to represent the moral seriousness that his wife has neglected until life tests her, and that she is given the opportunity to reclaim in middle age.
The Epsteins turn Mr. Skeffington into a fleshed-out character, far more sympathetic and real. We are even given some information as to his poor background: born—like the screenwriters—on the Lower East Side of New York City, his father a pushcart peddler named Skavinskaya, before the name was changed at Ellis Island.
In both the book and film, a key motivation for Fanny’s marriage to Job is her desire to provide financially for her beloved brother, who then dies in the First World War. The brother in the novel opposes the marriage (“What that Jew?” he exclaimed horrified. “But, Fan—you can’t”). The movie does not so directly name his antisemitism, yet it brings out even more starkly the brother’s destructive spite by having him employed by Skeffington, embezzle funds, and yet be treated by his Jewish employer with (unrequited) mercy despite his crimes.
The film, by extending the length of the marriage and giving Fanny and Job a daughter, also develops the pathos of a Jewish father concerned about the effects of anti-Jewish hatred on his child. In a particularly affecting scene that takes place in the 1930s, Rains is trying to do what is best for his daughter in the wake of the divorce. Davis does not want custody—parenting will cramp her social life—and the daughter adores her father and wants to accompany him to Europe. Rains loves his daughter (played touchingly here by Sylvia Arslan), but he knows that if she stays with her mother she might be able to avoid the stigma of her half-Jewish parentage. “You see, I’m Jewish,” he tells her. “Your mother is not. Now, if you stay here with your mother, you’ll never know what it i— I mean, if you come to Europe with me, it’s different there. And people may look upon you as, oh…this is very difficult to explain to a child.” She responds: “I suppose it’s easier to explain to a grown-up.” “I don’t know,” Rains murmurs.[1]
The film also retrojects its 1940s present back into its early WWI-era scenes. In one such scene, Davis and Rains are watching a newsreel showing the Kaiser’s soldiers doing military drills. The other spectators comment dourly on the images: “I don’t like the looks of any of them.” “Just like a machine.” “Yeah, a friend of mine was telling me they start ‘em goosestepping there when they’re two years old!”
Both book and movie end with the horror of Nazi antisemitism. Skeffington returns to England. “Job’s a broken man,” says Fanny’s cousin George in the movie. “He’s been in a concentration camp. You’d hardly recognize him.” The Nazis have confiscated his business and stolen his money. The Gestapo have tortured him, and put out his eyes. Von Arnim describes him blind, mentally shattered, penniless, spending his days on a London park-bench with his seeing-eye dog, wincing at the approach of imagined enemies. The name of the character is, then, an intentional reflection on the biblical book of Job.
Yet it is part of the delicate irony of von Arnim’s book that, while giving us at the end of her book a literal Job-figure, ruined in the most obvious and awful way, she spends the bulk of the novel presenting the wealthy, comfortable Fanny as a partly parodic, partly serious biblical Job as well. Female attractiveness and the flights it stirs in men are a real and vital thing, if not the most important thing. Fanny is contending with the loss of her looks at fifty, the effects of diphtheria (“the men, like her hair, seemed to have dropped off”), and the growing awareness of what a woman’s life may be like when her sex appeal has gone:
what a lot of dull people there seemed to be about lately. Dull men. Uninterested men. Uninterested, and therefore uninteresting. When first she began going out again after being in the country, she was struck by it. London suddenly seemed full of them. She couldn’t think where they all came from. Wherever she went, there they were too.
That there is an obvious incommensurateness between her sorrows and the sufferings of Skeffington is the point, something of which the novel and Fanny herself are quite aware. Von Arnim’s Fanny reflects:
What could be sillier in other people’s eyes than a woman kicking up a fuss because she, too, in her turn, had grown old, and her beauty was gone? Yet what could be more tragic for the woman who, having been used all her life to being beautiful, found that without her looks she had nothing left to fall back upon?
Fanny’s moral growth and quality are signaled by her honest confrontation with her own situation, her acceptance of her minor-key martyrdom, and her sympathetic determination to rise to the occasion:
she for the first time suspected that Fate was bent on making a man of her. Unpleasant, if you weren’t a man; but what could these knock-out blows one after the other mean, except that she was to be forced to stand on her own feet, and face it like a gentleman that everything, given time, went? If that really were so, the first thing she had better do was at once to leave off trying to cling. Straws, they had turned into, these men who used to be lovers; and deplorable as it was that lovers should end as straws, it was even more deplorable to try to cling to them. She wouldn’t. She would be a man. Though it certainly seemed great waste, if one had to end up as a man, that one should have begun life as the opposite.
Indeed, she is determined to “get busy paying back something, at least, of the debt she owed for her creation, preservation, and all the blessings of her life. Such blessings. She thought of them now with wonder.”
By finally juxtaposing Fanny’s sufferings with Skeffington’s, the book and the movie allow for the reality of even a wealthy woman’s unhappiness—while placing this in a more serious moral framework in which we grow by comprehending our good fortune and seeking to help those far worse off.
To be sure, this makes the concentration camp victim something of a placeholder in a moral equation. Fanny is all too willing to return Skeffington’s financial largesse and see that he is cared for but, although she would love to reunite with him and share their home, she does not want to ruin what she suspects may be one of his few remaining possessions: his idea of her beauty. This problem is conveniently solved by her discovery of his blindness. Now, by reuniting with Skeffington she can be the older, morally wiser woman and (in his imagination) the younger beauty both. Which threatens to turn both book and movie, in the end, into a pretty fable, though not one to dismiss.[2]
[1]Director Victor Sherman (born Abraham Orovitz) was also Jewish. He was evidently having an affair with Davis during the filming of Mr. Skeffington.
[2]Another element in the novel that is not transferred to the movie concerns the one former suitor of Fanny who does still want to marry her, for financial reasons: he is deeply in debt. In the novel, von Arnim seems to play up his racism and beastliness while he was conducting business in the Pacific, before returning to England with the idea of marrying Fanny for her money: “After the fat native women, oily to the eye, and with a horrible slippery resilience to the touch, like hot snakes, marrying Fanny would have the quality of a cold bath. God, the cool women of England, thought Edward, tossing beneath his mosquito-nets—the cool, clean, fragile, delicate opposites of armfuls! He had come to hate armfuls—so black and big, so slippery. Only just at first they had rather amused him, the unlimitedness of them, the sheer supply; but for years, except in moments of desperation, he had kept clear of them, and could hardly at last wait for the day when, quit of the creatures for ever, he was going home-to marry their exact contrary.”