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The Old Maid

So that’s Miriam Hopkins… I must have seen her in stuff, but I don’t remember anything in particular.

Perhaps Jekyll and Hyde? Her performance here seems very… er… stately.

Bette Davis is doing her Yes I’m Indeed A Teenage Girl For Sure thing.

Those skirts seem very practical. Gives you more lap to put your laptop on.

This is extremely melodramatic, which I quite like. The performances are entertaining, and the costumes are fun. But it’s a bit hard to get into — it’s just not all that gripping.

Heh heh:

For a bad play, it makes a surprisingly good drama

[…]

Variety called the film “stagey, sombre and generally confusing fare.”

The New Yorker wrote at the time:

The story is adult, insofar as it is concerned with something beyond getting a certain girl into the arms of a certain man. But how dull it is! Written and directed with no variety or change of pace, “The Old Maid” just trudges sensibly along to its inevitable conclusion, and then stops.

Yeah, that’s basically the problem.

So I guess her character is supposed to be… 40 now? So no wonder she’s gone grey.

This old film does have good points, but at the end of the day, I just have to agree with the New Yorker review: It’s just a bit on the dull side.

The Old Maid. Edmund Goulding. 1939.

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