Mrs Davenport (1949)

D. Curtis Bernhardt
B&W


A great big melodramatic musical of the kind nobody makes anymore, or made that often even in the 1940s. A musical which isn’t about dancing in front of exotic sights, or sexy and exciting show folks singing warmly to each other; but instead ordinary people in a big house facing crises in their relationships. Even small stories can be made big if you give them the right attention, and this is a small story made epic and spectacular. It centres on a bored housewife, Olivia De Havilland, who is fed up of her travelling businessman husband, George Sanders, and so flirting with waif-like hunk up the street, Farley Granger. When Granger breaks his leg she seizes her chance for perhaps something more and moves him in with her to recuperate. But, maybe sensing something wrong, Sanders decides to take a sabbatical from work to return to the house full time and become a doting husband. The scene is set for high passion, jealousy, arguments, tears, swoons and finally revelation after revelation of crippling childhood secrets. It’s the stuff of high musical drama, of emotive songs in an over-wrought style. Except if you put ‘Mrs Davenport’ on with a view to tapping your feet along to some soaring tunes, then I should apologise now, as this isn’t actually a musical at all.


Why am I being mischievous? Why am I lying? Well, because if ever a film looks like it’s crying out to be a musical it’s ‘Mrs Davenport’. So many times throughout the film an emotional crescendo is reached, the score starts to swell, and one thinks this is it: we’re going to have a big heartfelt number. But frustratingly it never actually happens. Yet still the film, in its ever so earnest melodramatic pomp, keeps leading us to believe that a musical is going to break out. The last time I watched this movie, a friend of mine and I played a drinking game wherein you had to swig at every point you thought a song was going to happen. We both ended up so, so pissed. At first I thought it was the self-serious score leading the audience to feel like this, but actually the whole thing is staged as if it really is a musical. At the end of every argument, revelation, tearful reconciliation, the camera lingers that little bit too long on our leads’ faces with the result that you expect something else to happen. When it then cuts away to the next talky scene, it’s like something has been chopped out. As if some bitter projectionist who can’t hold a tune has made this film his own personal plaything.


De Havilland, as always, is lovely and radiant and wonderful (I will never hear a word said against Olivia De Havilland); Sanders knows how to deliver snide remarks and present a wounded yet carefree façade like no other actor; while Granger looks the part of sensitive young soul, even if – as always – he looks ridiculously gauche on camera. But for a simple human drama, set in a ramshackle old house, it’s incredibly bombastic and in love with its own seriousness and importance in a way it doesn’t need to be. I don’t know if Tennessee Williams ever saw ‘Mrs Davenport’, but even he’d have thought that the characters just need to shut the fuck up and get over themselves. However if Warner Bros had taken the time to throw in something an audience could sing, well perhaps Mrs Davenport would have lived longer in the cultural memory as the great, spectacular, camp classic it is crying out to be.