In This Our Life (1942)

(On Cable TV, July 2022) Many facets of In This Our Life are interesting, but none combine to make it a good movie. A surprising, occasionally progressive film with a highly entertaining production history, sure, but not something with tremendous appeal for viewers. Another entry in the longstanding “Hollywood adapts a salacious, very popular novel into a pale neutered film” tradition, this melodrama follows two sisters through tumultuous melodrama featuring swapping partners, suicide, alcoholism, car accidents (several!) and so on. As if that wasn’t enough, here we have a black character set up to take the fall for what a white woman did. That was sufficiently ahead of its time to be controversial back then! Alas—interesting, but not good. Also interesting: Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland as the sisters, with the usual baggage of behind-the-scenes drama involving Davis. While In This Our Life suffers, in theory, from repeated conflicts between Davis and the film’s two very different directors (John Huston had to leave on war-related business, meaning that Raoul Walsh directed a good chunk of the film), I don’t think you can make a case that the film directly suffers from these disagreements—instead, it’s more fruitful to point at the wild script and recognize that there was probably never a satisfying film to be made from such melodramatic material no matter who would be involved in the production. (Although letting Davis rant freely as the “bad sister” doesn’t exactly help matters.)  In This Our Life is not boring to watch, but it works much better as a slightly trashy potboiler than any kind of serious drama it may have aspired to.