Marked Woman
                
Director: Lloyd Bacon
Year: 1937
Rating: 6.0
Lesson number one back in the 1930s was don't fuck with Bette Davis. She was made of polished steel with sharp jagged edges. When she tells the gangster "If you have hurt my sister, I will crawl back from my grave to get you", you believe her. This is a Warners tough slice of life film that is surprising for what the film gets past the Code. There is a lot of implied immorality going on here though never explicit. And the most brutal scene is only heard which makes it even more disturbing as people listen to the screams and can do nothing.



Five female friends and roomies all work at the nicely titled Intimate. A nightclub where you have to knock on the door and pass inspection to get it. The cops just use battering rams. The club's new owner Vanning (Eduardo Ciannelli) based apparently on Lucky Luciano tells them what their duties are. Make the customers comfortable, soften them up, get them to buy drinks and play roulette. A clip joint in other words, Mary (Davis) says. Yes, but a high class one. Later Mary tells her friends (Lola Lane, Isabel Jewell, Rosalind Marquis and Mayo Methot), I know all the angles. I do what I have to and will get out on easy street. Ya, easy street. Later in a great moment when she is confronted by the law, she tells them "if I wasn't in a hurry, I'd break right down and cry. So long chumps."



The scene when the club is full of lonely men sitting at their tables and all five women come flourishing down the stairs looking their best with predatory eyes like hawks looking for mice is great. They see them and glide in for the kill. It becomes clear later on - though there is enough wiggle room for Warners to deny it - that their duties go beyond the club. The girls all leave with customers - remember I get 20% says Vanning - but in the taxi Mary's customer who paid with a check tells her he pulled a fast one, he is broke. A fast one to the morgue, you mean, she says. Get out of town fast. He doesn't make it.



And finally at the 30-minute mark, Bogart as the ambitious DA enters the film. He wants Vanning and he sees these girls as his way. Mary's lovely college younger sister shows up to throw a wrench into things. Played by Jane Bryan and discovered by Davis, she got out of the film racket after a few years by marrying well, the owner of the Rexall Drug stores, a big chain at one time. Bogart is fine with little to do in this and very secondary to Davis who chews up the scenery and her co-stars like a starving cannibal. Her delivery is sharp like a razor as she snaps it off staccato style.



Of the five women, it should be mentioned that Bogart was having an affair with Methot and they soon got married. She is the one Vanning wants to fire because she looks too old. In the real world, her heavy drinking was in fact already taking its revenge on her looks. This wasn't a Bogart Bacall fairytale. The two of them became known as the Battling Bogarts and their drunken fights became legendary. Davis had been in a huge brawl with Warners because she thought she was getting lousy roles. She left and went to England to work. Warners sued her and won the case and offered her this role. Bogart said of Davis, "A kind of inner power came through her skin". She took the role seriously. After she gets "marked" she was upset at how the make-up people still made her look good. So she went to her doctor and told him, patch me up as if I had the hell beaten out of me. He did. The studio didn't like it. She got her way. The film was a big hit.