Documentary on the great Bette Davis, probably the best dramatic actress ever (or should we say, histrionic?)

'Stardust' on TCM Looks at Bette Davis, on Screen and Off
By ANITA GATES

Peter Jones does Bette Davis fans a big favor in his hypnotic, affectionate new documentary, which has its premiere tonight on TCM. He just sits back and lets the amazing movie clips roll: unforgettable scenes from "Jezebel," "Of Human Bondage," "The Cabin in the Cotton" ("I'd like to kiss you, but I just washed my hair"), "The Little Foxes," "Dark Victory," "Now, Voyager" (the two-cigarette-moon-and-stars thing), "All About Eve" and "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" among others. The very best may be the moment in "Old Acquaintance" when she shakes Miriam Hopkins silly, then says, rather unconvincingly, "Sorry."

When "Stardust: The Bette Davis Story" isn't demonstrating what made Davis great, it is allowing her to speak for herself in television interviews with Dick Cavett , Jack Paar, Phil Donahue and others. "I never cared how I looked, as long as I looked like the character," she says in one exchange.

But talking heads there must be, and happily some of them are enjoyably revealing, or at least somewhat original in their effusive praise. "Just watching Bette Davis on the screen was empowering to women, I think," Jane Fonda says. "Certainly was to me. It was like: This is what's possible. This is the range and depth that is possible for a woman."

Davis's son, Michael Merrill, acknowledges that his mother drank. Her older daughter, B. D. Hyman, who wrote the tell-all book "My Mother's Keeper" (seven years after Christina Crawford's "Mommie Dearest"), shares her memories. But the revelations told with the most obvious venom come from Marion Richards, Davis's nanny, who had the nerve to marry the boss's ex-husband, William Grant Sherry.

Ms. Richards even suggests that Davis may have had something to do with the death of Davis's second husband, Arthur Farnsworth, from head injuries after a fall in 1943.

Born in Lowell, Mass., Davis (1908-89) was close to her mother. Her father, as Susan Sarandon , the narrator, says, "gave his family everything but attention." Davis has said that her parents' divorce delighted her.

She studied acting in New York ( Martha Graham taught her dance) and worked on Broadway. Signed by Universal Pictures in 1930, she went to Hollywood and began a movie career that led to two Oscars and a long, fabled love-hate relationship with Warner Brothers.

According to the film, she was a 24-year-old virgin when she married Harmon Nelson, a bandleader, the first of her four husbands. She was busy making "Jezebel" and having an affair with its director, William Wyler , in 1938 when she learned that her father had died. She didn't bother going to the funeral.

Davis died in France at 81, on her way home from a film festival, leaving behind a lifetime of work that epitomized female strength and dignity. Yet there, in "Stardust," is an aging Davis giving an interview and announcing: "The girl adjusts to her husband. And I think unless she is able to do this, there can never be a happy marriage."

The great Bette Davis, a product of her time as we all are, had to live through the 1950's.