All This, and Heaven Too

Anatole Litvak's 1940 film All This, and Heaven Too is a pretty good melodrama, though not nearly as successful as other Bette Davis vehicles of the same period like The Letter (my personal favourite), Jezebel or even the weirdly melodramatic Now, Voyager.

The film starts with Davis getting a job as a teacher in an all-girls school. The girls of her class however have found a newspaper report about an scandalous affair she was involved in when she was in France employed as a governess for children in the house of a duke (Charles Boyer). When the girls taunt her about her past she begins to tell them her life story and then we see the whole film in flashback. The story itself is nothing unusual or unexpected. The duke is exasperated by the nagging demands of his wife and his withdrawal has made her hysterical. The governess is unhappy and lonely too and exceptionally devoted to the children and, you know, the usual stuff...

What is interesting is that throughout the film their love affair (or non-affair) remains "chaste". They don't even kiss once! Davis keeps reminding herself and others (she is in any case telling a story) that whatever she did was for the children and she never had any ulterior designs on the duke but the director (and the audience) knows better. I think this is what makes it interesting. Like other women's films of that period, this also dramatizes issues which would interest feminists, like how insecurity and powerlessness find an expression in feminine jealousy. Also how unfair the distribution of power in a marriage is - the duke repeatedly denies his love to his wife driving her mad, bitter and vindictive and even leading to a cruel end.

Another interesting aspect of the film is its ending. In the end Davis is reunited with a young and good looking church minister who is interested only in an asexual friendship with her ("new kind of love", he calls it). I don't know in what ways this serves as wish-fulfillment for women audiences (most of classic hollywood melodramas were indeed wish fulfillment fantasies) but it is interesting to think about it.