3 Leading Ladies Of The Silver Screen - Vol. 3 - Bigamist / Hells House / High Voltage

Starring: Bette Davis, Joan Fontaine Dvd Release: 7th March, 2005 Number Of Discs: 1 Format: PAL, Region 0 Encoding

Article Index: [Background Info] [DVD Review] [Biographies] [Articles/Resources] [Link To This Article] Looking To Buy? Buy This DVD Here

Unless I was unlucky, don't bother with this dvd. The quality of the three films was so poor, I was unable to get past the second one. The first, with Joan Fontaine, the sound was out of sync, but the story was quite interesting, with Edmund O'Brien as the bigamist, so I stayed with it. It did come to rather an abrupt halt though.

The second, the sound was muffled so that you had to turn up the volume just to hear what was being said. It was sickly sentimental & not terribly well acted either. Finally the third film with Jean Harlow was so crackly & muted that I couldn't get past the first five minutes.

All in all, these two fine actresses have made much better movies, & I strongly advise you to view these instead. I can't comment on the Jean Harlow movie, as the quality was so poor. I would have thought that any old films like these could have been digitally remastered.

Ruth Elizabeth Davis, better known as Bette Davis, was an Academy Award winning American actress. Davis was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. Her parents divorced when she was 7 & she & her sister were raised by their mother, who aspired to be an actress. Davis was denied admission to Eva LeGallienne s Manhattan Civic Repertory because she was considered insincere. So, she enrolled in John Murray Anderson s dramatic school & became a star. Her first professional stage performance was The Earth Between, Off-Broadway in 1923. Her first Broadway performance was in 1929, in Broken Dishes & later in Solid South. The next year, she was hired by Universal Studios, but they felt she was not star material & in 1932, they let her sign with Warner Brothers. Her first starring role was in The Man Who Played God & she became a star in Of Human Bondage. The Motion Picture Academy failed to nominate Davis for this tour de force & such was the outrage that she received many write in votes from disgruntled Academy members, the eventual winner was longtime rival Katharine Hepburn. Posters Of Bette Davis

Editors Choice: Return From Witch Mountain, Pocketful Of Miracles, The Virgin Queen, All About Eve, Of Human Bondage, Another Mans Poison, View DVDology

Joan Fontaine is an international actress. Born Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland in Tokyo, Japan, the daughter of a British patent attorney with a practice in Japan, she is the younger sister of actress Olivia de Havilland. Because Joan & her mother both had frequent illnesses, the family moved to Saratoga, California for their health. But Joans father soon went back to Japan & he & his wife divorced. Joan returned to Tokyo to attend the American School there, but she came back in 1934 to find that her sister was making a name for herself on the stage. Both sisters moved to Hollywood to start film careers. Because Olivia was using the family name, Joan began acting as Joan Burfield, in No More Ladies in 1935. Her career seemed to be ready to die, even as her sisters blossomed, but Joan changed her name to Fontaine & began receiving bigger parts in such movies as You Cant Beat Love, Quality Street, The Women & Gunga Din. In 1940, Joan received an Academy Award nomination for Rebecca. The next year she was again nominated, for Suspicion & this time she won the award. Posters Of Joan Fontaine

Editors Choice: The Witches, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea, The Bigamist, Rebecca, View DVDology

©2004-2008 DVDArk.co.uk