You really hate me, don’t you? You’ve never forgiven me in all these years.
Why should I? Tell me why I should.
Well, we’re sisters.
So we are. And to hell with you.
In Dead Ringer, Bette Davis, post Baby Jane career revival, plays twin sisters, both pretty unsavory in their own unique ways. This isn’t to be confused with A Stolen Life, a movie from 1946, where she also plays twin sisters. In that one, we get the more stereotypical “good twin/bad twin” thing; here, as I say, neither one of them are winning any awards. One of them has been living the high life with a wealthy husband while the other owns a run-down dive bar on the wrong side of town. When the wealthy husband dies, the two come into contact with each other again and the sparks fly. This movie is, no surprise, pretty darn great. This movie is quite a bit different from Baby Jane and Sweet Charlotte; it has some horror elements and it’s surely no spoiler to say that some people end up dead before the credits roll, but it’s got a stark procedural noir feeling to it. It’s directed by Davis’ old co-star from Now Voyager, Paul Henreid, and he brings a slowly paced, but still interesting, feeling to the movie. It’s not showy and over-the-top; it’s got a feeling of an old-school Hollywood drama to the way it’s made. Henreid isn’t, in other words, Robert Aldrich, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. And Davis gives a more restrained performance here; it isn’t minimal by any means, but this isn’t her going completely crazy. At the end of the day, she’s doing some really great, surprisingly nuanced character work and the script is surprisingly interested in notions of identity and fate and such.
The supporting cast is pretty good as well. Karl Malden is on hand as the work-a-day cop boyfriend of the bar-owning version of Davis’ character and, while the film doesn’t ask a whole lot of him, he’s incredibly good and just a pleasure to watch. Jean Hagen is a hoot as a high society flake and Estelle Winwood gets a couple of great scenes as a wealthy superstitious matriarch. Best of all, in my opinion, is Peter Lawford, cast quite against type as a real sleazeball. It’s well over an hour into the movie before he arrives, but he just slithers in, oozing a gross kind of charm and a strange kind of malice. To talk about his character at all would really be a spoiler, but, despite the relatively short screen time he has, he registers very strongly as a kind of golden boy gone to seed. There’s a phenomenally good scene with Davis, Lawford and Malden all together and Malden and Lawford have a great scene later as well that’s just the two of them. I suppose I should mention that Paul Henreid’s daughter, Monika Henreid, plays the maid and is about as good as director’s kids usually are in their debuts, though it was probably not ideal to be making your film debut opposite Bette Davis. So, while this movie is kind of forgotten in Davis’ filmography, I really, really enjoyed it. Davis is always so good, but she just really nails it here, particularly toward the end of the film; the next to last scene in the film is really surprising and she’s amazing in it. It’s also incredibly moving; this isn’t just a cheapo genre film. That scene really just knocked me out and gave the film a real emotional catharsis that you might not expect from a movie where Bette Davis plays crazy twins, you know what I mean? This one is well worth your time and reveals greater depths than you might at first expect while also delivering all the typical Davis thrills. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – surprisingly emotionally nuanced thriller boasts a great Bette Davis performance as unsavory twin sisters; very entertaining with a solid supporting cast. 3 ½ stars.