Old Acquaintance (1943)

Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Disappointment for a huge fan!

Brilliant and touching

Am I Missing Something?

...asks Millie Drake (Miriam Hopkins),but the answer she gets from the mirror, from the public, from her husband, from her own daughter seems to be "You are! But we just think Kit is a better and deeper person!" Millie and Kit Marlowe (Bette Davis) have been friends from girlhood, and Kit becomes, even in her 20's, a renowned author, a critical success but not a tremendously financial one. Millie, on the other hand, already married to a successful engineer and also pregnant, decides to compete with Kit and write too. However, she pounds out trashy romance novels that are a hit with the masses and therefore make her rich but not critically acclaimed. And that's really all that Millie has wanted since childhood - to be better at Kit at SOMETHING. And yet she keeps failing because Kit's strength is not in what she has but what she is.Now Hopkins plays Millie so over the top and childish that it is hard to dislike her. She takes her husband, Preston, for granted and loses him - he grows to love Kit but she says that is a line friends simply do not cross, even if the break up of the marriage had nothing to do with their feelings. Millie spends so much time on her career that her daughter Deirdre comes to think of Kit as a mom just as much as Millie. How will this all work out? Watch and find out. I will tell you that the surprises are in the men, not in the women. Millie takes everything the way you would expect her to - throwing temper tantrums dressed in the finest fashions while Kit is the lighthouse, the rock of stability through everything. Now back to the men. For one thing Millie's ex-husband doesn't bother to see his daughter for over ten years! He wouldn't have seen her even then had it not been for Kit bringing them together. Preston is no bum, he's had a good career, but no time or place for his daughter in his life? Then there is Kit's beau during the war years who is ten years younger than her and is constantly nagging her to marry him. Their age means nothing he promises, she's all he's ever wanted ... BUT one walk with Deirdre, who is practically Kit's daughter, and he dumps his 42 year old fiancée for a 19 year old girl? Men! How did we win a world war with these weasels in charge? I've given a great deal of the plot away, but the joy is in the execution, not the details. I will give this as a sign of how much it interested me. I was getting ready to exercise and this was on Turner Classic Movies. I usually like to listen to music when I exercise, but this film so interested me - it was not your standard 40's soap opera - that I actually watched the film during my workout and then dragged out one of my Bette Davis collections to see the entire thing.Highly recommended. Just one thing. Do you think Miriam Hopkins did such a good job because maybe Millie actually WAS the real Miriam Hopkins? Just wondering.

Enjoyable melodrama is even more so if you are aware of the back stage tension between the stars. Having costarred with Miriam Hopkins in The Old Maid several years previously and finding it a wearing situation Bette had no desire to do so again. She really wanted to make this with Norma Shearer but Norma turned it down and retired so Miriam was in and it became an ordeal that Bette bristled about whenever asked to the end of her life. That conflict seems to have fed into the spark between the actresses on screen and gave a lot of energy to their scenes. That energy is missing from the rest of the movie whenever either lady is not on screen because the other featured players John Loder and Dolores Moran while attractive are missing that spark that makes a star and their contributions are minor. Anne Revere, glamorized for once, has an amusing scene as a reporter who respects one of the ladies as a writer and not the other.

The film follows the relationship between Kit (Bette Davis) and Millie (Miriam Hopkins) who are both friends and authors with different styles. We span 20 or so years of their lives and their relationships with Millie's husband Preston (John Loder), Millie's daughter Deirdre (Dolores Moran) and Kit's partner Rudd (Gig Young). The film explores the avenues of career woman vs family woman.The film starts badly with the men being portrayed as comedy/ineffectual numbskulls and Miriam Hopkins's screeching voice irritating the hell out of the viewer. The film is boring - it gets better in the 2nd half but it's all still a load of tosh. Bette Davis is good, though, apart from her awful habit of saying "Dahling". You want to shout out "Oi....Davis....the word is Darling!"This is a film for women. It's not bad, it's just boring.

Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins reunite after being together in "The Old Maid!" It sets practical but lonely Bette against flighty but happy Miriam. Bette plays Kit Marlowe..a single, successful author coming home to the small town she grew up in. She meets up again with childhood friend, Millie Drake played by Miriam Hopkins. There's always been a bit of a rivalry between the two, even though they've been friends. Millie has a daughter, a husband and love. Kit has a successful career but no one really to love in her life. Kit's visit triggers jealously in Millie, so she decides to become a successful author like Kit. She writes a steamy, sexy book and Kit helps it along with her connections. Lo and behold, the book becomes a best seller, starting Millie on a career eclipsing her old friend's career, but she loses her husband along the way when she lets success go to her head.The subplots swirl around these two women...Millie's envy of Kit and then Kit's help turns Millie into a success but she loses her husband who becomes infatuated with Kit. Preston professes his love for Kit, but she in turn tells him no because of Millie and her daughter. Kit falls in love with a younger man, but she finds herself unwilling to commit because of his age. He in turn falls in love with Millie's daughter. When Kit finally realizes what she has and wants to be with him, he admits to her how he has fallen for another woman..the daughter Kit never had..the daughter of her best friend. The threads weave in and out of these two women keeping them bound together. When Millie finds out Preston was attracted to Kit long ago, she sets this scene up which is one of the funniest I've seen from Bette Davis. Millie admits to Kit that she told her daughter Kit and Preston were having an affair. She goes off on a self-pitying tirade at Kit. Kit tries to reason with her to no avail. Finally, Kit leaves the apartment only to come right back again. She walks over to Millie and then shakes the life out of her and throws her down on the couch.After reading interviews by Ms. Davis about some of her frustration at some roles she has endured, it was a revealing look at how she wanted to shake the life out of some producers and directors. Ms. Hopkin's hair and shoulders were just shaking with it, and you have to wonder how many takes it took for this one.The end finds them there in Kit's apartment drinking champagne and watching the fire. They've shared more than just a friendship now. They're shared the loss of love but have kept their friendship intact.This is a delightful movie, and one worth watching. It reminds us how friends alway stick no matter what. No one is perfect and each have faults and good qualities. It is true "old acquaintances" can accept both good and bad and stick to the end!