OLIVIA DE HAVILLAND as Roy Timberlake IN THIS OUR LIFE (1942) — dir. John Huston

In 1942, Bette Davis, under the direction of John Huston, delivered a ruthlessly accurate (and much underrated) portrait of a Southern girl, in the Warner Brothers production of Ellen Glasgow’s novel, In This, Our Life. She thus became, and, indeed, remained, the toast of Harlem because her prison scene with the black chauffeur was cut when the movie came uptown. The uproar in Harlem was impressive, and I think that the scene was re-inserted; in any case, either uptown or downtown, I saw it. Davis appeared to have read, and grasped, the script—which must have made her rather lonely—and she certainly understood the role. Her performance had the effect, rather, of exposing and shattering the film, so that she played in a kind of vacuum...

In In This, Our Life, Davis is a spoiled Southern girl, guilty of murder in a hit-and-run automobile accident, and she has blamed this crime on her black chauffeur. (An actor named Ernest Anderson: Hattie McDaniel played his mother). But he has steadfastly denied having the car that night. She, armed with her wealth, her color, and her sex, goes to the prison to persuade him to corroborate her story: and, what she uses, through jailhouse bars, is her sex. She will pay, for the chauffeur’s silence, any price he demands. Indeed, the price is implicit in the fact that she knows that she is guilty: she can have no secrets from him now.

Blacks are often confronted, in American life, with such devastating examples of the white descent from dignity; devastating not only because of the enormity of white pretensions, but because this swift and graceless descent would seem to indicate that white people have no principles whatever.... In the film, the black chauffeur simply does not trust the white girl to keep her end of the bargain—which would involve using her power to save his life—and is far too proud, anyway, to strike such a bargain. But the effect has been made, and the truth about the woman revealed.”

— James Baldwin, in The Devil Finds Work (1976)

Asa had raised himself in his smaller bed, with the harder mattress and the inadequate springs, while he stared at her thoughtfully. It was odd, he had reflected, how quickly Lavinia resented even an implied criticism of Stanley. In her youngest child, who embodied all that she had longed to be and was not, she had re-created, not her actual youth, but that other more vital youth which had existed in her imagination alone. To touch Stanley was like touching an exposed nerve in Lavinia’s ego.

Ellen Glasgow, In This Our Life

In This Our Life (John Huston, 1942) Cast: Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, George Brent, Dennis Morgan, Charles Coburn, Frank Craven, Billie Burke, Ernest Anderson, Hattie McDaniel, Lee Patrick, Mary Servoss. Screenplay: Howard Koch, based on a novel by Ellen Glasgow. Cinematography: Ernest Haller. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: William Holmes. Music: Max Steiner. Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland play sisters named Stanley and Roy, which should be enough to suggest what sort of movie In This Our Life is. And yes, it's a good sister (de Havilland/Roy) versus bad sister (Davis/Stanley) plot, with George Brent and Dennis Morgan as the men in the middle. As the movie starts, Stanley is on the brink of marrying Craig (Brent) but instead runs off with Roy's husband, Peter (Morgan), after which Roy gets divorced and falls in love with Craig, but Stanley's marriage to Peter goes sour and he commits suicide. So then she sets her eye on Craig again, and so on, accompanied by an almost nonstop score by Max Steiner to make sure you're feeling what you're supposed to feel. But this adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Ellen Glasgow wants to be more. The crux of the plot hangs on Stanley's attempt to frame a young black man named Parry (Ernest Anderson) for a hit-and-run accident that she committed. Unfortunately, the sensitivity of Hollywood studios about offending Southern audiences waters down this part of the narrative, even though Anderson has a good scene in which Parry despairs of receiving justice. Censorship also weakens the incest motif in Stanley's relationship with her uncle William (Charles Coburn), which was stronger and clearer in Glasgow's novel. Davis didn't want the role of the bad sister, and made things difficult for director John Huston (and for uncredited director Raoul Walsh, who filled in after Pearl Harbor when Huston was called into service as a documentarian/propagandist for the Department of War). The result is some of Davis's more flamboyantly mannered acting. De Havilland, however, gives a solid performance as the tough and thoughtful Roy. It would have been a more entertaining movie if it had had the courage to be trashier and less tepidly social-conscious.

In This Our Life is a 1942 American drama film. The screenplay by Howard Koch is based on the 1941 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same title by Ellen Glasgow

so my roommate is completely straight edge like no drugs no alcohol etc and so im sure y’all can imagine my surprise when i saw she brought home this sign

so i immediately inquired

and now you may ask. what the fuck did my roommate think that sign meant? well

anyways i moved the sign so it’s now front and center in our living room and ive been laughing every time i pass it

love how the moment ao3 goes down we all start acting like housewives waiting for their husbands to come back from war

don’t you love when you’re casually reading a random poem and suddenly come across a line that burrows into your bones and becomes the definition of your heart for the next 17 years

the whole guilt-tripping language in posts about important topics paired with how I'm still getting bitches in my notes talking about why it's actually good to tell "bad" people to kill themselves continues to prove to me that a lot of people have absolutely no concept of social justice or activism outside of assuming the worst of and then viciously attacking strangers on the internet

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

Be soft, like you? No. I'll go out and get what I want. The way Stanley gets what she wants. The way Uncle William got away from you everything he wanted. I'm going to be like the Fitzroys. They know how to live. And I'm gonna be just as hard as they. That's the way to be happy. OLIVIA DE HAVILLAND as Roy Timberlake IN THIS OUR LIFE (1942) — dir. John Huston

i want this book to last forever istg

Still, her voice did not break. The most astonishing thing to Asa was the absence of grief in her face, the graven immobility of her attitude, as if she were not wholly there, as if some vital part of her had detached itself from her surroundings, from the immediate moment, from the actuality of time and space.

Ellen Glasgow, In This Our Life

sometimes. i just have to remind myself that percy took annabeth to paris. like, canonically. he forgot their one-month anniversary. and took his girl to paris to make up for it. the standards are in elysium.

Some of you haven't been to the darkest depths of ao3 and it shows

I'd love to see a dpxdc story where the Justice League knows about Amity Park and the Ghosts the whole time, and does think the ghosts are rogues to be addressed. Doesn't agree with the GIW, maybe doesn't even know about them? THE IMPORTANT PART.

The Red Huntress is the only active vigilante in Amity Park, according to the JL. Phantom is marked as one of her rogues. Maybe the Fentons even are marked as rogues from all the property damages and random shooting/sliming of citizens. Valarie is the only person successfully taking care of the ghosts, masking and suiting up in the classic vigilante way the whole time.