The Star - A Great Bette Davis Film

Bette Davis was a mercurial creature, the characters she portrayed were all so different that sometimes I couldn't believe they were all being played by the same actress! 

In The Star, she was given a difficult task, to try to make a spoiled has-been movie star into someone the audience could care about. But she succeeded magnificently. You see the trials and miseries a woman must deal with while aging in Hollywood. And there is a revealing portrait of the leeches (usually relatives) that prey on the rich (or once rich) and famous. Her relationship with her daughter (played by Natalie Wood) is wonderful, as is her budding romance with a rugged, no-nonsense former co-star (Sterling Hayden). Assorted so-called friends and associates give her several doses of reality along her desperate path to a fantasy comeback, but the truth takes awhile to sink in. 

It's an obsessive lifestyle, being a star, with a bond as hard to break as a dope addiction. But the film gives you hope that the character, Margaret Elliot, will survive in her new surroundings, and even be happy, probably for the first real time in her life.

Films like this are hard to pull off, they quite often end in a mess of vapid melodrama. The Star has enough heart and soul to keep from slipping into that mess, while also managing to leave a few choice truths for you to ponder once the film ends.