Bette Davis Eyes

Karl Magee, University Archivist, University of Stirling

It’s a rare creative occasion when someone gets the opportunity to direct one of their childhood heroes. It’s even more unusual when this opportunity provides the final act in a director’s filmmaking career. Lindsay Anderson’s Archive includes a selection of childhood scrapbooks and albums of Hollywood stars which he collected and created when a child in the 1930s. These items preserve a starry who’s who of the golden age of Hollywood including a young Bette Davis, making a stir in her first ‘talkies.’ 

Over fifty years later Anderson got the opportunity to direct Davis in his final feature film, The Whales of August. After years of finding it increasingly difficult to make films in Britain Anderson went to America to direct this tale of two elderly sisters sharing a summer house on the Maine Coast. The film was released in 1987 and is very different in style and tone to Anderson’s British work. Its gentle story and leisurely pace are closer to the classic American cinema he eulogised in his writings on film than the satire, energy and anger of If…. and O Lucky Man! The film provides a quiet farewell for both Anderson and a trio of Hollywood greats with Lilian Gish and Vincent Price starring alongside Bette Davis.  

(Images: Players cigarette card for Bette Davis, 1934, ref. LA 6/3/1/13; photographs of making of The Whales of August, ref. LA 1/11/4/2; contact sheet of photographs of Anderson directing Bette Davis on the set of the Whales of August, ref. LA 1/11/4/1.)