You won't be disappointed!

Wonderful character development!

Very well executed

The greatest movie ever made..!

Critic James Agee, when reviewing the film in 1944, felt it was an overwrought story made to manipulate female moviegoers. Not sure if I agree with his assessment, but I do think Bette Davis is miscast as a gorgeous woman. It would have worked better with someone like Vivien Leigh or Gene Tierney-- any actress whose beauty was obvious and too striking to ignore. Or perhaps someone like Ingrid Bergman would have done an excellent job. And maybe in place of Rains, they could have reunited her with Boyer. Joan Fontaine (in Warners' remake of THE CONSTANT NYMPH a year earlier) might also have been acceptable.But Davis just does not work for me in this role. In NOW, VOYAGER she starts as an ugly duckling and we know that even despite her metamorphosis, she still has all those ugly insecurities inside-- that's sort of what bonds her to the young girl later on in the picture. However, in MR. SKEFFINGTON there is not supposed to be any doubt that she's a confident and alluring woman. I feel what we get here is play-acting, a vainglorious actress in a less- than-noble attempt to play a great screen siren. It's just not believable at all, no matter how much they dress her up.

I will not write another review of "Mr. Skeffington" since this has already been done, and well done too I might add, by other users. I won't go on about the fact that the film is extremely well done, and one of Bette Davis' best performances in a distinguished career.I always find it fascinating, however, to think about the character who ends up getting his or her comeuppance and learning their lesson, as Mrs. Skeffington does, and ask "what if." Although I know that she receives a much needed lesson in values and priorities, so that by the end of the film she understands what is truly important, I always feel some measure of sympathy for the character.Vain, unfaithful and perhaps calculating though she might be, she is not without pathos and depth -- even in the beginning -- since her actions are motivated by the love of another, however misplaced. In attempting to help her brother, misguided though some might think it, she shows a willingness to help someone and to make a considerable sacrifice out of sisterly devotion.Ultimately, when she gets sick and loses her looks, it is ironically cruel that the last man she dated ends up marrying her daughter; this always felt a shade too mean for my taste, although I accept the action as part of the whole of a great classic movie. Nevertheless, I can't help feeling that there should have been more dialog about this since it strikes me as a potentially incestuous betrayal by the daughter to the mother.Once again, I do not discount or disagree with the general view about the film and its characters, but Mrs, Skeffington always elicited more sympathy from me than is perhaps usual among the movie's fans, even if she may not deserve it.Definitely worth watching!!!

Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein co-produced and co-adapted this fetching, moving, often wonderful study of a woman's life, based on the story by "Elizabeth" (née Elizabeth von Arnim). Bette Davis gives a high-wire act of a performance as Fanny Trellis, a flirtatious New Yorker in the early 1900s with no money in the bank, a brother to support, and potential suitors lined up at the foot of her staircase. She eventually marries a Jewish financier whom she doesn't love, but who adores her, yet never tires of her gentleman callers (whom she discards in much the same way as she does everybody else). This vain, frivolous beauty with the goosey good humor eventually gets her comeuppance however, and it's a bittersweet moment. Director Vincent Sherman allows this lengthy tale to unfold at a casual, jaunty pace, though he's exceptionally straightforward with the narrative and doesn't pussyfoot around. We see the years passing via newspaper headlines--a cliché--yet Sherman never loses his focus, and we understand where our non-sensible heroine is coming from emotionally at every exasperating turn. Davis never allows interest to wane in her characterization, and she's matched scene-for-scene by a charmingly low-keyed, non-threatening Claude Rains. Some of the supporting performances are overstated, as is Franz Waxman's hyperkinetic score, but the sheer professionalism of the production and some very funny lines help compensate for the film's minor deficiencies. *** from ****

No doubt about it, Fanny Trellis Skeffington is a despicable character. She's the kind of person who in real life would be the kind you love to hate, totally self centered and unabashedly out for herself. It's the kind of role an actress like Bette Davis can work wonders with, and in this one, she's remarkable. Perhaps as much as the acting, I was also struck by the competence of the makeup department in aging her character, along with those family members and suitors who endured the story arc throughout the decades. The striking thing however as I think about it now, is how the concept of 'old' has been redefined from the 1940's to the present. Fanny and her contemporaries considered themselves old at fifty (maybe even older at half a century). To my mind, the fifty year old Fanny looked like she could have been seventy, and even then, not looking nearly as good as someone like say, Raquel Welch who turns seventy this year.Being the insufferable snob that she was, Fanny does get her comeuppance in sufficient doses, though too late in life to have made her remorse meaningful. Dr. Byles is dead on when he orders Fanny to "Sit down, I haven't earned my fee yet". You know, that kind of honesty might be grounds for a lawsuit today for making the patient feel bad. But for sheer brutal honesty, there's namesake daughter Fanny (Marjorie Riordan) who cuttingly remarks "Have I a mother"?, excoriating Davis's character for her inability to be beautiful AND a mom.Claude Rains turns in another superb performance; he earned my admiration a long time ago for that great turn in "Casablanca" as Captain Renault. Funny, but he looked older and heavier here than in the Casablance gig, but then again, I go back to my earlier statement about how the actors wore their characters.Fans of Davis and Rains should be reasonably pleased by their work here, each manages a fair amount of screen time and displays their craft well. One of the things I found interesting was the way the picture employed the device, one might consider it a maguffin, of the character frequently mentioned but never seen, Miss Fanny's oft dismissed luncheon companion Janie Clarkson.