The Thinking Machine #107

In their series The Thinking Machine, critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin create a new video essay for Filmkrant every month.

The Hollywood melodrama Old Acquaintance (1943) was not the first time that Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins appeared together on screen, but it was the film that made the most of the essential difference in their acting styles, and how these styles could be tailored to the needs of particular stories, moods and dynamics.

Where Davis is a figure of calm control and reserve, Hopkins is histrionic, even camp; where Davis acts with the twitch of a single muscle, Hopkins gestures with her entire body. How to put two such disparate performance modes into the same frame?