Nasty Canary: Bette Davis

Let’s make, as she might say, a “cry for the genuine”. Those famous eyes were not, precisely speaking, beautiful. Sardonic, agonised, coldly febrile, they strain, more like a parakeet’s than the “moulting canary” of her character, Charlotte Vale, in Now, Voyager, the new restoration at the heart of a Bette Davis retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank through August and September.

Charlotte is the “late life” daughter of a tyrannical Boston matriarch. Having sexually transgressed as a youngster, she plays her allotted role of “spinster aunt”, smoking secretly and carving ivory boxes that hint at her erotic repression – until a nervous breakdown smashes this canary’s cage. She voyages to South America by way of recovery, sheds her stupendous caterpillar eyebrows (deserving an acting credit in themselves) and masquerades, via a borrowed cabin, as a