The kind of contrived mess that gives the term "women's picture" a bad name. Bette Davis is the former gun moll turned respectable legal secretary who marries a wealthy, irresponsible weakling (Henry Fonda, poorly miscast). When Fonda's bully of a father (indomitable Donald Crisp) has the marriage annulled after just one day, a distraught Davis runs off, not knowing she and Fonda have conceived a child. When the lovers are finally reunited years later, Fonda has been married to a woman of his own social standing (radiant Anita Louise). The new wife, confined to a wheelchair following a car accident (the result of Fonda's reckless drinking), shows not a shred of bitterness toward her husband and, in fact, pleads with Davis to assume her role as Fonda's wife since the wife herself is unable to give Fonda the child he has always wanted. What Davis does next will come as no surprise to fans of this sort of tripe but Davis, cast against type as a self-sacrificing mother, is vibrantly warm and pretty and her performance surprisingly free of artifice.
Review of That Certain Woman
