Beyond the Forest (1949) on Netflix
Rosa Moline, the restless wife of a small-town Wisconsin doctor, wants a glamorous life in Chicago. She has long been involved with Neil Latimer, who owns the local hunting lodge.
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- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb6.8/102,948 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes60%
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Plot summary
Rosa Moline is the restless wife of Lewis Moline, a doctor in a small Wisconsin town. She is bored by her surroundings and uninterested in his practice, wanting expensive possessions and more interesting company, which for her means Chicago. For over a year she has been involved with Neil Latimer, who runs a business in Chicago and owns the local hunting lodge. Impatient for him to propose marriage and take her to Chicago, she demands payment from Lewis's patients, who are slow to settle their bills and sometimes pay in produce or with an odd job. Lewis knows nothing of the affair but is used to her unease, and when he learns what she has taken he throws the cash at her and says that if she leaves for Chicago she need not return.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Beyond the Forest (1949)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Warner Bros. offered Bette Davis the role of Rosa Moline expecting she would turn it down, a move film historian David Melville says would have let executives void her contract. She made the film anyway, and it became her last with the studio.
- Bette Davis and director King Vidor feuded throughout the shoot. When Vidor demanded more vehemence in a scene where Davis berates Joseph Cotten as her "dull-but-decent doctor husband", she asked Jack Warner to replace Vidor, who refused her and kept Vidor.
- The final cut of Beyond the Forest removed the sequence showing Rosa Moline's abortion, and director King Vidor only learned of the edit when he watched the film at a local theater.
- The Legion of Decency gave the film a "C" classification because of its abortion elements, which hurt its box office and forced the studio to negotiate cuts so it could be reclassified as a "B".
- Beyond the Forest was Bette Davis's last film as a Warner contract player after eighteen years. She tried repeatedly to walk away from it, a standoff that sent the production cost through the roof, but Warner refused to release her.
- Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? draws on the film: Martha and George, whose marriage echoes Bette Davis and Joseph Cotten's, quote the "What a dump" line from a scene in Beyond the Forest.
