In This Our Life (1942) on Netflix
In Richmond, Roy Timberlake is an interior decorator married to Peter Kingsmill. Her sister Stanley is engaged to attorney Craig Fleming, and days before her wedding Stanley runs off with Peter.
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Trailer
Plot summary
In Richmond, Virginia, Asa and Lavinia Timberlake give their two daughters the male names Roy and Stanley. Roy is a successful interior decorator married to Dr. Peter Kingsmill, and Stanley is engaged to attorney Craig Fleming. Their uncle William Fitzroy has long doted on Stanley with expensive gifts and money, and he is upset when she runs off with Peter days before her wedding. Craig sinks into despair. Roy divorces Peter, who then marries Stanley and moves with her to Baltimore. Roy decides to keep a positive, if hardened, attitude. Minerva Clay keeps house for the Timberlakes, and her son Parry Clay is studying law.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about In This Our Life (1942)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- John Huston left the production three days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor for a United States Department of War assignment, and uncredited Raoul Walsh finished the film. Walsh and Bette Davis clashed at once: she refused his direction and reshoots, developed laryngitis and missed several days.
- The U.S. wartime Office of Censorship disapproved the film in 1943 before its foreign release, saying it made abundantly clear that a Black person's testimony in court would be disregarded if it conflicted with a white person's.
- During costume and wig fittings, Bette Davis learned her husband was in a Minneapolis hospital with severe pneumonia; Howard Hughes arranged a private plane, but her flight took two days, grounded by fog and storms, and Jack L. Warner cabled her to return to the film.
- Bette Davis had wanted to play the "good sister" Roy but was cast as Stanley instead, a part she felt she was too old for.
- Bette Davis found Ernest Anderson, a Black waiter at the studio commissary, and helped him get the part of Parry Clay in the film.
- Warner Bros. paid $40,000 for the screen rights to Ellen Glasgow's novel, which included William Fitzroy's incestuous desire for his niece Stanley; screenwriter Howard Koch toned down the book's controversial themes to satisfy the Motion Picture Production Code.
