The rarely seen Bette Davis drama Storm Center (1956) has its heart in the right place, so it’s unfortunate that it becomes such a heavy and graceless movie.  It’s a drab 50s drama, directed in a lumbering yet overwrought fashion by co-screenwriter Daniel Taradash.  The story is cautionary but unconvincing.  The great Bette is hopelessly phony and self-conscious here, managing to be both subdued and mannered.  Her chirpy, clipped line readings don’t help; she speaks to everyone like she’s their kindergarten teacher.  Actually, she’s a librarian extraordinaire, as well as a WWI widow.  Her city council wants to ban The Communist Dream from her shelves and she refuses on principle.  Fired, she becomes a pariah.  It’s a witch-hunt drama, a left-leaning problem picture.  None of it is helped by one of the worst child performances you’ll ever see, in the other central role.  I’ll leave him nameless, but, boy, does he have a whopper of a big bad scene in which he denounces Bette publicly, leading to her slapping and shaking him.  Trying to slap and shake a performance out of him?  

It’s all rather feeble, but it was nonetheless a treat when TCM screened it at the end of last year.  After all, it was something of a lost Bette Davis movie.  I don’t recall it ever being on TV before.  The picture now has a time capsule feeling for those feverish times.  Bette was long past the point of being cast as ordinary people, women who could blend into a room, or even a town.  She fared no better that same year as the Bronx housewife in The Catered Affair.  Storm Center was originally set to be a comeback vehicle for Mary Pickford.  From Mary Pickford to Bette Davis!  Not really such a leap when you consider how much Bette resembled the Pickford look when she played Baby Jane Hudson six years later.