Winter Meeting
| Winter Meeting | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Bretaigne Windust |
| Produced by | Henry Blanke |
| Written by |
Catherine Turney Based on the novel by Ethel Vance |
| Starring |
Bette Davis Jim Davis (billed as James Davis) |
| Music by | Max Steiner |
| Cinematography | Ernest Haller |
| Edited by | Owen Marks |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
|
Release date
|
April 7, 1948 |
|
Running time
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104 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $1,083,000 |
Winter Meeting is a 1948 American drama film directed by Bretaigne Windust, written by Catherine Turney from the novel of the same title by Grace Zaring Stone (under the pseudonym Ethel Vance), and starring Bette Davis with Jim Davis, who would portray patriarch Jock Ewing in the television series Dallas three decades later.
Disenchanted poet Susan Grieve, escorted by her friend Stacy Grant, meets embittered World War II naval hero Lieutenant Slick Novak at a Manhattan restaurant where a dinner party is being held in his honor. He is more interested in Susan than his Peggy Markham and offers to take her home at the end of the evening. The two become better acquainted over coffee in Susan's apartment, and she initially resists but then succumbs to his charms when he tries to kiss her.
The following day, Slick returns to see Susan, and she spontaneously invites him to spend the remainder of his leave with her at her country house. In this setting, the two share secrets about each other, Susan telling him about her clergyman father's descent into insanity and eventual suicide, and how it estranged her from her mother, he confessing his longtime desire to become a priest and revealing the guilt he feels about surviving the war while others died in battle.
Slick returns to the city alone, and Susan later accidentally runs into him and Peggy in the restaurant where they first met. The following day, he visits Susan's apartment and suggests they try to make their relationship work, but she urges him to reconsider the priesthood and the two part ways. Susan, having learned her mother has been hospitalized, then calls her in the hope they can reunite.
William Grant Sherry introduced his wife Bette Davis to the novel Winter Meeting and suggested it as a possibility for her next film. Davis enlisted her friend Catherine Turney to write a screen adaptation and stayed in close touch with her throughout the process, sending her memos about sequences that concerned her. "I am very rested and very ambitious to do something really outstanding - and I don't feel this, the way it is, answers the requirements," the actress noted at one point. She later recalled, "Winter Meeting was a great book . . . We should never have tried to make it. This is where censorship really hurt us. We were not allowed to be honest about the differences of opinion between a Catholic and a non-Catholic. It was, therefore, a dull and meaningless film." Davis spoke at length about the censorship problems with Winter Meeting in a later interview with Thomas M. Pryor of the New York Times, insisting the original story "would have made an engrossing film drama, but unfortunately much of the novel had to be bowdlerized to meet production code requirements."
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