"My Oscar, you're in a bad humor!" -- click this text to watch scene

 

Otis Ferguson

"....Bette Davis is probably in the best role of her life here, and seems born to it. The tricks with the hands and the hyperthyroid are not necessary, and she discards them. She is there as a central figure, she maintains that perfect truth which makes the figure perfectly terrible; she is working along her own special line, but that line becomes the picture for its duration, and if any actress has done better you will have to read about it in memoirs....

"But we come back to the director William Wyler] again....[I've left out too much; I believe this is the scene where Regina doesn't get Horace's medicine]....The dramatic part of the scene lifts up like a full chord in the orchestra, and we think, it is this woman who has looked up with her hard nervous eyes to find this object of hate. But it is actually the man [Wyler] who devised this much....[fill in]

Otis Ferguson, The New Republic, September 1, 1941
   re-printed in The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson, p. 384-85