Sunday, July 26, 2020

Caged Birds

Olivia De Havilland in Lady in a Cage (1964)

Olivia De Havilland died this week at the age of 104. It sometimes seemed to us film fans that she would live forever. She was the last of the great actors from classic Hollywood and with her, an era that recedes farther and farther from living memory comes to a definitive ending. I remember her best for her films with Errol Flynn and for her horror movies in the sixties and seventies, but she won a pair of Oscars after her collaboration with Flynn ended. Her feud with her sister, Joan Fontaine, seems to finally be at an end. I haven't written about many of her films, but I'm probably going to watch a fair dozen of them this week. I wrote about Lady in a Cage in 2006 for another venue. I'm reprinting that piece here, only slightly rewritten for clarity.