FILM 2071: IN THIS OUR LIFE (1942)

FILM 2071: IN THIS OUR LIFE (1942)

TRIVIA: Both Bette Davis' and Olivia de Havilland's characters have masculine given names--"Stanley" and "Roy," respectively. The film never hints that there is anything unusual about their names, nor does it offer any explanation.

Director John Huston carried on a torrid affair with Olivia de Havilland during the shoot. Warners studio head Jack L. Warner said, "Anyone could see that . . . it was Valentine's Day on the set . . . When I saw the rushes I said to myself, 'Oh-oh, Bette has the lines, but Livvy is getting the best camera shots'."

In David Maraniss' 2012 biography of President Barack Obama, titled "Barack Obama: The Story", he reports that Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro, was named "Stanley" not after her own father, Stanley Dunham, but after the Bette Davischaracter in this film. Maraniss says that Obama's maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, saw the movie while pregnant with Obama's mother, and she thought the name sounded sophisticated for a girl.

Warner Bros. was named to the Honor Roll of Race Relations of 1942 because of its dignified portrayal of African-Americans in this film. However, scenes in which Ernest Anderson's character was treated in a friendly fashion were cut for showings in the strictly segregated American South to avoid offending those viewers. The film was initially disapproved for export by the Office of Censorship in Washington, DC, because it suggests that the Negro's testimony would be totally disregarded by the jury when it was disputed by a white person, which, in the South at the time and for many years afterwards, was true.

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