Don't miss vintage Bette Davis on TV

By Rex Reed

Bette Davis has become such a has become such caricature of her former self in the past decade that watching her on the screen in all of her hammy, froggy-eyed, scene-stealing shamelessness has become one of the really dismaying side effects of this job. But one of the glories of this job, on the other hand, is the boundless capacity it holds for surprise.

It is therefore with rapturous joy that I have lived long enough to see the great Bette Davis of my childhood return to her pinnacle of unsurpassed energy, intelligence and artistry—all of which she combines miraculously this Sunday night on CBS-TV in Strangers, one of the major dramatic events of this or any other TV season.

Strangers is a pulverizing drama of such emotional intensity, moving courage, rare insight and wisdom that I think the entire movie industry should hang its head in shame. How this magnificent piece of film should find its way into our hearts and minds through TV instead of on the big screens of movie houses throughout America is a sad and cynical comment on the stupidity of the motion picture industry.

But let's be grateful for small miracles. Strangers is a devastating drama that must not be missed by anyone. It is an extraordinary story about a complicated mother-daughter relationship that ex tends far beyond those frail boundaries and teaches us all about the need for warmth, compassion and dignity, no matter what our station is in life.

Brilliantly written by Michael de Guzman (the best writers are all turning up on TV these days), Strangers provides Davis with her finest role in 20 years and director Milton Katselas pulls it out of her, inch by heart wrenching inch. She is more than matched—inspired, probably — every step of the journey by the incandescent Gena Rowlands.

Together they make this mother and daughter creatures of blood and guts and tears and sweat and passion and—well, it's almost too much for a viewer to stand.

I've never seen better acting than this in any medium. The amazing thing about Bette Davis is that with one or two exceptions, she made all of those libraries full of movies without much help from reputable directors. She practically directed herself throughout her career. In recent days, she's played so many dumb roles in trashy horror movies that while I sympathized with the way she sleepwalked her way through them by rolling her eyes and puffing her petrified cigarettes, I worried at the same time that she just might possibly have forgotten how to act. Those fears are now laid to rest. Bette Davis, in Strangers, is devastating.

The plot is fragile, because Strangers is more of a character study than the usual action paced TV fare today's lobotomized audiences are conditioned to expect. But if you can stay with it through the tears and the quiet stretches when you can hear the two women's hearts beating, you will be well rewarded.

Rowlands plays a gentle, bruised, exhausted woman who returns to her home town in New England to see her mother. Same old neighbors watering the same old geraniums, same old cracks in the sidewalk Nothing much has changed. Except her mother, who has become a recluse, piecing together jigsaw puzzles, in dark rooms badly in need of airing, ranting at the neighborhood children who ring her doorbell in fun, the lines of anger and frustration hardening on her face like deep ravines. She's old, and some folks even think she's senile.

You're not welcome here, I don't want you here," says the mother. “I want to stay," says the daughter. And their story begins with two strangers on opposite sides of a cold, unfriendly house, staring at each other.

The girl went away- 21 years ago and never so much as sent a postcard home. Now she wants her mother back. We see the reasons they grew apart, the ways they grow to trust each other again, and in their human chronicle, we learn how they're not so far different from each other in their aims, needs, failures, disappointments and small joys. Struggling to repair a broken toilet together. Planting a new garden together. Shopping for groceries together. The old woman gradually breaks out of her shell, learns to love

her daughter again only to discover that the girl has come home to die,

All those years of anger and resentment eating away inside her like a bleeding ulcer finally erupt and in one heart crushing emotional fireworks display, Davis screams: "How dare you do this to me? How dare you come back and make me care?" We're never fed too much information at any one time, but by observing the gradual architecture of their relationship we come to know everything about them both until they are no longer strangers to us or to themselves,

Davis and Rowlands perform open heart surgery on these women, revealing everything behind their carefully com posed masks in a thousand details. Davis is a tough old bird in her denim shirt, blue jeans and white sneakers, and Rowlands is an aging butterfly trembling with the need to be loved by someone before her wings dry up and fall off. Anger, stubbornness and pride kept these two apart, and Strangers shows how they come together again in a fusion of hearts and minds and soul that will, obviously outlast the brevity of mortal life.

The fact that Strangers is being telex cast on Mother's Day should have every sensitive person in America reaching for the phone to call up Mom. I will never forget mine, and this special valentine from Bette Davis and Gena Rowland will do more for mothers, dead or alive, throughout the nation Sunday night than all the turkey dinners rolled into’ one. See Strangers and you will never be the same.

Tired of all those tattle tale books about the stars? Read Anne Jackson's "Early Stages" (Little, Brown, $8.95), a personal memoir that is honest but not scandalous, moving without indulging in tragedy and self-pity. It is also intelligent, and written by herself. Her language is inseparable from her experience, her voice uniquely individual. Here is an actress who takes up the pen in middle age and displays an innate talent that could be a lesson to all aspiring writers.

From her childhood in a miners' hole low in Pennsylvania to New York during the Depression, where her parents and two sisters finally settled in a railroad flat in Brooklyn. her story takes on the texture of an early play by Elmer Rice or Clifford Odets. On each page you hear the E1 rattling past the window, listen to her Croatian father's broken English, suffer her mother's Irish Catholic rage. For Anne, desperate for a life of her own those cramped quarters and barren cultural perimeters became as stifling as a tenement in August. She became strong willed and imaginative, and engineered her own route to the stage.

Whether she became an actress, a typist or a housewife, this book would stand as a readable accounting of a life. No bedroom keyholes, no affairs with the Kennedy’s, no nervous breakdowns, no homosexual assaults. Just a personal memoir that reads like a good novel, with characters, especially the parents, who are sometimes awful, sometimes lovely, but always too real not to care about. With so much trash glutting the market, it's a marvelously reassuring experience to come across a celebrity-authored book that reads like literature,