She made forty-five films at MGM. The range of material—from the pre-Code films of the early 1930s, in which she had genuine latitude to play sexually complex women, through the melodramas of the mid-1930s and the more restrained productions of the late 1930s and early 1940s—demonstrates a performer who was consistently asked to carry material of widely varying quality and who mostly succeeded in carrying it.
The “box office poison” designation of 1938, and the studio’s response to it, created the conditions for her eventual departure. She did not leave MGM in June 1943 with a triumphant sense of liberation; she left with a complicated mixture of relief and anxiety, knowing that the institutional support she had relied on for nearly two decades would not be there for her next project or the one after that.
The Warner Bros. years that followed were more focused but also more uncertain. She made fewer films, but she made *Mildred Pierce*, and *Mildred Pierce* was worth more to her career than the sum of her less distinguished MGM productions. The Oscar that came with it did something that all the commercial success of the 1930s had not quite managed: it gave her a form of artistic recognition that could not be revoked by a studio’s decision to reassign her to a lesser film.
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DAVIS AT WARNER BROS.: THE EIGHTEEN YEARS OF BATTLES AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Bette Davis’s relationship with Warner Bros. was defined by a paradox that runs through her biography in various forms: she was the studio’s most celebrated actress and its most contentious employee simultaneously, and neither fact diminished the other.