OLD ACQUAINTANCE: a scenery chewing spectacular!

There weren't many actresses who could hold their own against Bette Davis but Miriam Hopkins was one of them.
Miriam who?
She was the Faye Dunaway of the 1930s appearing in a number of critical and box office successes ("Trouble in Paradise", "These Three", "The Old Maid") before fading from sight and memory. OLD ACQUAINTANCE, released in 1943, was Hopkins final film as a big star and she certainly went out in style.
She and Davis had worked together four years earlier in "THE OLD MAID" during which Davis had an affair with Hopkins husband, so there was little love lost between the two of them by the time Warner Bros reunited them for this overheated melodrama.
Knowing this backstory makes watching the film an even more pleasurable experience. Here are two big, temperamental stars, both accustomed to being queen of their domain, and with a history of mutual dislike, being asked to play a couple of lifelong friends who fall out over men and success.
Davis was the bigger star by 1943 but Hopkins refuses to yield. Where Davis is content to chew at the scenery Hopkins rips out large chunks and swallows them whole. To counter the by now familiar Davis mannerisms - the clipped speech, the vigorous sucking on cigarettes etc - all of which are on display here, Hopkins resorts to the sort of histrionics for which the word overacting is an inadequate descriptor.
Faced with two such forces of nature it's not surprising that the men in the story come off like potted plants. Both John Loder and Gig Young are so dull and colorless that it's difficult to understand how they avoid getting simply chewed up and spat out. 
To the best of my recollection OLD ACQUAINTANCE was the first Hollywood film to deliberately cast two such mutually antagonistic stars in order to record the sparks that would inevitably fly. Their barely masked on-screen contempt for each other would not be seen again until Davis was pitted against arch rival Joan Crawford almost twenty years later in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" The acidic bitchy energy generated by their rivalry contributed greatly to "Baby Jane's" status as a cult classic. OLD ACQUAINTANCE deserves similar consideration.