—Please come sit down, Gabrielle. You see...I've got to tell you now that I love you. —Alan... —I tell you solemnly...you're the first person I ever loved in my life. —Alan, they're all staring at us. —I know, but you've got to believe and remember...because, you see, this is my one chance of survival. I told you about that major artist that's been hidden. Well, I'm transferring him to you. You'll find a line in that poem of Villon's that fits that.  Something about: Thus in your field my seed of harvestry will thrive...Well, I've provided barren soil for that seed, but you'll give it fertility and growth and fruition. ... —I told you I was looking for something to believe in, worth living for and dying for. Well, I... I believe I found it...here in the valley of the sh- —Alan, what have you found? —I don't know.

In 1942, Bette Davis, under the direction of John Huston, delivered a ruthlessly accurate (and much underrated) portrait of a Southern girl, in the Warner Brothers production of Ellen Glasgow’s novel, In This, Our Life. She thus became, and, indeed, remained, the toast of Harlem because her prison scene with the black chauffeur was cut when the movie came uptown. The uproar in Harlem was impressive, and I think that the scene was re-inserted; in any case, either uptown or downtown, I saw it. Davis appeared to have read, and grasped, the script—which must have made her rather lonely—and she certainly understood the role. Her performance had the effect, rather, of exposing and shattering the film, so that she played in a kind of vacuum...

In In This, Our Life, Davis is a spoiled Southern girl, guilty of murder in a hit-and-run automobile accident, and she has blamed this crime on her black chauffeur. (An actor named Ernest Anderson: Hattie McDaniel played his mother). But he has steadfastly denied having the car that night. She, armed with her wealth, her color, and her sex, goes to the prison to persuade him to corroborate her story: and, what she uses, through jailhouse bars, is her sex. She will pay, for the chauffeur’s silence, any price he demands. Indeed, the price is implicit in the fact that she knows that she is guilty: she can have no secrets from him now.

Blacks are often confronted, in American life, with such devastating examples of the white descent from dignity; devastating not only because of the enormity of white pretensions, but because this swift and graceless descent would seem to indicate that white people have no principles whatever.... In the film, the black chauffeur simply does not trust the white girl to keep her end of the bargain—which would involve using her power to save his life—and is far too proud, anyway, to strike such a bargain. But the effect has been made, and the truth about the woman revealed.”