With Warner Bros. studio chief Jack L. Warner himself in charge of the production, "The Old Maid" is a fine example of what that studio's "stock company" was able to produce in the late '30s and early '40s. Here is Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, assisted by George Brent and Donald Crisp acting up a storm a very soapy piece of melodrama, and making it all very engrossing. Based on Zoe Akins' Pulitzer Prize play and Edith Wharton's novel, this drama of sacrifice, deception, and raging emotions is given a superlative treatment by this impressive company. The film even has the services of Max Steiner's score, underlying every scene with original and adapted source material. Edmund Goulding's direction is sure-footed and he has managed to curb histrionic accesses of the two stars nicely; their acting is quite restrained, yet powerful. Whatever sparks flew between the two ladies off-screen may be justified by what on-screen legacy is left for all to appreciate. Further, the drama depicts the limited and restrictive social/class mores of the period, undoubtedly imported from strict European values.

... and George Brent as Clem Spender is that kind of guy. We don't see much of Clem himself except at the beginning, but the film is pretty much about the aftershocks of him being the love of the lives of the two main characters, cousins Delia (Miriam Hopkins) and Charlotte (Bette Davis).

The time is the beginning of the Civil War, in the north, far enough away from the battlefields to the extent that if this war will ever touch the lives of the characters it will be through death on those battlefields. Clem has apparently gone off to make his fortune so he can marry Delia, whom he claims to love - heck I think he believes that himself. But Delia is practical. After waiting for two years she decides to marry "a Ralston" - Jim Ralston to be exact, good provider from a family of bankers, not hard on the eyes, and probably so predictable Delia will spend the rest of their mutual lives with her feet asleep.

Clem comes back on the wedding day, and Charlotte, who we are told is several years younger than Delia, goes down to the station to try to get Clem to stay away from the wedding, that Delia says it is too late. When Delia and Clem meet, at her house before the wedding, you understand she did not want to see Clem because she still loves him, she will always love him, although she doesn't say that. When an allegedly broken hearted Clem exits the house, Charlotte, also secretly in love with Clem goes after him. Now remember this is the production code era and so you see NOTHING in the way of passion between them. But they did have sex because suddenly Charlotte is going out west for her health, and when she returns she is running a home for war orphans, with her own child by that one night with Clem, Tina, hidden among the bunch.

Delia being told about the existence of the child, and that it was Clem's is the undoing of both cousins. Delia, in the jealousy that she cannot even admit to herself, sabotages Charlotte's wedding by telling a lie to the groom, gets Tina and Charlotte to move into her house after her husband dies, gets Charlotte to let her adopt Tina, and in the end the once vivacious beautiful young Charlotte turns into an "old maid", somebody that even her own daughter has no use for other than to pity her. The person she ultimately calls "mummy" is Delia.

Now Davis' acting here is raw, everything is out there. She IS that vivacious young woman at the beginning of the film, she IS that bitter spinster in the end - partly because she knows what Delia has taken from her and that Delia refuses to admit her own motivations. Hopkins plays her part more subdued, as though Delia cannot admit to herself that all of this has been about Clem, that it was he she has always loved, whose child she wanted and has managed to maneuver herself into a position where she gets her.

Now being an "old maid" was considered a horrible fate for a woman until about 1970, but these two women are living on the fumes of a memory, of the adventurous handsome but broke Clem as a young man. His death as a soldier in the Civil War freezes him in time in that state. They neither ever seem to get that had either of them got their wishes they would have ended up married to an emotionally ambiguous man, a man who just can't seem to succeed, and prolonged poverty never made anybody happy.

This is a great film even if it is full of overdoing the punishment of sin production code style for everybody involved. Case in point, Bette Davis' Charlotte ages to the point that she looks ten years older than the actual age of her character for the sin of one night of out of wedlock passion with somebody she tragically loved, while Miriam Hopkins' Delia has hardly aged a day over the film's course, even though all the while she's been taking a wrecking ball to her cousin's life.