Jane Fonda, Ellen Burstyn and very knowledgeable TCM host Robert Osborne are among the many who are interviewed about Davis, whose life was often more melodramatic than her movies. As a child, Davis caught on fire while near a Christmas tree candle and, it is recalled, she played the scene to the hilt for maximum impact (her injuries were apparently minor). And the documentary suggests that head injuries suffered by her second husband were not entirely accidental—that Davis once pushed him, hard, up against a wall in the compartment of a train.

In an interview with Mike Wallace that aired on “60 Minutes,” Davis confesses that she had an abortion because she wanted to devote her time to her career. Davis later had a daughter, B.D. Hyman, who would grow up to be another of Davis’s enemies, telling vicious tales about her mother that make the stories related by Joan Crawford’s daughter about her “Mommie Dearest” seem almost wholesome (Crawford and Davis’s feud, of course, is legendary).

Davis’s lovers included director Vincent Sherman and William Wyler, who directed her in, among other films, “The Little Foxes.” The shooting of that picture was a constant battle, as he kept trying to convince her that less would be more. They never worked together again.

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We can follow Davis getting old through the awesome array of clips assembled: Davis interviewed on the “Today” show, and talking about marriage with some sort of psychiatrist on “The Steve Allen Show” in 1964. She also appeared with Dick Cavett in 1971, during the last third of her life, when the role she played most often—and with the greatest relish—was that of Bette Davis. In a rare clip from “The Jack Paar Program” in 1962, she demonstrates to Paar and his guests the correct gestures for doing the classic, or standard, Bette Davis impression. (On May 30, Warner Home Video will release another batch of Davis DVDs, including “The Man Who Came to Dinner” and “Old Acquaintance.”)

The documentary also discusses Davis’s particular appeal to “generations” of gay men, due partly to her on-screen roles, partly to her off-screen intransigence and refusal to apologize for who and what she was.

Whether you’re a fervid Davis fan or a casual admirer, you’re bound to come away from this film feeling sorry for her—even considering the hostility she showed to so many around her. She played many a suffering heroine on the screen, but she did plenty of suffering in real life, too.

At some point, the star and the woman became one; it was almost as if Davis wanted to make sure her life would make good reading, maybe someday a good movie, once she had passed on. This documentary is a good movie, too, a very good one, lusciously and lyrically put together—full of insights and wit and revealing anecdotes.

“Love is now the stardust of yesterday,” the song goes, “the music of the years gone by.” Seventeen years after Bette Davis died, she is still giving us a helluva show.

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