I usually love classic Hollywood women’s pictures, and Mr. Skeffington had been on my list for a long time. It has all the right ingredients: a woman’s belated coming-of-age story, a close-up look at the emotional texture of a marriage, Bette Davis, Claude Rains, warmth, humor, melodrama. But the whole is somewhat less than the sum of its parts, and to make matters worse, the film is deeply let down by its own ending. Spoilers follow.

Bette Davis plays Fanny Trellis, the most sought-after young woman in a right-on-the-cusp-of-WWI New York. Fanny has all the accoutrements of wealth, but it’s more style than substance: over the past few years, her ne’er-do-well brother, the appallingly named Trippy Trellis (Richard Waring), has created a sinkhole in the family fortune. Cheerful Fanny believes they’re on the upswing now, though, since Trippy has found a good job with Job Skeffington (Claude Rains). She’s barely through praising Trippy’s newfound success when a surprise dinner guest arrives: Mr. Skeffington himself.

Trippy, as it turns out, has been embezzling from Job’s firm–and doing it so insolently, with neither fear nor imagination, that the initially forgiving Job is finally ready to file charges. (Job is Jewish, and Trippy’s absolute disregard for him–and his eventual visceral revulsion at having Job as a brother-in-law–is obviously and openly antisemitic from the start.) Fanny and her goodhearted cousin George (Walter Abel) talk Skeffington into not filing charges quite yet–maybe they can drum up the missing money. But Fanny, it turns out, has another solution in mind. She’s mildly intrigued by Job–he’s intelligent and kind, and though clearly attracted to her, he alone among her admirers keeps his distance–and she has to eventually marry someone, doesn’t she? Why not Job, ensuring that Trippy will go free?

Even in its early days, their marriage is lackluster and often unhappy in banal little ways. Job goes into it knowing Fanny doesn’t truly love him, but he has hope she will–and over the years that hope dies by inches as he becomes convinced that the best he can say is that Fanny, despite her many flirtations, is loyal to him. She doesn’t love him, but she doesn’t love any of the men who avidly circle around her, either. It’s all about her–her only true romance is with her own (justified) conviction that she’s a great beauty, sparkling and much-sought-after. She wants to preserve that image so much that when she’s pregnant with their daughter, she goes all the way to the other side of the country so that no one she knows will see her looking “fat.” Motherhood doesn’t change her, either: she’s vaguely fond of little Fanny, as she is of her husband, but that’s all.

What does change things is Trippy’s death in WWI (he enlisted to escape the horrors of having a Jewish brother-in-law). Fanny, with a viciousness brought on by grief, lets Job know that she feels that she’s been cheated–that she married him to save Trippy and now blames their marriage for killing Trippy instead. After this, the distance between them widens into a gulf. They barely see each other, and both look for comfort and distraction in a string of affairs. (The film maintains the pretense that Fanny isn’t actually sleeping with the men she dates during this period, but I think that’s more of a flimsy bit of Hays Code cover than anything we’re meant to believe.) Fanny is genuinely shocked to learn that Job is cheating too: “Do you think all those years he’s been sitting at home waiting for you?” her latest boyfriend asks incredulously. “Well, he’s always home when I get there,” Fanny says. The boyfriend’s got it down: “He’s just got a faster car than you.”

Fanny, after getting confirmation of Job’s affairs in person in a beautifully awkward scene, files for divorce and pushes Job to take custody of young Fanny. (He’s reluctant only because he’s going to Europe, where he knows that his daughter might face the antisemitism she’s been lucky enough to miss thus far, but he can’t resist her heartfelt pleas.) She dives straight back into her joyful old life of fun and admiration–but when a now-adult Fanny Jr. (Marjorie Riordan) comes home to take shelter from the Nazis, her age comes crashing down on her. One second, she’s being adored by a younger man, and the next, she’s watching him make heart-eyes at her daughter instead–and two seconds after that, she’s ravaged by diphtheria, which leaves her with patchy, thinning hair and old age makeup. She’s gone from beauty to “eyesore,” and she’s lost everything in the process. Everything she valued depended on other people’s responses to her, and those just aren’t the same anymore.

This is where I began to turn on Mr. Skeffington. It’s too clear that the movie is glorying in her humiliation, subjecting her to slight after slight–some of the glimpses of her downfall feel organic (the final, quiet scene between her and young Fanny, where her daughter gently but decisively turns away any chance of further developing their relationship, is beautifully done), but others just feel punishing. I buy that Fanny would host a party for all her old lovers to try to get her spirits up and that it would go horribly, but introducing a new character just to give her a vicious set-down is a bridge too far. None of that would matter if Fanny got more of a chance to develop during this stage, however. She loses her beauty, but we barely see her get to find anything new to value in its place. There are stabs at it, in that too-little-too-late scene with her daughter and in the quiet maturity with which she rejects one former admirer’s consolation, but they’re not much. She’s having intermittent hallucinations of Job, and if they were there to show that she’s missing him–that now she craves the substance of their life together–that would be nice, but instead, it’s like the movie’s trying to remind you that he exists to set up the bleak, bitter punchline.

Fanny doesn’t really get to grow and deepen and fall in a kind of bittersweet belated love. Instead, she steeps in her own unhappiness until George brings Job to her–a Job whose name has become more ostentatiously appropriate than ever. The Nazis took all his money. He was in a concentration camp. He’s blind now. Fanny has exactly half-a-second of processing that, as George says, there are worse things in the world than losing one’s looks–she realizes that she’s only thought of herself all these years, and she’s horrified and embarrassed that she came down to see Job anxious about what he would think of her now but not at all thinking about what he’s been through. Then we move swiftly on: oh, right, Job is blind now! To him, Fanny really will always be the beautiful young woman he knew! He’s the one man who will always love her not because he truly cares, but because he’ll never know she got old and ugly! Of course Fanny clings to him and devotes herself to him from here on out: he’s her only chance to recapture the life she once had. She can at least adopt his questionable saying that “a woman is beautiful when she’s loved, and only then,” because it offers her a path back to beauty. And in case we missed that this is a happy ending for Fanny’s narcissism, not in spite of it, George essentially winks at the camera and tells us so.

Fanny gets “saved” from having to have any real character growth at all, and in this scenario, a Jewish character being tortured and blinded by the Nazis is just the setup for a tongue-in-cheek happy ending where everybody sort of gets what they want (but certainly not what they need). I appreciate that Job Skeffington is a sympathetic Jewish character in a 1944 movie, and he benefits from a typically graceful and powerful performance from Rains. I like that while he’s almost perfect, he does still get to have affairs of his own rather than being completely innocent and long-suffering (couldn’t you just see a version of this where he pretends to the affairs for Fanny’s sake, so she can divorce him without being tarnished as an adulteress?). But fucking hell, that ending. Just because it’s Fanny’s movie doesn’t mean Job–who gets the technical title role!–needs to be turned into a battered object just for her sake. If the message of your movie can even vaguely be interpreted as “wow, good thing those Nazis came along, amirite?”, you need to go back to the drawing board.

Up until the last act or so, Mr. Skeffington is mostly enjoyable–the humor can sometimes be clumsy, and the score is sometimes awkward in those scenes, but Davis and Rains are compelling, the emotions are complex, and there are a number of well-crafted, bittersweet scenes. But it’s hard, and maybe even impossible, for me to get past that ending. Thank God we still have Now, Voyager.

Mr. Skeffington is streaming on Tubi.