By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

Bette Davis, born 100 years ago April 5, made her first appearance on film in 1931 and her last in 1989 . Part of what makes Davis , I think, the greatest actress of the American cinema - was, you could tell what she was thinking and feeling from across the room, even a very large one like the ballroom she swoops into, wearing a red dress, in William Wyler’s “Jezebel’’ (1938), scandalizing the fashionable society of 1852 New Orleans; unmarried young women like her character, Julie Marsden, are expected to wear white. But Julie wants to make an impression, and she does; and as she takes a turn on the dance floor with her stiff-backed escort, you can see, although most of the sequence is in long camera shots, her growing awareness that she has made a terrible mistake, that she has gone, for once, too far.
On the occasion of her centennial, it’s worth remembering Davis as she was in her prime, in the 1930s and ‘40s, when she commanded the screen with something subtler and more mysterious than the fierce, simple will that carried her through the mostly grim work that followed. In her heyday, as the reigning female star at Warner Brothers, she was as electrifying as Marlon Brando in the ‘50s: volatile, sexy, challenging, fearlessly inventive. She looked moviegoers straight in the eye and dared them to look away.
Her breakthrough role came in John Cromwell’s 1934 adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham novel “Of Human Bondage,” in which she plays the coldhearted Cockney temptress Mildred Rogers, a vile specimen who cruelly - and protractedly - abuses the affections of a sensitive, artistic, clubfooted young medical student.
Davis persisted in playing women who were frankly, unapologetically bad: characters like Stanley Timberlake in John Huston’s odd, disturbing Southern melodrama “In This Our Life” (1942); Rosa Moline in King Vidor’s overheated “Beyond the Forest” (1949); and especially Leslie Crosbie and Regina Giddens, the heroines of two further collaborations with William Wyler.
In Lloyd Bacon’s terrific “Marked Woman” (1937), for instance, in which she plays a nightclub hostess (read prostitute), you see a kind of distillation of all the tramps, gun molls and shady dames she’d played as an eager young nonstar under contract to studios that didn’t know what to do with her. Her character in “Marked Woman” is a wonderfully complex creation, a wary survivor who’s both proud of her sex appeal and slightly uncomfortable with it: not a hooker with a heart of gold, exactly, but a prostitute who prefers to keep her heart as much to herself as possible.
In one of her most celebrated roles, as the panicky aging actress Margo Channing in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “All About Eve” (1950), Davis trots out every bad habit she’d developed over the years, every “Bette Davis” mannerism, and makes them all seem, strictly speaking, necessary: real aspects of an unmistakably real woman. Margo, mannerisms and all, seems surprisingly level-headed. In the end she’s a trouper.
Davis never retired from acting and lasted, improbably, to 81, after a lifetime of abusing alcohol, nicotine and, often, her directors. Her best director was Wyler, who abused her back, productively. The three movies they made together represent one of the great collaborations of a filmmaker and an actor in the history of movies, because Wyler’s theatrical intelligence was a match for hers.
They fell out during “The Little Foxes” (1941), perhaps because both realized, on some level, that they couldn’t hope to surpass the intimate anatomy of evil they had together managed to get on the screen in “The Letter” (1940). That picture’s heroine, a Singapore planter’s wife, is, like so many of Davis’s most vivid characters, a creature of urgent need, but she’s cooler, more controlled than most. She kills her lover and lies to her husband (and the court) with remarkable equanimity. And because Wyler persuaded Davis - “persuaded” may be too mild a word - to mute her mannerisms, her every glance and movement seems to register with particular force, passion straining to burst free of its confinement.
Watching the first scene of “The Letter” is as good a way as any to remember Davis on her birthday. She strides out, with that fast, purposeful walk of hers, onto the veranda, pumps some lead into her prone paramour, then pauses, lowering her gun hand slowly, to contemplate what she’s done, striking a pose (in medium long shot) that looks both melancholy and defiant. That’s Bette Davis as she was at her best: first in furious motion, then eerily, eloquently still. She was no drama queen. She was drama in the flesh.