The Great Lie (Warner Bros., 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, October 20) my husband Charles and I watched the 1941 film The Great Lie, directed by Edmund Goulding and written by Lenore J. Coffee based on a novel, January Heights, by Polan Banks (a man, by the way, whose other movie credits include the 1932 Warner Bros. “B” Street of Women and the 1952 film My Forbidden Past, based on a novel of his called Carriage Entrance). The film stars Bette Davis as Maggie Patterson, long-time girlfriend of fellow Maryland native Peter Van Allen (George Brent), only on a trip to New York City Van Allen has spontaneously met, fallen for, and married world-renowned concert pianist Sandra Kovak (Mary Astor). I gave Charles a heads-up that The Great Lie is one of my “doubles” movies, since both Davis and Astor played the female lead in versions of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (Davis in a highly tweaked rewrite from 1936 called Satan Met a Lady that turned Hammett’s mystery into more of a screwball comedy, and Astor in the classic version from 1941 with John Huston directing and Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade). And it turned out that Astor was not the only Maltese Falcon cast member who turned up in The Great Lie: Jerome Cowan, who played Spade’s hapless partner Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon (and got killed in the first reel!), is here as Jock Thompson, Van Allen’s long-suffering attorney. In the opening reel Thompson informs Van Allen that his marriage to Sandra Kovak is not legal – she married him too soon, before her divorce from her previous husband had become final. But in the meantime he and Sandra have already had sex and Sandra has got pregnant, and in the days when abortion was illegal nationwide Sandra has no interest in putting her career on hold to have a baby, especially a baby whose father is not legally her husband. (One wonders how Warner Bros. and producers Hal B. Wallis and Henry Blanke got this situation past the Production Code Administration.)

Van Allen responds by flying his private plane back to Maryland and the home of Maggie and her family. They start dating and ultimately get married themselves, only they decide to honeymoon in New York. They’re at a fancy nightclub when Sandra confronts Maggie and announces that she’s going to have Peter’s baby. Maggie hits on the idea of booking a remote cabin in Arizona (where you’ve got a lot of fuller’s earth blowing past the door in dust storms and Bette Davis might have been reminded of the previous movie she made with that setting, The Petrified Forest) where she and Sandra will stay together until Sandra gives birth, after which Maggie will pass off the baby as hers. Ultimately the ruse works, only in the meantime Peter, who on Maggie’s advice has gone to work for the government as a consultant on aviation (one wonders what he was doing before), has crashed his plane in the interior of Brazil and just about everyone in the movie assumes he’s dead. The baby is born and Maggie names him Peter Van Allen, Jr., after his presumably deceased dad. Then a rescue party finds Peter Van Allen, Sr. and brings him back from the interior of Brazil to the U.S. Sandra shows up at the grand reunion of Peter and Maggie and demands that Maggie tell Peter the truth about who the baby’s mother is. Sandra also demands custody of the boy even though the reasons she agreed to the “great lie” deal with Maggie in the first place – she’s an internationally famous concert pianist and also a “woman of the world” – still apply. Maggie does indeed level with Peter that the boy is Sandra’s biological child, and eventually Sandra realizes that the boy is better off with Peter and Maggie. I’d seen The Great Lie only once before, at my father’s home in the early 1970’s, and I’d remembered much of it but not the fact that the George Brent character was supposedly dead through most of the middle section.

I’d also forgotten how relentlessly over-the-top the film is; a stronger director like William Wyler might have toned down Bette Davis’s overacting and got a better, more believable performance out of her, but Goulding at best seemed disinclined to do so and at worst let her open up to full throttle and let ’er rip. I give Goulding credit for keeping the camera in almost constant motion and thereby giving cinematic life to what could have otherwise been a really stagy and dull story. Tony Gaudio was the cinematographer, and he used red filters on so many of the exteriors one expects John Wayne and a troupe of cowboys to ride in at any moment. Max Steiner did the music, basing most of it on the famous opening of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, which not only is played by Sandra Kovak in her concert sequences but is tweaked in various ways. I especially loved the version with sleazy saxophones heard in an early sequence in which the newly married Peter and Sandra are waking up from an all-night party during which a lot of records got strewn about the floor and presumably broken, since this was the era in which records were made of a fragile mixture of shellac and clay. The Great Lie also suffers from George Brent’s terminal weakness as a leading man; through much of the film I was wishing Warners had cast Errol Flynn in the role (despite his and Davis’s well-known dislike for each other in the two previous films they’d made together, The Sisters and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex). Quite a few people who knew Brent, including Bette Davis herself, said he was almost irresistibly sexy in person, but on screen he comes off as an acceptably attractive man but hardly a male sex magnet. (Compare that to the accounts of people who knew Rudolph Valentino and Marilyn Monroe, who were no more than reasonably attractive in person but they lit up the screen when photographed for film.)

Among the things I liked about The Great Lie is that Gaudio didn’t go out of his way to make Bette Davis look sexy; as the plainer woman in Peter’s life she spends much of the movie wearing slacks and her makeup by Perc Westmore is rather harsh, though this is not one of those movies (like the post-scarring scenes of Marked Woman or the whole of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?) in which Davis was willing to make herself look ugly if she felt a role required it, which is one of the big things I like about her. The scenes with Bette Davis and Mary Astor alone together in their Arizona redoubt were the ones I remembered most vividly, and they’re still the high points of the movie. Sandra resents that the cabin they’re sharing is lit only by lamps, she bitches that Maggie should at least have found them a place with electricity, and Maggie points out that places with electricity also have other people, some of whom are reporters who’d love to grab hold of the scandal surrounding a major celebrity like Sandra. I particularly liked the scene in which Maggie has sent for a couple of piano-and-orchestra records so Sandra can listen to her kind of music on the wind-up phonograph with which the place is equipped – and Sandra takes a look at who the pianist is on the label and denounces him as nonmusical. (Charles asked me if she meant Vladimir Ashkenazy – whose star career didn’t start until 1962, over two decades after the film was made. The principal real-life male rivals to Sandra’s character in 1941 would have been Artur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz.) Mary Astor won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for this film, and she credited Bette Davis for much of that because Davis had let Astor dominate the screen again and again.

Unlike most of the women who worked with Davis as co-stars, Astor liked her and got along with her just fine. Davis also actively lobbied with Warner Bros. to get Astor the part because, among other reasons, Astor could actually play piano and therefore they could shoot her with her fingers actually touching the keyboard even though the music on the soundtrack would be played by someone else. (The film’s imdb.com page lists Max Rabinowitz as Astor’s piano double and says she also had a hand double, Norma Drury.) The Great Lie holds up surprisingly well as a movie, even though it was first and foremost a ”women’s picture” (though billed third, Mary Astor gets a lot more screen time than George Brent!), and I found myself imagining a modern remake/sequel with a framing scene set 20 years after the main story in which Peter Van Allen, Jr., now a young adult, gets his DNA tested and learns from that that the woman who’s raised him all his life isn’t in fact his mother. A tastefully done modern treatment of this story premise could be a quite interesting and effective movie for any modern-day filmmakers who want to take the barnacles off this story and reimagine it for today.