A Thorough Look at All About Bette : Commentary: LACMA’s 36-film tribute to the actress reveals a woman who relished working and is at her best when her indomitable toughness shines through.

Bette Davis was nothing if not game. The subject of “All About Bette: The Film Career of Bette Davis,” a 36-film tribute at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that continues through July, Davis appeared in 86 films between the years 1931 and 1986, in addition to doing a good deal of work for television and stage. It seems that Davis, who died in 1989 at age 81, was a woman who simply had to work.

That may in part explain the fact that when the romantic leading-lady roles stopped coming her way in the late ‘50s, Davis rolled up her sleeves and dove into kitsch horror films where she was essentially called upon to spoof herself. By the time she got to 1964’s “Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte” (screening on July 29), we find her stomping around a haunted house in a frilly party dress and Pippi Longstocking braids, clutching a rifle and bellowing like a sailor. At this point Davis entered the arena of high camp; her filmography demonstrates in no uncertain terms how difficult it is to age gracefully on the silver screen.

Making her debut in 1931 in two mercifully forgotten potboilers, “Bad Sister” and “Seed,” Davis first made a name for herself three years later in “Of Human Bondage.” An adaptation of a story by Somerset Maugham, the film (which screened last week) cast Davis as a slatternly cockney waitress with a heart of stone. There was an indomitable toughness to Davis that made her perfect for roles like this. In fact, she tends to go soggy when she plays nice, and even in the sentimental two-hankie women’s pictures she made in the ‘30s and ‘40s, she’s more often than not cast as a high-spirited heartbreaker, independent career woman or all-purpose harpy.

Curated by Darlene Ramirez, acting head of LACMA’s Film Program, the series continues tonight with “Jezebel” and “The Little Foxes,” two films that show off Davis’ flair for nastiness beautifully. Released in 1938 to cash in on the interest in the Old South generated by the publication of Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind,” “Jezebel” casts Davis as a saucy femme fatale with her heart set on another woman’s husband. Larded with maudlin sentiment and racism, the film nonetheless garnered Davis her second best actress Academy Award. (Her first came in 1935 for her portrayal of an alcoholic Broadway star in “Dangerous.”)

Far better is William Wyler’s movie of the Lillian Hellman play “The Little Foxes,” a brutal portrait of a ruthless family that features one of the most finely honed performances of Davis’ career.

Friday’s program includes a routine gangster picture from 1934, “The Big Shakedown,” and “A Stolen Life,” which finds Davis playing twin sisters. This turgid melodrama revolves around an insanely convoluted plot, as is always the case in movies about twins.

Next week’s bill pairs the 1939 film “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex,” a stately Hollywood rendition of history that’s a disaster factually, with the 1955 release “The Virgin Queen,” which chronicles the relationship between Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh. Period pictures simply don’t suit the emancipated spirit of Davis.

Look instead to such upcoming highlights as the June 18 screening of “Dark Victory,” a corny tear-jerker that finds Davis playing a wealthy society girl with a fatal brain tumor. Davis is so radiantly beautiful in this film that one is willing to overlook the gooey dialogue (the film also features the bonus of Ronald Reagan cast as a hard-drinking party boy). Also on the bill is the serviceable “Kid Galahad,” about a prizefighter, with Davis as the love interest.

Kicking off July’s schedule is “All About Eve” (July 1), a savagely witty film about the perils of life in the theater. If one is to believe “My Mother’s Keeper,” a scathing biography of Davis published in 1985 and written by her daughter, B.D. Hyman, Davis is essentially playing herself in this film. Also screening that night is “The Star,” a film released two years later that works similar turf.

On July 8, “Dangerous” is paired with “Juarez,” a historical drama bloated with pious lectures on democracy that features Davis as a prim Austrian queen with religious leanings. Davis on her knees in prayer? It simply doesn’t wash. She looks insane in her big scene, too: Eyes flashing, nostrils flaring, kooky feathered hat perched on her head, she gives a dictator a piece of her mind, then faints dead away. A nervous breakdown follows shortly. (Screen women used to be such fragile creatures--they were forever getting the vapors and fainting.)

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Davis goes for a freshly scrubbed look in the 1941 film “The Great Lie,” which screens July 9. A story revolving around rightful custodianship of a baby, the film also features Mary Astor as the bad girl--and needless to say, Astor gets all the tart lines and blows Davis off the screen.

Davis catches up with Astor in “The Letter,” which also screens July 9. Based on a Somerset Maugham story (passions will, of course, run high in a tropical setting), the film opens with a shot of Davis emptying her gun into some poor sap crawling on the ground like a worm. Post-murder, Davis cheerfully whips up a meal for the men who come to her aid. She really had that cold-blooded thing down pat, but what really jumps out of this film is Davis’ weird diction. She speaks in that mannered accent of indeterminate origin that actresses of the ‘30s and ‘40s favored--sort of a blend of posh boarding school flavored with a bit of upper-class England.

Davis is still talking that way three years later in “Old Acquaintance,” which screens July 15 with “Mrs. Skeffington,” both films directed by Vincent Sherman. So high-spirited that it threatens to erupt into hysteria, “Old Acquaintance” pairs Davis with Miriam Hopkins as two very different women who are nonetheless lifelong friends. Hopkins plays the ditz and Davis is the voice of reason--a thankless job that doesn’t really suit her.

Davis began to edge into her Grand Guignol period in 1956 with “The Catered Affair,” a Gore Vidal adaptation of a story by the master of the sad, shabby world of New York’s working class, Paddy Chayefsky. Directed by Richard Brooks, the film finds Davis playing a downtrodden mother who tries to force her daughter to have the wedding she’d dreamed of having herself. Dressed in a faded housedress and droopy sweater, her hair in a disheveled bun, Davis seems to be impersonating Shirley Booth for much of the film, which screens with “Pocketful of Miracles.”

The program ends on a graceful note with the July 30 screening of the 1978 film “Death on the Nile” and “Whales of August” from 1987, films that treated Davis in the dignified manner she’d more than earned after more than 50 years of faithful service to the dream machine.

* For further information about programming, guest appearances and lectures related to the Davis Film Tribute, call (213) 857-6010.