Again, the eyes have it

Bette DAVIS would have turned 100 on April 5, and her career seems more than ever an unrepeatable anomaly. With her outsize performances and distinctive features (those bulging eyes, that clipped voice), she is surely one of the most iconic Hollywood stars of all time. But she was also one of the most iconoclastic. Often more alarming than charming, she was an unconventional beauty who met few of the obvious requirements for stardom (save for drive and ego).

A notoriously short-fused control freak with a messy personal life, she raged against upstart costars, unsympathetic directors and the restrictions and indignities of the Hollywood system. Her explosive performances, which paired brazen artifice with a molten core of emotional honesty, seemed like an outlet for her off-screen fury and frustration.

Davis spent nearly two decades at Warner Bros., where she made more than 50 films and where her dominance earned her the nickname “the fourth Warner.” The best-loved and most interesting films she made for the studio -- “Dark Victory,” “Now, Voyager,” “Mr. Skeffington,” “Jezebel” -- have already been compiled in earlier sets by Warner Home Video.

But Warner’s six-film “The Bette Davis Collection, Volume 3” (out Tuesday), scrounging for leftovers from her prime of the late ‘30s and ‘40s, proves that even in her lesser vehicles, Davis was compulsively watchable. She never gave less than her all -- even on autopilot, she’s somehow in overdrive. Fox’s five-film “The Bette Davis Collection” (out next week), drawing from the ‘50s and ‘60s, picks up the second act of her career, when the dwindling offers of work compelled her to take out her famous want ad in the Hollywood trades (“Mobile still and more affable than rumor would have it.”).

Davis’ status as an early feminist idol seems more complicated today. It’s true that she often played independent women and that she challenged the bounds of socially prescribed female behavior, but it’s equally true that many of her roles invite the viewer to revel in the spectacle of her suffering or her willingness to be grotesque.

The Warner set features two extreme examples of those modes. In “The Old Maid” (1939), based on an Edith Wharton novel and directed by Edmund Goulding, she ages into a sad spinster whose biological child ends up in the clutches of a scheming character played by Miriam Hopkins. (Davis, in a wonderful, typical act of hubris, had tried to persuade the studio that she could play both roles, using a split-screen effect.) In John Huston’s lurid “In This Our Life” (1942), her demonic sociopath ditches her fiance, steals the husband of her long-suffering sister (Olivia de Havilland), drives him to suicide and attempts to blame a fatal hit-and-run on the black maid’s son.

“The Great Lie” (1941), also directed by Goulding, revisits the themes of female rivalry and parental sacrifice. In Anatole Litvak’s “All This, and Heaven Too” (1940), she’s the good-hearted nanny who comes between a French nobleman (Charles Boyer) and his harpy wife (Barbara O’Neil). Davis is given top billing in “Watch on the Rhine” (1943), based on a Lillian Hellman play, but takes a supporting role as the wife of the anti-fascist hero (Paul Lukas). “Deception” (1946), a histrionic noir reunion with her “Now, Voyager” costars Claude Rains and Paul Henreid, signals the start of a middling run that brought her Warners period to an end.

Jack Warner finally released Davis from her contract in 1949, setting the stage for her great comeback in “All About Eve” (1950), the centerpiece of the Fox set, which shows a fearless if not always flattering progression into middle age. She’s an invalid in “Phone Call From a Stranger” (1952) and Elizabeth I (for the second time in her career) in “The Virgin Queen” (1955), but by the ‘60s, her metier was Gothic horror. In “The Nanny” (1965), her unusually subdued title character harbors murderous secrets. Robert Aldrich’s “Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte” (1964), more representative of Davis’ late period, is an unrestrained banshee-fest, but in pairing her with her former rival De Havilland, it’s also oddly tender beneath the hysterics, a nutty hommage to the ghosts of old Hollywood.