A Stolen Life

Director Curtis Bernhardt’s opening, banking Bette Davis’ New England bona fides, as she misses a boat and hires handsome Glenn Ford to ferry her over to a nameless island, neither of them identified at this point, in A Stolen Life, 1946, based on a novel by the Czech writer Karel Benes.

Crafty but not evil, painter Kate (Bette Davis) sails to the lighthouse with a prize she knows is coveted by the keeper Folger (Walter Brennan), her proposition only a cover for her true intention, of getting to know the maintenance man Bill (Glenn Ford), in A Stolen Life, 1946.

Returning to her family’s New England island retreat after a modest romantic encounter, somewhat frumpy painter Kate (Bette Davis) meets, for the first-time, her much talked-about twin sister Pat (also Bette), director Curtis Bernhardt using mattes and stand-ins, in A Stolen Life, 1946.

Bill (Glenn Ford) doesn’t even know of the existence of Pat (Bette Davis), the vivacious mischievous twin sister of his reserved almost-girlfriend Kate (also Bette), much less that he’s been intercepted by her, and taken to their New England vacation cottage for lunch, in A Stolen Life, 1946.

Bette Davis plays a nice sister and the evil twin who takes her place and her man in director Curtis Bernhardt's A Stolen Life (1948).