Winter Meeting

This is a much more than your typical Bette Davis melodrama. Here, Davis plays a NYC poetess (Susan Grieve), who runs around in high social circles. One of her society friends, Stacy Grant (John Hoyt), invites her to dine with him as he entertains a navel hero, Slick Novak (Jim Davis, Jock Ewing from TV's Dallas) who is staying briefly in town. Stacy's idea was to make Susan his date while pairing Novak up with his secretary, Peggy Markham (Janis Paige). However, the evening doesn't go as planned, since Novak falls for Susan rather than Peggy and invites himself into Susan's house after the evening's entertainment.

In spite of Susan and Novak not hitting it off too well at first, they start to talk. They soon discover--after driving to Susan's family farm in CT--that they each have unresolved issues from their past. Susan's problem has to do with her dead father; how her mother had treated him which lead him to commit suicide.

Susan never forgave her mother for her cheapness. However, Novak's insistence that Susan had not tried to see her mother's side of the issue leaves Susan to question her own beliefs.

Novak's unresolved issue is spiritual in nature. Since he had been 16, he had always felt a strong need to enter the priesthood and had been discouraged from this by talking to a priest before entering the Navy.

The two help each other to resolve these some of these issues. In the end, this is not so much of a romantic story between a man and a woman as it is a mutual guidance about leading each other to spiritual epiphanies (or sudden moments of soulful clarity) of how to proceed with their lives.

P.S. This is one of those movies in which the two leading co-stars stare the last name: Davis & Davis.