"What a dump. Hey, what's that from? 'What a dump!'" Even before this impersonation opening Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, this "goddamn Bette Davis picture...goddamn Warner Brothers epic" had been relegated to the campiest of camp classics. King Vidor, until his later years, disparaged it too, recalling how Davis tried to have him fired mid-filming. The New York Times reported that Davis "has never been more unpleasant," and undeniably her black fright wig and peasant blouse will suggest to faithful attendees of this Vidor retrospective some sort of middle-aged parody of Jennifer Jones in his equally wild Duel in the Sun and Ruby Gentry. If Beyond the Forest is a rather lunatic production, it's also something much more. Once one accepts its outlandish, melodramatic pitch, this dissection of a "Wisconsin Bovary" belongs alongside such Billy Wilder noir classics as Ace in the Hole (for its further study in small-town greed) and Sunset Boulevard (for its study of another middle-aged woman's frustrated passion). Vidor maintains a sneaking sympathy for his heroine's vitality, turned murderous through repression in a company town, marriage to saintly doctor Joseph Cotten, and life in an environment ("What a dump!") she despises. Scott Simmon