"What a dump. Hey, what's that from? 'What a dump!'" Ever since this impersonation at the opening of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, this "goddamn Bette Davis picture...goddamn Warner Brothers epic" has been relegated to the campest of camp classics. Director 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 make her into some sort of middle-aged parody of Jennifer Jones in Vidor's equally wild Duel in the Sun and Ruby Gentry. If, on some level, it's as lunatic a production as Strange Illusion, it's also something much more. Once one accepts its outlandish, melodramatic pitch, this study 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 though it has from its repression in a company town, a marriage, and a home ("What a dump!") she despises. Tonight's screening will premiere a new print of Beyond the Forest, struck from the original nitrate negative by the Library of Congress Preservation Lab. Preceding the feature will be the 1946 cartoon Baby Bottleneck. In Beyond the Forest, Bette Davis sneers at the postwar baby boom as "mass production," the metaphor taken up by this Bob Clampett Technicolor classic-newly printed in 35mm for the first time since its release. Scott Simmon