Director John Huston carried on a torrid affair with Olivia de Havilland during the shoot. Warners studio head Jack L. Warner said, "Anyone could see that . . . it was Valentine's Day on the set . . . When I saw the rushes I said to myself, 'Oh-oh, Bette has the lines, but Livvy is getting the best camera shots'."
Third of six feature films Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland made together.
In 1973 Bette Davis told biographer Whitney Stine that one day she had been approached in a supermarket by a woman who turned out to be Ellen Glasgow, author of the novel on which "In This Our Life" was based. Glasgow chewed out Davis for having ruined her beautiful book in the film adaptation. "What did you say?" Stine asked Davis. "What could I say? She was right!" Davis replied, then explained that because of Production Code censorship, the filmmakers had had to so thoroughly bowdlerize the story that they had essentially destroyed it.
Both Bette Davis' and Olivia de Havilland's characters have masculine given names--Stanley and Roy, respectively. The film never hints that there is anything unusual about their names, nor does it offer any explanation. In the novel it is insinuated that Mr Timberlake wanted sons and gave them masculine names in the hope that it would make them feel strong and independent.
The two main reasons that John Huston made In This Our Life (1942) were: to help his friend Howard Koch, as this was one of his first screenplays (and then he went on to write Casablanca (1942)); and to keep close to Olivia de Havilland, with whom he was romantically entangled at the time, and in whose defense he later beat up Errol Flynn.