Beyond the Forest is a 1949 American film noir directed by King Vidor, and featuring Bette Davis, Joseph Cotten, David Brian, and Ruth Roman.

She tried several times to walk away from the film (which only caused the production cost to go through the roof), but Warner refused to release her from their employment contract.

Lewis does not yet know about the affair, but he is used to his wife's unease with her life; he discovers what she's done and throws the cash at her, telling her that if she goes to Chicago, she need not come back.

He follows her to a neighboring town where she is sitting in a lawyer's office; she reluctantly leaves with him but, on the way home, tricks him into stopping their car and going to the trunk.

[8] In an especially dramatic scene in the filming where Davis berates her "dull-but-decent doctor husband" (Joseph Cotten), Vidor demanded "greater vehemence" in her delivery.

[9] Davis’ complaints concerning Vidor had the opposite effect and spurred Warner executives to cancel her contract, a finale satisfactory to both parties.

[10] The final cut of the movie appeared without the sequence depicting Rosa's abortion, an edit that Vidor only discovered when he viewed the film at a local theater.

[12]Writing in 2004, Dennis Schwartz was nearly as dismissive, summarizing the plot as "bombastic melodrama", but noting that, "The film's only redeeming value is in its almost camp presentation, which might find some in the audience entertained by the overblown acting on Bette's part (she caricatures herself) and the intense but laughable soap opera story.

The revelation that Rosa Moline's "evil" is a role forced on her by a repressive environment is what transforms Vidor's passion play from an updated rendering of Madame Bovary into film noir.

"[20][21] Vidor diverges from Flaubert's social outlook in that he expresses a genuine sympathy for the small factory town and its community relationships that Rosa finds repellent.

[22] Rosa's long sought destination, Chicago, is depicted as a threatening domain of heavy industrial oppression, heightened by a Max Steiner score that emphasizes the city's "brutality".

In contrast, Vidor portrays the rural industry in the small town Loyalton, Wisconsin, as comporting with the "human pace" of life in the local community, the "pollution-belching mill" a "tiny blemish.

Bette Davis gets peritonitis in the end...she's got this big black fright wig she wears all through the picture and she gets peritonitis, and she's married to Joseph Cotten or something..." "...somebody..."[26]Film historian Raymond Durgnat observed that "Vidor's exasperated melodrama" in Beyond the Forest "wears a lot better after the resurgence of high melodrama" that appeared in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

[28] Composer Max Steiner was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Music (Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture) in 1950.