YMMV / Beyond the Forest

• Jerkass Woobie: Rosa Moline is an incredibly obnoxious woman but it's clear that she feels stifled by Small Town Boredom, unfulfilled by marriage life (even to a nice man) and has wasted away her youth hoping for escape and overreacts out of a deep mid-life crisis and ends up going insane.
• Parody Displacement: This is the film from which one of the Catch Phrases associated with Bette Davis, "What a dump!", comes from, being popularized by the film version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, when Elizabeth Taylor's character does an exaggerated impression of Davis. In an interview with Barbara Walters, Davis said that in Beyond the Forest, she really did not deliver the line in such an exaggerated manner. She said it in a more subtle, low-key manner, but it has passed into legend that she said it the way Elizabeth Taylor delivered it the later film. During the Barbara Walters interview, the clip of Bette Davis delivering the line was shown to prove that Davis was correct. However, since people expected Davis to deliver the line the way Elizabeth Taylor had, she always opened her in-person, one woman show by saying the line in a campy, exaggerated manner: 'WHAT ... A... DUMP!!!' 'I imitated the imitators,' Davis said.
• The Woobie: Lewis Moline played by Joseph Cotten. It's clear that he's a good professional and a decent and patient man, and that he's stuck in a terrible marriage to a woman who not only doesn't want his help, but is incapable of being helped.