A great production and Henry Fonda and Bette Davis were fantastic. You can really see the shift here in sets and camera motion towards a realistic and believable creation of Hollywood cinema and actors who are tantalizing. The actors in Hollywood are clearly crafting their skills in this period very quickly. The nuance of Henry Ford is incredible. He takes his time and lives and breathes his lines and beats rather than rushing through them from point to point using intonation and punctation to define the emotions in the lines. Rather Henry Ford feels and breathes his beats so that there is more complexity and humanity to him. I will say that style does stand in contrast to Bette Davis' more direct and blunt approach to acting which is far more stagey in nature and emblematic of the Katherine Hepburn speak your emotions style and speak them quickly and bluntly. That being said, Bette Davis' style of acting is entirely appropriate for her character who is almost a trial run for Scarlett O'Hara, the bold hot-headed Southern woman.
I will say the representation of slavery is extremely crazy. You can really see how the audiences of the 1930’s historically speaking weren’t that far from the cultural mindset of the audiences of the 1850’s. The slaves were depicted as being well off in slavery even if it was all subtext in this film. It's not very nuanced in it's representation of black people.