CAST:
Bette Davis (Jane Hudson), Joan Crawford
(Blanche Hudson), Victor Buono (Edwin Flagg), Maidie Norman (Elvira
Stitt), Anna Lee (Mrs Bates), Marjorie Bennett (Della Flagg)
PRODUCTION:
Director/Producer – Robert Aldrich,
Screenplay – Lukas Heller, Based on the Novel by Henry Farrell,
Photography (b&w) – Ernest Haller, Music – Frank DeVol, Special
Effects – Don Steward, Makeup – Monty Westmore, Art Direction – William
Glasgow. Production Company – Associates and Aldrich/Seven Arts. USA. 1962.
SYNOPSIS:
It is 1917 and Jane Hudson is an
enormously popular variety show child star. She is able to get anything
she wants and throws tantrums when she does not get it. She is envied by
her sister Blanche who vows to one day get even. Blanche’s opportunity
comes in the 1930s when she becomes a Hollywood star and Jane is a
has-been who has sunken into alcoholism. As the two sisters drive back
from a party one night, one gets out to open the gate and the other
slips the car into gear and drives forward at them. The accident leaves
Blanche paralysed from the waist down. Thirty years later, Jane is left
tending the wheelchair-ridden Blanche. However, Jane’s sanity has
snapped and she cruelly tortures the helpless Blanche, keeping her
imprisoned and feeding dead rats and her pet bird up to her.
COMMENTARY:
With the exception of Psycho (1960) and to a lesser extent Les Diaboliques (1955), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
is the film that had the greatest influence on the prolific
psycho-thriller genre of the 1960s. It gave an entirely new impetus to
the flagging careers of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, both former
Hollywood stars beyond their glory years who subsequently found new
careers in horror movies. Indeed, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,
with its sight of former Hollywood stars over the hill and going round
the bend, created a lurid pseudo-tabloid sub-genre of Grand Guignol
Hollywood self-devouring (one that had its antecedent in Gloria
Swanson’s swan song, Sunset Boulevard (1950), which was almost a horror film). What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was followed by a cycle of Grand Guignol psycho films featuring over-the-hill female stars – Olivia De Havilland appeared in Lady in a Cage (1964), Tallulah Bankhead in The Fanatic/Die, Die My Darling (1965), Eleanor Parker in Eye of the Cat (1969), Shelley Winters in What’s the Matter with Helen? (1971) and Who Slew Auntie Roo? (1971), Ruth Roman in The Baby (1972), Lana Turner in Persecution (1974), while both Bette Davis and Joan Crawford appeared in several lookalike films – Davis in Hammer’s The Nanny (1965) and The Anniversary (1968), and Crawford in Strait-Jacket (1964), I Saw What You Did (1965) and Berserk (1968). Indeed, Joan Crawford’s own life story was even turned into a Batty Old Dames film of sorts with Mommie Dearest (1981).
When What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
came out, a large part of its success was the shock of seeing the two
former stars reduced to monsters. The horror in the film fails to
translate so well to today’s teen and twentysomething audiences who
often find the film dated and ludicrous because they are not conversant
with the film’s context – that it represented a shock trashing of two of
the icons of Hollywood glamour in the 1940s. Bette Davis in particular
shocked everybody with her completely over-the-top performance. It is a
real theatre-rattling barnstormer of a delivery that she gives – and one
that garnered her a Best Actress Academy Award nomination. She goes
totally bonkers and the results are fascinatingly grotesque to watch.
The scene where she in cracked, gargoyle makeup sings a song I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy in a cracked, girl-like voice is a masterpiece of the memorably bizarre and twisted.
Joan Crawford’s fine performance was not
unexpectedly overshadowed by Bette Davis but is one that elicits a good
deal of pained sympathy. Although such is something that the film seems
to misunderstand. The final twist in the ending mutes the horror –
seeming to imply that we should forgive Jane for what she has done as
Blanche deserved it. A good deal of the venom between the characters was
apparently something that existed between the two actresses in
real-life with both delighting in spitefully nasty games of
one-upmanship on the other on set – there was even a book written about
such Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud
(1989) by Shaun Considine. The irony that only came out in later years
is that the roles were uncommonly close to the truth upon the parts of
both actresses – Joan Crawford and Bette Davis were both utterly vain,
particularly when it came to their own celebrity, both abused their own
family members and both had daughters who wrote books about the cruelty
of their parents.
Director Robert Aldrich has the power to
shock at his disposal – the dead rat scene always has gross-out impact.
There are the odd moments of suspense – the move down the stairs and the
balled-up note – although there are also times when the film seems
talky, almost too stagy, and needs more drive and tension. Indeed, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
is a film whose effect lies with the barnstorming theatrics of its two
stars rather than as a straight psycho-thriller. (It would make a very
interesting revival as a stage play). There is fine black-and-white
photography, which only serves to bring out the deliberately unglamorous
making-up of its two stars. The other Academy Award nominee among the
cast was Victor Buono as Supporting Actor – there is a sly amusement to
the scenes with his mother and a piquant charm to his clumsy English
mannerdness in the scenes with an outrageously flirting Bette Davis. In
recent years, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? has gained the status of a gay cult classic because of its campy over-acting.
The film was later blandly remade as a tv movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
(1991), which was executive produced by Robert Aldrich’s son William.
In a piece of freakish stunt casting, the Joan Crawford and Bette Davis
roles were played respectively by real-life sisters Vanessa and Lynn
Redgrave.
Robert Aldrich later returned with Bette
Davis (and it was originally intended Joan Crawford who quit/was fired
in mid-production because of the rivalry with Davis) in a follow-up of
sorts Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), which is a much better film, if not as famous. Also of interest is Robert Aldrich’s The Killing of Sister George (1968), which returns to the same Hollywood Grand Guignol as What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? although is not a horror film, and his The Legend of Lylah Clare
(1969), where a producer attempts to turn Kim Novak into a replica of
his dead wife, which hovers for a time on the edge of being a ghost
story. In the Hollywood Guignol stakes, Aldrich also produced a further
Batty Old Dames psycho film What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969) and Bert I. Gordon’s Picture Mommy Dead
(1966) where the spirit of Zsa Zsa Gabor haunts her daughter from out
of a painting. Robert Aldrich had a celebrated career that stretched
between the 1950s and 1980s, making films such as The Dirty Dozen (1967), The Longest Yard (1974) and The Choirboys (1977). He made several other films of genre interest, including the quasi-sf Mickey Spillane adaptation Kiss Me Deadly (1955), which is perhaps one of the finest of all Hollywood film noirs, and the nuclear missile silo hijacking thriller Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977).
Novelist Henry Farrell, whose 1960 novel the film was based on, also developed a film career as a result of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. Farrell furnished the script for Robert Aldrich’s Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, the novel for the Curtis Harrington-directed Baby Jane copy How Awful About Allan (1970) and the script for Harrington’s What’s the Matter with Helen? (1971), as well as scripts for two tv movies, the haunted house drama The House That Would Not Die (1970) and the clairvoyance thriller The Eyes of Charles Sand (1972).
