Angelman's Place

I first read of the film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane in a paperback book published by Pyramid in the 1970s, entitled Karloff and Company: The Horror Film by Robert F. Moss. It was a slim volume that had a surprisingly exhaustive series of essays about the development of the horror genre, all the way from Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari up through the 1960s-70s Hammer Film period. This is where I first became interested in scary movies as varied as Dracula and Frankenstein to Rosemary’s Baby--and Baby Jane. As an “illustrated biography”, the Pyramid series offered a good mix of words and pictures to capture the imagination of a 10-year-old budding movie buff.

The first picture I ever saw of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis

It was the gruesome photo that accompanied the section about the 1962 shocker starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford that made me pause and take notice...a pancake-faced old blond woman, dressed as a little girl, sitting on a beach with a grotesquely gray-faced brunette expiring beside her. The doll-like blond lady was grimacing and the brunette’s big eyes were full of pain.

At this moment in time, I had never even heard of Bette Davis or Joan Crawford, but I vowed to find out more. Who were these two scary ladies, and why did they both seem so intensely compelling?

Baby Jane was a movie that was never on television in the 1970s when I was growing up. I first saw it in the mid 1980s, thanks to the magic of videotape. Just prior to the Blockbuster Video era, when studios put out all the classics on VHS tapes, small Mom & Pop video stores would not only rent you the tapes but the videocassette player as well. In college in Chicago, my best friends and I would trudge miles in the snow lugging the video player and tapes, to watch movies we had heretofore only read about--or had only seen in edited-for-television versions.

The Hudson Sisters: Blanche (Joan Crawford) and Jane (Bette Davis)

Naturally, my two gay college friends and I were instantly transfixed by this black-and-white horror classic. A forgotten vaudeville child star and her former movie star sister have shut themselves away in a decaying old house amid regrets and recriminations, as the alcoholic Baby Jane (Bette Davis) taunts and tortures her crippled, long-suffering sister Blanche (Joan Crawford) with gleeful malice.

Reel life melds with real life as actual clips of youthful Davis and Crawford are used to illustrate their 1930s movie careers in one of the extended flashback sequences in the prologue. The Bette Davis clip is used to show what a terrible actress Baby Jane was, and indeed, Davis’s 1933 performance in Ex-Lady is wooden and leaden, replete with a cringe-worthy southern accent. She really does “stink” — Davis must have had quite a sense of humor about herself to allow that clip to be shown. On the other hand, Crawford is beautiful, elegant and flawless (if a little affected!) in her own clip from 1934’s Sadie McKee. The juxtapositions of past and present and young and old, are perfect exposition to precede the two aging stars’ first appearances.

Of course, it is the performances that make this movie a classic. Without a doubt, Davis steals the picture with her balls-out portrayal of the alcoholic, bitter and mentally unhinged Jane.  As caregiver to the crippled recluse, former movie actress Blanche Hudson, Davis’s former child star Jane Hudson is now the “fat sister” slouching around the dingy dark Hudson house, yawning, mugging, shuffling and clomping around, rattling through a multiplicity of empty gin and scotch bottles, beginning her endless guzzling as she prepares her wheelchair-bound sister’s breakfast tray.

"This is my very own Baby Jane doll"

With Mary Pickford sausage curls and heavily lipsticked cupid bow mouth on a chalk white face, Davis transforms herself into a monstrous life-sized doll. (Her performance of the child star’s theme song “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy” truly has to be seen to be believed.) Jane is a grotesque madwoman but also a psychopath and a sadist, serving her disabled sister first their pet canary then a big juicy rat from the cellar under a silver cloche. She savagely kicks Crawford around the room then trusses her up with the precision of a BDSM dominatrix, but not before coldbloodedly murdering their housekeeper Elvira by bludgeoning her with a hammer.



Davis plays the role with a savage gusto, as if she knows this may be her last chance to prove herself on the silver screen. She is truly a force of nature--and Jane Hudson remains one of her most unforgettable roles. Already a two-time Oscar winner, she received her final Academy Award nomination as Best Actress for the role, but lost to Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker. (Ironically, Joan Crawford famously accepted Bancroft’s award that night amid glamorous fanfare, completely upstaging her former costar.)

Joan knew how to look like a winner!

Though Crawford was supposedly incensed that she had not received a nomination herself, she too had garnered strong reviews for her more sedate performance. Crawford was heavily praised by many critics, including reviewer Paul V. Beckley in the New York Herald Tribune: “If Miss Davis's portrait of an outrageous slattern with the mind of an infant has something of the force of a hurricane, Miss Crawford's performance could be described as the eye of that hurricane, abnormally quiet, perhaps, but ominous and desperate.”

You can’t underestimate Crawford’s contribution to the film, both on screen and off. It was Joan who found the novel by Henry Farrell and brought it to director Robert Aldrich, with whom she’d done Autumn Leaves. As the crippled Blanche Hudson, Crawford wisely chose to underplay to her costar’s flamboyant histrionics.

When the character of Jane imitates her sister Blanche’s voice over the telephone, Davis is obviously miming Joan Crawford’s own voice--and Crawford exaggerates her own hoity-toity, piss elegant delivery, neatly spoofing the saintly, holier-than-thou  “Bless You” Crawford image. It’s obvious Joan  was savvy to the joke and able to poke fun at herself for the sake of a good story.

Maidie Norman as Elvira: "I can't remember the last time I saw words like that written down!"

Victor Buono and Marjorie Bennett: "This is Mr. Flagg's seck-etary...I think you'll find he's very well qualified."

B.D. Merrill (later Hyman) and her Mommie Dearest

Obese and effete young actor Victor Buono (best known as the evil King Tut on Batman), who was only in his early 20s at the time, was inspired casting as the pianist and potential “love interest” for Jane, and he earned a well-deserved Oscar nod himself for Best Supporting Actor. Other standouts in the cast include the reliable Maidie Norman (Torch Song) as Elvira, and British character actress Marjorie Bennett’s (Promises, Promises) broad cockney characterization as Edwin’s coddling mother.

Rounding out the cast are Anna Lee (The Sound of Music, General Hospital) as the nosy next-door neighbor,  and a flat-voiced B.D. Merrill giving the worst performance in the film as the neighbor's daughter…obviously reading her lines off a cue card, practically pausing in the middle of a sentence till the next card is turned  (Of course, B.D. Merrill Hyman is Bette Davis’s less talented daughter who later wrote the Mommie Dearest-inspired hack job My Mother’s Keeper in Bette’s waning years.)

Director Robert Aldrich confers with his stars

Baby Jane is the film that spawned a brand new movie genre—the Grand Guignol, named for the grotesque and violent French theatre that played ironically until 1962, the year this film was released. Guignol horror pictures of the 1960s revitalized the careers of the grande dames who headlined them, and created a new stereotype--the aging movie actress as either victim or killer. Some were well-produced and notable, but most were schlocky and exploitative, but almost all made money and kept leading ladies of a certain age working and in the public eye.

Some of my own guilty pleasures of the period include Die, Die My Darling! (with Tallulah Bankhead), What’s The Matter with Helen? (Debbie Reynolds), Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice? (Ruth Gordon), Lady in a Cage (Olivia de Havilland) and The Devil’s Own (Joan Fontaine). Later on, into the 1970s and even the ’80s, Elizabeth Taylor in Night Watch and Betsy Palmer in Friday the 13th kept the subgenre alive.

Crawford kept up her new image as Scream Queen with Straight Jacket, Berserk and Trog, while Bette Davis returned often to the Guignol, first in Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, then in The Nanny, Burnt Offerings and The Dark Secret of Harvest Home.

Why does Baby Jane remain a classic? The bottom line is that it is a very solid low-budget horror  movie, suspenseful, taut and well-plotted, infused with dark humor. This grotesquely gothic film is a camp classic, yes...but it’s so much more than just that. The inimitable style and attention to detail of director Robert Aldrich (The Big Knife, The Killing of Sister George) are everywhere apparent, and the film is photographed with flair by the brilliant Ernest Haller (Gone with the Wind, Mildred Pierce). The charisma and combustible chemistry of its two leading ladies adds an undeniable layer of excitement.

Much has been written about the making of this unique film, and the legendary feud between the two stars, a lot of it myth and legend and hearsay. One particular writer, Shaun Considine, has compiled all the Baby Jane lore into an engrossing book called Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud. How much of it is true and how much is fiction is debatable. Perhaps some of the more outlandish stories were made up or exaggerated by the participants themselves specifically to sell tickets to the film. 

Joan and Bette's reunion in Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte was not meant to be.

But it’s safe to say that Davis and Crawford were never the best of friends...to put it mildly. Their first teaming was such a box office bonanza that Aldrich convinced them to reunite in a new movie, Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, but on location in Louisiana Joan reportedly fell ill and then quit the picture just as filming got underway. Bette’s old friend Olivia deHavilland took over the role. Yep, their mutual enmity was most likely real!






And yes, of course I am watching (and LOVING) Ryan Murphy’s FX series Feud: Bette and Joan starring Susan Sarandon as Davis and Jessica Lange as Crawford. Both actresses are absolutely marvelous in it! It’s must-see TV for classic movie freaks like me.

A movie idol indulges his appetites

Here is a Hollywood where stars’ vices are indulged and whims acceded to--then their weaknesses and peccadilloes are carefully exploited for maximum benefit to the bottom line.

Gossip, innuendo and scandal are used strategically by studios to protect their investments,

and cover stories and disinformation are manufactured at a greater pace than the motion picture commodity itself. Illusion creates perception, and perception is reality in the hall of mirrors known as Hollywood.

Jack Palance as Charlie Castle

In The Big Knife, movie star Charlie Castle’s soul has been stained, his talent wasted and his marriage nearly destroyed under his seven-year slave contract at Hoff Federated Studios. When it comes time to sign on for another seven years of indentured servitude, he hesitates. But the industry’s well-oiled machine literally chews him up and tears him to shreds when he tries to buck the system.

With his unconventionally handsome features and tall, well-muscled physique, he-man Method actor Jack Palance is well cast as conflicted matinee idol Charlie Castle. Palance, usually most at home playing a menacing bad guy (Sudden Fear, Panic in the Streets), reveals raw and real vulnerability as the wounded idealist faced with a horrifying reality.

Ida Lupino as Marian Castle

Film noir heroine Ida Lupino (Out of the Fog), approaching the then-career-halting age of 40, enjoys one of her last roles as a leading lady (before enjoying a second career behind the camera as a film director), displaying a quiet strength as the dissolute movie hero’s long-suffering wife Marian.

A strong supporting cast brings to life a host of juicy archetypal roles. The great Rod Steiger is the personification of narcissistic evil as the domineering studio head Stanley Hoff. Wendell Corey (Harriet Craig) is perfect as the grim-faced studio henchman “Smiley” McCoy, as is Ilka Chase as a vicious and demanding gossip columnist, a la Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons. Everett Sloane is effective as Castle’s sympathetic but ultimately impotent agent. The versatile Jean Hagen (in a 180º turn from dizzy Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain) scores in her scenes as a slutty, amoral Beverly Hills housewife; her nymphomaniacal character might have been drawn by Harold Robbins, Joyce Haber or Jackie Collins.

Cuckold Buddy Bliss (Paul Langton) and wife Connie (Jean Hagen)

Rod Steiger as Stanley Shriner Hoff

Wendell Corey as Smiley McCoy

Charlie and Nat (Everett Sloane)

Shelley Winters (inexplicably billed as Miss Shelley Winters) makes the most of her one-scene cameo as Dixie Evans, a vengeful, addle-pated and overripe starlet who threatens to blow the lid off a scandalous Hoff Federated cover-up. Making Dixie the dumbest of dumb blondes, just a bit long in the tooth and a tad too voluptuous, seems to be a not-too-subtle poke at Winters’s real-life friend Marilyn Monroe, who was waging a battle royale with her own studio around this time.

(Miss) Shelley Winters as Dixie Evans

Though the Odets play has been opened up to include short scenes at Castle’s Malibu beach house, the Hoff Studio and a nearby Bel Air cocktail party, this is mostly a filmed stage play, but director Aldrich keeps the action moving with his talented cast and always-inventive camera work. Aldrich’s final tableau of Marian sobbing “Help” as the camera pulls up and back from the scene foreshadows the last shot of The Killing of Sister George a dozen years later.  

This voyeuristic peek at Hollywood’s dark side is as sizzling and relevant today as it was 50 years ago. I don’t usually recommend remakes, but an updated version of this conspiracy-driven tale set in the present day and starring a Tom Cruise or even a Mel Gibson, would be fascinating to watch.  

Beryl Reid in the title role

Susannah York as Alice

The beautiful Susannah York aces the difficult role of Alice, the child-woman who chafes against George’s smothering and mood swings yet plays Virginia Woolf-worthy mind games herself and is not as innocent (or young) as she professes. The minute she meets the successful BBC program director Mrs. Croft (who pays a visit to George to rake the actress over the coals for unprofessional behavior), Alice makes plans to hitch her wagon to the high-powered lady executive and ditch her falling soap opera star lover. With her pixie hairdo (the rage of 1968 for gamines like York, Goldie Hawn and Mia Farrow) and soulful doe eyes, York’s performance is a skillful blend of intensity and vulnerability.

Coral Browne as Mercy Croft

The smug, uptight and terribly upper-crust BBC program director Mercy Croft is played with venomous finesse by the versatile character actress Coral Browne, best known for her iconic role as Vera Charles in Auntie Mame (and as the wife of the great Vincent Price). But here, as the frosty middle-aged widow whose latent tendencies are stimulated by George’s pretty blond flatmate, Browne is given her juiciest role ever, culminating in one of the most startling and searing sex scenes ever put on mainstream film up to that time. Far from a Penthouse soft-focus girl-on-girl fantasy, the love scene between the older and younger woman, as staged by Aldrich under unforgiving lighting in unrelenting close-up, is as much a ghoulish nod to his grand guignol roots (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte) as it is unexpected eroticism.

Chock full of irony and wit, not to mention loads of bitchy and catty repartee, Sister George is the female version of Boys in the Band, ground-breaking for its time and still eminently watchable.

Elsa Brinkmann confronts the legendary Lylah Clare

The plot is promising: The persona of a long-dead film diva is resurrected for a new biopic when her Svengali-like director and lover Lewis Zarkin (Finch) finds a woman bearing an eerie and uncanny resemblance to the deceased star. And not only does Elsa (Novak) look just like Lylah Clare, she is seemingly possessed by the dead actress’s restless spirit.

Novak, resplendent in Renie gown and Monroe-like Guilaroff flip hairdo

But the film just doesn’t work. It’s a total bore, despite a couple of fleeting opportunities for a flash of Aldrich’s gothic magic. The only scene in the whole film that approaches the master’s best work is the cocktail party and press conference early in the picture where Elsa Brinkmann (stage name Campbell) is introduced to the Hollywood press corps. Here, the great character actress Coral Browne (unforgettable in Auntie Mame and in Aldrich’s own Sister George) makes the most of her cameo as the embittered, disabled gossip columnist Molly Luther. Though Browne returns all-too-briefly in a couple of scenes before the end of the movie, there are two more long hours to get through.

The only scene with any dramatic tension...

...thanks to the redoubtable and wickedly bitchy Coral Browne

If the movie has any other saving grace at all, it’s the radiant Miss Novak herself. Evoking the essence of legendary screen goddesses like Harlow, Monroe and Dietrich (and naturally, herself!) in diaphanous silk Renie gowns and iconic Guilaroff hairstyles, Novak really gives the part her all, and the moments when the demure Elsa channels the raucous, Teutonic, foul-mouthed Lylah are truly riveting. 

Novak gives a bravura performance...