DIRECTOR: Curtis Harrington
In mid‑1930s Iowa, two young men—Leonard Hill and Wesley Bruckner—are sentenced to life in prison for murdering Ellie Banner. Their mothers, Helen Hill (Shelley Winters) and Adelle Bruckner (Debbie Reynolds), are harassed by a hostile crowd. Helen receives a threatening phone call from a man who claims to have cut her hand and vows to make the mothers “pay.” Terrified, Helen and Adelle flee Iowa, change their names, and move to Hollywood, hoping for a fresh start. They open a dance academy for little girls aspiring to be the next Shirley Temple. The school attracts an elocution teacher, Hamilton Starr (Micheál Mac Liammóir) whose presence unnerves Helen. Anonymous calls resume, and Helen begins experiencing hallucinations—visions of dead bodies and imagined threats. Adelle becomes romantically involved with Lincoln Palmer (Denis Weaver) a student’s father. Helen grows jealous and increasingly unstable, turning to radio evangelist Sister Alma (Agnes Moorehead) for comfort. As Helen’s paranoia escalates, she mistakes a man entering their home for a threat and pushes him down the stairs, killing him. Her mental unraveling culminates in violence, revealing the depth of her psychological break.
Curtis Harrington’s What’s the Matter with Helen? stands as one of the most refined entries in the psycho‑biddy—or hagsploitation—cycle, anchored by two powerhouse performances from Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds. Working from an original screenplay by Henry Farrell, whose novel inspired Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, the film knowingly invites comparison to the Davis–Crawford dynamic. Winters leans into a full‑throttle, scenery‑chewing intensity while Reynolds counters with a grounded, almost luminous optimism, creating a tension that mirrors the genre’s foundational pairing without ever feeling derivative.
The film is a rich study in female anxiety, aging, and social judgment. Its blend of 1930s period nostalgia and psychological horror produces an atmosphere that is both charming and deeply unsettling. Helen’s hallucinations—visible only to her—mark her as an unreliable narrator and widen the emotional distance between her and the audience. Rather than validating her fears, Harrington frames her mental illness as frightening, socially disruptive, and tragically isolating. Hollywood, ostensibly a place of escape, glamour, and reinvention, becomes for Helen a site of surveillance and dread. The dance school’s cheerful façade contrasts sharply with her internal horror, underscoring the film’s central theme: guilt and trauma cannot be outrun, even in the city built on fantasy.
Helen and Adelle’s identities are inextricably shaped by their sons’ crimes. The film subtly echoes mid‑century psychological conservatism by implying that “bad mothering” produces deviant sons. Adelle’s nurturing presence at the dance school stands in stark contrast to Helen’s instability, reinforcing the narrative that Helen bears responsibility for her son’s violence. Their relationship is the emotional core of the film: Adelle seeks reinvention—new clothes, romance, Hollywood optimism—while Helen clings to fear, modesty, and religious solace. Their diverging performances of femininity and aging create a slow, painful fracture in their bond.
Although the film offers no explicit queer coding, Harrington’s inherent camp sensibility renders the entire project queer‑adjacent. Within that heightened register, it is not unreasonable to imagine that Helen’s fixation on Adelle carries an undercurrent of longing—or, at the very least, a desperate need for her companionship. The film’s emotional architecture supports this reading: Helen’s terror of abandonment, her jealousy, and her escalating dependence on Adelle all gesture toward a relationship that exceeds simple friendship. Harrington never confirms this, but the camp tonality leaves the door open, allowing queer viewers to recognize a familiar pattern of coded desire, emotional intensity, and catastrophic attachment.
Openly gay Irish actor Micheál Mac Liammóire (né Alfred Wilmore, born in London but immigrated to Ireland in his early twenties) has one of his few memorable film roles as Hamilton Starr the vaguely sinister elocution teacher. Mac Liammóire and his life partner Hilton
Edwards (also born in London and also moved to Ireland in his twenties), founded Dublin’s Gate Theatre, which nurtured such talents as Orson Welles, Geraldine Fitzgerald, and James Mason. When I was growing up, they were Ireland’s only homosexual couple. Although fêted by all, their union was always illegal, both actors being long dead before homosexuality was finally decriminalized in Ireland in 1993.
Edwards had a small but memorable scene as a blind patron of a gay bar, to whom his younger-sighted friends feed all the gossip, in the groundbreaking Basil Dearden/Dirk Bogarde movie, Victim, in 1961 – see Book One: Hidden in Plain Sight – Queer Cinema During the Hays Code Era (1934-1968). The film did more to sway public and political opinion on homosexuality in England than any parliamentary discussion. Six years later, in 1967, homosexuality was decriminalized in Great Britain.
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