DIRECTOR: Robert Aldrich
Thanks to Lukas Heller’s superb adaptation of the Henry Farrell novel, Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? works simultaneously as high drama and delirious camp. Hollywood’s two grande dames, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, are in top form, with Davis getting the showier role as Baby Jane Hudson. But Crawford is equally superb as Blanche—the still, wounded eye at the center of Bette’s hurricane.
Opening flashback: In 1917, Baby Jane is a spoiled vaudeville child star adored by audiences, while her sister Blanche grows up overshadowed. Years later, Blanche becomes a major Hollywood actress, only to be left paralyzed after a mysterious car accident. Jane now washed‑up and mentally unstable, lives with her in a decaying Hollywood mansion, clinging to delusions of a comeback. She psychologically and physically torments Blanche—locking her in rooms, serving grotesque meals, and sabotaging every attempt to reach the outside world.
DAVIS AND CRAWFORD ARE SPECTACULAR!
In the film’s devastating climax, Blanche reveals that she was actually responsible for her own accident, not Jane. But the confession comes too late. Jane’s madness has already spiraled beyond reach. On the beach at Santa Monica, she dances childishly as the police arrive, leaving Blanche near death. The haunting ending underscores Jane’s complete detachment from reality.
Gay actor Victor Buono is perfection as Jane’s would‑be accompanist Edwin Flagg, whose horrified reaction to what he discovers prompts Davis’s immortal line: He hates me. And Australian actress Marjorie Bennett, as his mother Dehlia Flagg, seems to have wandered in from a John Waters movie—glorious, grotesque, and unforgettable.
Baby Jane is gay sensibility incarnate baroque, hysterical, tragic, and wickedly funny. The psycho-biddy horror subgenre had arrived in style.
Every Davis line is immortal, but some of my favorites are:
“You mean all this time we could have been friends,”
“Because you didn’t eat your din-din,”
“But you are Blanche, you are in that chair!”
The score is by Frank De Vol.
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Ernest Haller
Warner Bros.
Bookmark for a GAY MIDNIGHT SCREENING!
Director Curtis Harrington would give his own inimitable touch to the psycho-biddy horror subgenre in the early seventies with Whatever Happened to Helen – see Book Two: Out of the Shadows – Queer Cinema from the New Hollywood (1968-1980).
