Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte
Robert Aldrich (1964)
In William Wyler’s Jezebel (1938), the heroine Julie, played by Bette Davis, scandalises a mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans ball when she wears a red dress rather than the white expected of unmarried women. In the prologue to Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte, the titular character’s father is hosting a grand party in his antebellum mansion in Louisiana. The year is 1927. While the guests talk and dance, a murder is committed in a summerhouse in the grounds of the mansion. At the climax to the prologue, Charlotte re-enters the gathering: her face is in shadow but her white dress is heavily bloodstained. Charlotte’s features have been hidden from the camera throughout the prologue, and for good reason. She’s a teenager but she’s played by Bette Davis. The Jezebel echo in Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte, however affectionately or humorously it may have been intended by Robert Aldrich, is, in effect, a painful indicator of Davis’s degradation, by this stage of her career, not only as a face but as an actress. The film’s cast includes several other Hollywood luminaries who are her near contemporaries – Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead. Each may have had their own reasons for appearing in Aldrich’s grand guignol but, as with Davis, the result has an uncomfortable, sadomasochistic quality. Unlike these other three, the character that Bette Davis is playing at least gets out of the plot alive.
Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte is a follow-up to Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), a considerable and an unexpected box-office hit. Baby Jane was adapted by Henry Farrell and Lukas Heller from Farrell’s novel. The Sweet Charlotte screenwriting duo is the same, the source this time an unpublished short story by Farrell. The film was so consciously designed to cash in on Baby Jane‘s success that, according to Lorraine LoBianco (tcm.com), its working title was ‘Whatever Happened to Cousin Charlotte?’ and changed only because Davis thought it would mislead the public to expect an explicit sequel to the earlier film’s story. Even though it isn’t Baby Jane II and even with the different title, it’s clear from an early stage that Charlotte is more of the same. After the prologue, the action leaps forward to 1964. The middle-aged Charlotte Hollis is rich, unmarried and seemingly deranged. She still lives in the mansion, now decrepit and about to be demolished by the Louisiana Highway Commission, that she inherited from her father, Sam. Charlotte has spent her life traumatised by the murder, thirty-seven years ago, of John Mayhew, a young doctor (and married man), with whom she’d been about to elope on the evening of the party. Although she has it in her head that her violently possessive father killed Mayhew, Charlotte also knows that Big Sam Hollis died – and only a few months after Mayhew – convinced that she, the apple of her father’s eye, was the guilty party. The experience of Baby Jane primes you to expect the protagonist to have wasted her best years in isolated, barmy self-reproach and that she will be exonerated, in time. She duly is, but it’s a long time. Sweet Charlotte‘s resemblance to Baby Jane is also reflected in the films’ length. Both are on the screen for 133 minutes.
Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte is currently showing as part of the BFI’s ‘Southern Gothic’ season. It’s not a distinguished entrant in the programme: the Louisiana setting isn’t integral to the story and the characters don’t grow out of the locale organically. It’s rather that – just as, in Baby Jane, it made sense to have a Los Angeles setting for a tale of luridly thwarted and perverted movie stardom – the garish melodrama goes with the territory. Robert Aldrich is naturally partial to grotesque exaggeration and the audience naturally expects it in this part of the United States. Aldrich lays on thick the melodramatic paraphernalia. As well as the crumbling family home, there are stuffed birds, an electric storm, a ghostly harpsichord and, of course, a music box that plays a melancholy-eerie tune that recalls the youth of a blighted life. The tune is the lullaby that Frank De Vol and Mack David wrote as the film’s title song – De Vol’s incidental music is rather less quiet. John Mayhew’s murder is crudely gruesome horror: his killer uses a meat cleaver to decapitate Mayhew and sever his hands. We see the dismembered body parts and facsimiles of them appear later, as part of the campaign by Charlotte’s malicious cousin Miriam (de Havilland) and her old flame Drew (Cotten) – he too is a doctor – to destroy what remains of Charlotte’s sanity, so that she’ll be certified and they’ll come into her money and property. Unlike Baby Jane, Sweet Charlotte has been largely forgotten but the BFI audience I saw it with seemed to enjoy it, as people enjoy the better-remembered film, as a camp joke. Yet Aldrich surely made it with a higher ambition – an ambition achieved in the sense that the picture made money, attracted some positive reviews, and received seven Oscar nominations (two more than Baby Jane, although Sweet Charlotte didn’t win anything).
The prologue is protracted and overdone and Victor Buono, in his few minutes on screen as Charlotte’s father, is so bizarrely and laboriously sinister that he throws the story out of balance. As a result, it takes time, when the main narrative is underway, for even Robert Aldrich to wind up to the required hysterical level, but he gets there. Here’s an example of Aldrich’s visual style, which is nothing if not emphatic. A vial containing the drug being used by Miriam and Drew to render Charlotte insensate disappears from a bedside table, and the camera imitates Miriam’s viewpoint as she registers what’s happened. We see the empty space on the table; then the vial, visualised in the place where it was left; then the empty space again. Then, as if this wasn’t enough, the camera zooms in on the empty space. The insistent obviousness of the direction and most of the acting is sometimes counterproductive – Charlotte seems so crazy from the start that the efforts of Miriam and Drew to destabilise her make rather little difference. And, even at her craziest, Charlotte has strong competition from Agnes Moorehead, as her loyal housekeeper, Velma. Moorehead does senescent eccentricity in a very big way – her facial expressions and walk are scaled more for Madison Square Garden than a movie theatre. When Velma, trying to protect Charlotte, creeps round quiet-as-a-mouse, the histrionic effort is deafening. In Baby Jane, Bette Davis expressed in her movement the gulf between the rebarbative vitality of the child star Jane had been and the weariness of the sarcastic slattern she’d become. In Sweet Charlotte, Davis’s clothes and hairdo indicate a woman frozen at a point in her distant past but the contrasts and continuities between the Charlottes of 1927 and 1964 aren’t sufficiently physicalised. The relationship between her former and present selves is meant to be illustrated through emotional expression but it’s only rarely, when Davis finds something between the extremes of wild-eyed bellowing and wild-eyed vulnerability, that she seems to go deeper than self-parody. She was only in her mid-fifties at the time but she looks terrible, and it isn’t all make-up (her exophthalmia, for example). She is distressing to watch.
Olivia de Havilland, only eight years Davis’s junior, doesn’t look like the poor relation Miriam is supposed to be. Of course, in the early stages, she’s meant to be concealing the bitterness that motivates Miriam’s attempts to destroy Charlotte but de Havilland’s appearance is too opulently elegant – there’s a suggestion of visiting royalty about her. Miriam’s pent-up resentment comes through eventually but de Havilland doesn’t give Davis the same opportunities to delight the audience as Joan Crawford did in Baby Jane – because she’s a much better actress and not the unvarying pain-in-the-neck that Crawford was as Blanche. (Crawford evidently got on Bette Davis’s nerves as much as Blanche got on Jane’s.) A miscast Joseph Cotten has to work very hard in his impersonation of a Southern cad and, like nearly all the senior actors in the film, speaks very loudly and emphatically – perhaps Robert Aldrich felt that fans of the old guard in the audience were likely to be losing their faculties. This deliberate delivery also afflicts Cecil Kellaway, who plays a London insurance investigator, Mr Willis, puzzled as to why no life insurance claim was ever made following Mayhew’s murder. (Willis, virtually the sleuth who works the mystery out, describes the situation as ‘strangely odd’.) Another face from the 1940s, Mary Astor, has a key cameo as Mayhew’s widow, Jewel, and is effective. Since Jewel dies off-screen, you also feel that Astor gets off relatively lightly. There is some decent acting in smaller parts from younger generations: Wesley Addy as the local sheriff; George Kennedy as the Highway Commission foreman who takes his life in his hands trying to remove Charlotte from her mansion; and, especially, Bruce Dern, whose blend of nasty appetency and cravenness means that his brief appearance, as the unfortunate John Mayhew, is a star turn.
3 May 2015