Robert Aldrich (1962)

Two sisters who hate each other’s guts are stuck together in a Los Angeles mansion that one of them bought when she was a star movie actress in the 1930s – decades ago.  Blanche was paralysed in a car accident at the height of her fame; wheelchair-bound, she’s dependent on her younger sister Jane, who, even longer ago, was a vaudevillian child star – Baby Jane Hudson – and who is mired in memories of her infant celebrity and dreams of reviving a performing career.  Joan Crawford is Blanche, Bette Davis Jane.  It’s hard to believe now either that the film was taken seriously by some serious critics (like Andrew Sarris) or that it was a box-office smash.   The two stars – and the situation of the roles they play in relation to their own careers – must have been a big part of the commercial success but this is a leaden movie; the lack of light and shade and the insistency are boring.  In its afterlife, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? has acquired the reputation of a camp classic – a reputation fortified by the legendary animosity between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in life, on set and all the way through to Oscars night in 1963[1].  But this too implies something more enjoyable than Baby Jane actually is.  Robert Aldrich’s heavy hand and the overemphatic acting of the leads have the effect of a bludgeon.  The obvious music by Frank DeVol announces when you’re meant to be scared or touched but the story is unaffecting – any reaction I had was to do with the actresses rather than their characters.  Because Joan Crawford is a pain-in-the-neck sufferer and Bette Davis has humour and vitality, you take pleasure in Jane’s cackling delight when she serves Blanche a dead rat for lunch.  In the 1930s part of the prologue to the main action, Aldrich shows clips featuring the real Crawford and Davis of the time.  Jane, unable to come to terms with the loss of childhood fame, has a serious drink problem and is meant to be a liability no sane director would cast although, since she’s Bette Davis approaching her prime, you can’t understand why.

There’s something very wrong with Joan Crawford’s playing of Blanche.  The praise she received for the subtlety of her performance can be explained only by Davis’s being so loudly over the top.  From the film’s reputation, you’d at least expect flamboyant sparring between Jane and Blanche; there isn’t any because Crawford seems determined to be tragically noble.  Did she know she’d be no match for Davis and decide to excise any malevolence from her portrait of Blanche?  In the 1917 opening sequence, the child who plays Blanche (Gina Gillespie) watches Baby Jane (Julie Allred) from the wings in silent, brimming fury – she conveys a depth of envy that no amount of adult success could hope to counteract.  In contrast, Joan Crawford never suggests an underside to Blanche’s martyred grandeur.  There’s also something fundamentally wrong with the script by Lukas Heller (based on a 1960 novel by Henry Farrell).  Baby Jane is a monster as a child star – she’s so vilely egocentric, offstage and in front of her public, that it’s hard to believe she’d have lasted even as long as she does.  As a young woman, she’s a failure but no less a horror.  In other words, Jane seems not to have been curdled by either the disappointments of life or the effects of being widely accused of causing the ‘accident’ that paralysed Blanche.  Jane was always a nasty piece of work; it’s no surprise that, in late middle age, she’s a rancorous hag.  When Blanche eventually reveals what really happened the night a car rammed into the gates of the mansion – it was Blanche in the driving seat, trying to kill the drunken Jane but crippling herself in the process – the moment has no impact at all, and this isn’t just because Jane has, by now, gone completely bonkers.  You simply don’t believe it when she replies to Blanche, ‘You mean all this time we could have been friends?’  From what the viewer has seen, Jane was precociously malicious and this is her one quality undimmed by the years.

Bette Davis’s movement is really good.  She trudges flat-footed through the decaying mansion; she gets across a girlish quality in Jane’s reprises of the dances that Baby Jane performed.  She’s amusing and likeable when she blares out contempt for the neighbours, or for Blanche herself.  But the performance doesn’t really develop – Davis just keeps it going.  This is a feat of stamina but since you don’t get any sense that Jane has been perverted by time – she’s merely got older and more strident – it’s eventually monotonous, especially as Joan Crawford gives Davis nothing to play off.   By this stage in her career, she was already losing some of her timing.  In a fright wig, her face caked in rouge, lipstick and powder that gives her the look of peeling plaster, she’s a memorable image.  But while you can admire Davis’s fearlessness in looking grotesque, there’s an unpleasant edge – not only to what she’s being asked by Aldrich to do but also in her desperation as an actress to make the most of a role that she must have feared (more or less rightly) would be her last big one.  It’s Bette Davis rather than Jane Hudson who gives off a Norma Desmond quality in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? 

Victor Buono is consistently extraordinary as Edwin Flagg, the out-of-work musician who answers Jane’s advertisement for a piano player (to help resurrect her career).   The opening exchange between Edwin and his mother (Marjorie Bennett) is so exaggeratedly squalid – and such a weird contrast after watching Davis and Crawford for an hour – that it’s disorienting.  It’s more thoroughly camp than any other part of Baby Jane and Edwin’s sarcastic imitation of his mother’s Cockney vowels (that’s what they sound like anyway) gives the scene a nasty prickle.  Buono is physically so bizarre that he’s clammily compelling and he shows good comic timing in Edwin’s first meeting with Jane, when she performs Baby Jane’s signature number ‘I’ve Written a Letter To Daddy’.  (The tune and most of the words of the song have stayed in my mind since I first saw the movie in my teens.)  Maidie Norman as the Hudson sisters’ unfortunate home help and Anna Lee as the woman next door are OK but the actress playing the latter’s daughter is hopelessly wooden.  Her name is B D Merrill and she’s Bette Davis’s real-life daughter.  The picture ends on Malibu beach as two incompetent policemen finally apprehend Jane, just as she’s got ice creams for her and Blanche, who’s lying in the sand, presumably dead.  (She’s been kept prisoner for days by her sister, without food or water.)  A horde of people gathers and Jane, an ice cream in each hand, begins to dance – delighted to be a crowd-pleaser again after all these years.  Robert Aldrich suggests that the curious, mostly smiling people on the beach are voyeurs.   As a member of the audience of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, you feel like one too.

31 January 2014

[1] Davis was nominated for Best Actress for Baby Jane.  Crawford wasn’t but somehow managed to persuade the other four nominees – all absentees from the ceremony – that, unless Davis won, she would collect the Oscar on the winner’s behalf.  When Anne Bancroft’s name was called (for The Miracle Worker) Crawford sailed past Davis – they were both waiting in the wings rather than seated in the auditorium.   Davis recalled that, ‘I almost dropped dead! … I was paralysed with shock. To deliberately upstage me like that – her behaviour was despicable’.