by Miguel E. Rodriguez
DIRECTOR: Robert Aldrich
CAST: Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Victor Buono, Maidie Norman
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 92% Certified Fresh
PLOT: A delusional former child star torments her paraplegic sister in their decaying Hollywood mansion.
I have heard of this movie by reputation almost my entire life, and only now, near the end of my 52nd year on Earth, have I finally sat down to watch What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, a movie that has been called a camp classic, a horror film in the guignol tradition, and a showcase for two of the greatest bitches in the history of cinema. And let me tell you, it was worth the wait. Bette Davis’s performance as Baby Jane Hudson is the stuff of legend: evil, despicable, vile, and impossible to look away from. She doesn’t just chew the scenery, she purees it.
And yes, before faithful readers get up in my grill, this is one of the slowly growing list of films where the main character is an absolute douchebag, and I not only tolerate it, I celebrate it. It’s impossible not to. Like Christian Bale or Jack Torrance, Davis hypnotizes viewers by so perfectly embodying the character that it becomes impossible to imagine anyone else playing it. It’s been said that at one point, Joan Crawford was going to play Baby Jane, but as talented as Ms. Crawford was, I can’t imagine her improving on Davis’s fearless performance. This is the very definition of “commit to the bit.”
If you’re like me before I watched the movie, you know the bare bones of the story. Back in the heyday of vaudeville, Baby Jane Hudson with her golden curls was the darling of the stage, entrancing audiences with her heartbreaking rendition “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy.” Her slightly older sister, Blanche, was ignored by her talented sister and, tragically, her father. But karma is a bitch, and in the early-to-mid-1930s, Blanche becomes a Hollywood superstar, while Baby Jane toils in obscurity, clearly an inferior talent to her celebrated older sister.
One night, there is a terrible “accident” in front of their house (an old Hollywood mansion that once belonged to Valentino), and Blanche is paralyzed from the waist down. For the next thirty years, Blanche is confined to a wheelchair on the second floor of their mansion, while the delusional Jane, who in her late sixties still wears her Baby Jane makeup and curls, dutifully brings up Blanche’s meals and verbally abuses her. Their part-time maid, Elvira (Maidie Norman, unknown to me, but quite good in a pivotal role), discovers a trove of Blanche’s fan mail…opened and discarded by Jane.
How to describe these scenes of emotional and verbal abuse? The words that come out of Jane’s mouth are as harsh as you can get in a movie from 1962. (In one scene, watch her mouth carefully, and you can see her call Blanche a “bitch” just as a buzzer drowns out her voice.) But because Blanche, with the patience of a saint, puts up with it, we the audience are forced to accept it. I mean, I wanted to punch Jane in the face about 30 minutes into this two-plus-hour movie, but I had to tough it out because Blanche is toughing it out. At that point, I just wanted to see what kind of karmic fate awaited this intolerable harridan. I wanted her to get trampled by horses while being drawn and quartered by four tractors.
But this is just summary. I’m not doing the movie justice. For a 61-year-old movie, it felt just as tense and thrilling as anything I’ve seen in theaters this or any year. The term “camp” I absolutely disagree with when applied to this movie. Camp occurs when someone genuinely believes they’re making a great film, and the result is so laughably bad it’s good. Ed Wood is camp. Reefer Madness is camp. Troll 2 is camp. But NOT What Ever Happened… Director Robert Aldrich knew what a casting coup he got with Davis and Crawford in the leads, two actresses whose well-known feuds were constantly reported. All he had to do was turn them loose on the script and keep the cameras rolling. Rather than getting a movie that got overcooked by hammy histrionics, Aldrich got a top-notch thriller that keeps audiences off-kilter right up to the last five minutes. That’s not an exaggeration. As such, this cannot qualify as “camp” because the result was not a bad movie, but a brilliant one.
The different ways in which the screws get turned in such a claustrophobic thriller are ingenious. Blanche has a pet parakeet that flies away while Jane is cleaning the cage…so she says. Jane serves dinner to Blanche one day, always with a covered dish, and just as she walks out, she casually mentions there are rats in the basement. Blanche and we look with horror at the covered dish waiting on her table. Blanche tries to send a distress signal to their next-door neighbor; the way THAT scene plays out would have warmed the cockles of Hitchcock’s heart. Blanche discovers that Jane has been practicing forging Blanche’s signature…UH oh. One day the maid, Elvira, sees too much, and I found myself yelling at the screen when it becomes apparent her life is in danger.
The whole movie works on you like that. I did a lot of yelling at the screen, just like your stereotypical rude audience member. At one point, Jane has lied and lied and dug a hole so deep she can’t find a way out, and she pleads to Blanche, “Help me, Blanche, I don’t know what to do!” The things I yelled at the screen at that point, I will not repeat here, but they involved words that rhymed with “witch”, “ducking”, and “blunt.” That’s how well the movie got under my skin, in a good way, I should hasten to add.
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is one of the finest thrillers I’ve ever seen. I hesitate to call it a horror film because, in a way, I guess it transcends the horror genre. It includes some occasional horrific imagery, but the movie is too complex, too rooted in real-world physics and situations for me to see it as a horror film. It’s a domestic thriller that flirts with self-indulgence, but the performances are so good, we forgive it when, for example, Jane performs her old Baby Jane number, her voice croaking on the high notes like a frog on helium. In any other movie, I can imagine people would shake their heads and mutter, “Oh, brother…” In this movie, we still shake our heads, but in awe of an utterly unafraid actor.
As for why I give it a “9” instead of a “10”…ask me after watching it yourself and I’ll tell you.
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 