Currently streaming on FilmStruck
Director: Robert Aldrich
Starring: Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Victor Buono
There are different types of horror, and they can hit us differently. For me, the worst is the horror of what humans can do to one another. Take my two favorite horror films, Rosemary’s Baby and Night of the Hunter. The former is ostensibly a paranormal horror film, but that’s not really where the true terror lies. It’s in Rosemary’s slow realization that her friends and, most importantly, husband are conspiring against her, and her subsequent feelings of desperation and helplessness that truly scar me with every viewing. With the latter, it’s Robert Mitchum donning the attire of a minister, a position of trust, to stalk two small children through the countryside. A pregnant woman and two children, all terrorized by those that they should, under normal circumstances, relied most closely on. That juxtaposition enhances that terror of helplessness. When those closest to you turn out to be your biggest enemy, is there any hope?
A rather obvious 3rd type of protagonist who desperately needs someone to trust would be one confined to a wheelchair. Perhaps that’s less the case now, but in 1962, a wheelchair bound woman like Blanche Hudson (Joan Crawford) certainly needed a friend. And who better than a sister? Unfortunately for Blanche, Jane Hudson (Bette Davis), like Guy Woodhouse and Reverend Harry Powell, tortures rather than nurtures. It makes What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? disturbing, seeing a twisted sadism emanate from one who should be a protector.
In the 1910’s, Jane was a vaudevillian star by the name of Baby Jane, a Shirley Temple-esque cutie pie in curls who would enamor crowds with saccharine-laced songs like “Fly the Flag of Freedom”, “She’s Somebody’s Little Girl”, “I Wouldn’t Trade My Daddy”, and her biggest showstopper and most requested tune – “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy”. Baby Jane is the star of the show (and she knows it, adopting a diva personality already), and older sister Blanche sulks backstage while mom promises she’ll have her turn one day. The mother is correct. By the 1930’s, Blanche is a major Hollywood star, a beloved dramatic actress. In 1935, we see a mysterious car crash paralyze Blanche. This is all prelude, as the opening credits roll over the aftermath of this car crash. The delayed opening credits isn’t uncommon now, but in its time was an abnormality. The timing not only lets you know where the story really starts, but it forces an uncomfortably long pause in the storytelling. As you watch all these credits and see that car, smoking and broken, you’re given more time to wonder exactly what awaits.
Now it’s 1962, and the two have been together a long time. Blanche is confined to the second floor of their home, where she watches TV marathons of her old movies. Jane, still in curls and dressed like one of the pretty dolls sold as merchandise at her old shows, is her bitter caretaker. Her powdered face gives her the visage of a clown, one as terrifying as Pennywise. Her voice is more of a croak. Her lip seems permanently curled upward, perhaps from a lifetime of disgusted contempt at her lot in life. It makes for something completely grotesque. She is as much a movie monster as Frankenstein or the Wolfman. Her deformity is of the soul, her carnage psychological.
I won’t delve into the plot, because there’s really not much of one. Jane terrorizes Blanche because she can, because Blanche has nowhere else to go, and longs for a reboot of her career. She hires a struggling piano player (Victor Buono, in an Oscar-nominated debut), and we find something possibly more disturbing than bitter, angry Jane: the emergence of the Baby Jane stage persona kept in the shadows for all those years. It makes for one of the most unsettlingly joyous musical numbers in movie history:
(if Buono’s only screen time in the entire film were his reactions to Jane in this scene, he still would have deserved his nomination)
While Rosemary feared having her child taken from her, and the children of Night of the Hunter feared simply for their own safety, Blanche’s fear is rooted in simply having to endure this ghoul that has her trapped. The stress of her confinement really accumulates on Blanche throughout the film. She longingly looks at the bottom of the stairs, where a telephone seductively awaits. But Blanche can’t make it to the phone. The only call she can make, via a buzzer, is to Jane to come check on her. It makes Jane all the more terrifying, because there’s no escaping her cruelty. The only mystery is what new way that cruelty might manifest each day.
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? isn’t a perfect film, however. It leans a little too heavily on the well-known feud between its two leads. The film itself might be a bit on the sadistic side, seemingly coming up with biting remarks just for the joy of having Davis and Crawford hurl them at each other. It seems a bit long and repetitive in spots, and you wonder if certain scenes avoided the cutting room floor because filmmaking took a backseat to watching prolonged psychological torture between two acrimonious actresses. The film at times seems to enjoy its subject a bit too much for my taste. But perhaps that’s part of the horror of Baby Jane. Director Robert Aldrich created a grotesque clown whose cruelty feeds off being watched, and then he made it so we can’t look away.
Is it Watchlist-worthy?
Undoubtedly. Despite its flaws, Davis delivers a performance for the ages as Jane, the former child star twisted by decades of jealousy and contempt, who terrorizes her wheelchair-bound older sister.