Cast: Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon

Director: Jim Sharman

Screenplay: Jim Sharman

Running time: 1 hr 46 mins

Genre: Musical/Horror/Sci-Fi



CRITIQUE:


At the vast catalogue of musicals in movie history, fancy strolling at the dark backstreets and you’ll end up in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, perhaps the zaniest, most subversive musicals ever made. A genuine head-scratching mishmash of sci-fi, B-movies, horror, exploitation with creatures in all shades of genders break out into a song and a bit of a boogie-woogie in straps-and-leather. One couldn’t but feel like stumbling into a drag show horror-house as though in a drunken stupor, asking ‘What the hell is going on?’ Exactly that.


Sure, it is vivacious, even flamboyant and unbelievably ridiculous – but this is precisely what the film aims to be; an unleashed, unalloyed cry for sexual liberation, a stark representation of the liberal decade of the 1970s. It seems to convey that it’s a-OK to slap-up rouge, wear fishnet stockings and skyscraper heels all in the name of freedom of self-expression. So it’s not all barmy, as Tim Curry delivers a sheer performance as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, ferociously bitchy at one moment, frightening the next and volatile at the most unexpected, encompassing and transcending all gender categories. His alien transvestite is a possibly a first. The songs are catchy, but often pointless and forgettable. Even Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon, playing Brad the Hero and Janet the Heroine respectively, merely stand like propsmen running around the set, both prey to Curry’s hedonistic gender-bender.


VERDICT:

Strange for a film that advocates let-live-and-let-loose of sexuality is actually suffering an identity crisis. This gender-bender showcase may be best remembered for its representation rather than for its bonkers, hyper-real razzle-dazzle.



RATING: B-

Cast: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Screenplay: Ernest Lehman

Running time: 2 hrs 51 mins

Genre: Action/Adventure/Suspense



CRITIQUE:


Let’s put this forward straight. Hitchcock’s suspenser North By Northwest is an influential piece of cinema. Not only did it set the template for many action movies of the twenty-first century (see the James Bond franchise, or perhaps the more recent paranoid thrillers such as Eagle Eye), it had also established the man-on-the-run plot device that is de rigueur to the spy genre. There’s no denying that this is bravura filmmaking, capturing truly iconic scenes – including the jetplane chase on a vast cornfield, the fugitive-in-the-train sequence and the Mt. Rushmore climax – and it is gorgeously, innovatively photographed. Hitchcock, meticulous with his camera, pans, tilts, zooms and cranes his frames in glorious delight, giving a light-hearted nuance to his otherwise dark material of double-crossing, mistaken identities and duplicitous blondes. And this is really where North By Northwest staggers with flaws. Forget what the critics are saying: this one is loaded with overfamiliarity. It seems as though Hitchcock reiterates himself with this thriller, and anyone who has seen his black-and-white romcom action caper The 39 Steps would sense some déjà-vu. Both featured protagonists accused with erroneous personalities, cross-country getaways, trains, blonde bombshells, comic crescendos and plots as thick as soup. Cary Grant delivers a suave and effortlessly charming presence to his Manhattanite ad exec Thornhill and Eva Marie Saint is superlative as the ice-cold Eve Kendall – but has the proverbial character interplay starkly reminiscent of many other couples of Hitchcock’s canon. Vertigo, anyone?



VERDICT:

There’s no doubt North By Northwest is suspense-packed and impressively shot, but this feels like a blood brother to The 39 Steps and the first cousin of Vertigo. It’s an entertaining caper but thematically weary.



RATING: B+

Cast: Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Martin Balsam

Director: Sidney Lumet

Screenplay: Reginald Rose

Running time: 1 hr 36 mins

Genre: Dramas



CRITIQUE:


Just who in their right minds would want to watch an entire film about a dozen cranky, hotheaded jurors set in a single room – technically speaking, a courtroom drama without the actual legal battle, a crime investigation with nary a sight of a crime scene, a thriller without explosive stunts? Anyone who’s up for a challenging cinematic experience should. This intellectually and morally rewarding drama set in a swelteringly hot day inside a jury room questions, explores and simultaneously dismantles the American legal system and exposes human bigotry and the system’s astonishing reliance on cold, hard logic. Expect cinematic fireworks here, more than one named Michael Bay could ever pull off.


There is an utter lack of interest in plot here, and it’s even remarkable for that; the movie starts rolling after a court proceeding of a slum youth accused of murdering his own father, where the twelve unnamed juries had to vote whether the boy is guilty or not. We’ve seen a good amount of court battles, lawyers spitting tirades and accusations, but rarely do we see cinema penetrating into the very nucleus of the decision-making body. Twelve citizens from the different echelons of society are convened to decide the fate of one accused man, and never a single character remained in the shadows underdeveloped. The perceptive and superbly written script by Reginald Rose harbours a wonderful knowing of these twelve characters, from Henry Fonda’s meticulous-minded architect, the film’s crusading hero, to Lee J. Cobb’s vociferous, irrational snob, and even provides surprising poignancy in Joseph Sweeney’s wise old codger with an experience. Radiating with compelling performances, Sidley Lumet, first-time director here, infuses his camerawork with incisive watchfulness. Despite his claustrophobic setting, he still manages to move around his camera, veering from one character to another and even mounts the unforgiving power of close-ups, where not a character emotion is left unestablished on the actors’ faces. In its technical aestheticism, this owes significantly to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope that has a parallel concept of one setting, minimal editing and gliding camera techniques – but where the filmic exercise of Rope tackles an intellectual murder, 12 Angry Men excels more purposefully with a deft harmony of both the mind and, yes, the heart.


VERDICT:

The clever irony of 12 Angry Men is that despite of its claustrophobic jury-room setting, it says an awful lot about justice, the American judicial system, social prejudice and humanity more than a hundred courtroom dramas put together. Spellbinding cinema. It is also, Gods help us, miraculously moving.



RATING: A+

Cast: Peter Sellers

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Screenplay: Terry Southern, Stanley Kubrick

Running time: 1 hr 35 mins

Genre: Comedy



CRITIQUE:


Stanley Kubrick, one of the many copiously-bearded directors in Hollywood, was a serious, serious man. His obsessive-compulsive directorial faculties come across in his meticulously framed sequences and laboriously demanding shots. Ask Shelley Duvall. She’ll fill you up with the number of takes it took her to scream in The Shining whilst Jack Nicholson hacks the door open. This is a director who took his craft seriously, and every piece of celluloid produced transcends any genre: 2001: A Space Odyssey shattered sci-fi conventions, A Clockwork Orange revolutionised violence on-screen, and even The Shining injected a much-needed human psychology in the usual haunted-house horror fare. He pushed cinematic envelopes further. He glowered infinitely behind the lens. But was he a funny man?


Yes. Dr. Strangelove says so. His propensity for humour is ever-present here, crystallised in this crisp black-and-white celluloid, albeit a very black and devilishly sardonic one. It is intelligent, too. Perhaps one of the greatest satires captured in cinema, it satirizes the absurdity and futility of the Cold War between the US and Russia, two giant nations once arguably obsessed with nuclear warfare. The writing is bitingly cynical, the should-be terrorizing scenario of America facing a forthcoming nuclear apocalypse made side-splitting with a completely inept commander of US Air Force launches an attack on the Soviets just because he couldn’t bang his mojos. Sexual overtones and the ineptitude of men are rife here, and the incredible Peter Sellers milking it all out with his legendary three-act roles. It’s an impressive display of an actor’s versatility on-screen, whether it is the jaded, moustached Captain Mandrake, the royally-pissed President Muffley in the Pentagon, shouting to his scuffling subordinates “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!” and lastly, the nutty German mad-scientist, the Nazi-salute-lashing Dr. Strangelove. If the tongue in cheek isn’t well placed enough, watch that final sequence of nuclear explosions to the tune of “We’ll Meet Again”. Its madcap humour is simultaneously frightening and hilarious.


VERDICT:

This brilliant satire of the Cold War is acid-humoured, chock-full of bile and black as pit. Hard to watch but unremorsefully uproarious. Kubrick teaches us how to be funny in the eve of Judgment Day, whilst Sellers displays a masterclass of acting to the third power.



RATING: A

Cast: Alexandre Rodrigues, Leandro Firmino da Hora

Director: Fernando Meirelles

Screenplay: Fernando Meirelles

Running time: 2 hrs 10 mins

Genre: Foreign/Crime/Drama



CRITIQUE:


Amongst the plethora of gangster pictures, The Godfather, Goodfellas, Scarface, The Little Rascals (delete where necessary), Fernando Meirelles’s second directorial feature City of God sticks out like a sore thumb. Mostly because it is subtitled and utterly foreign. Nevertheless, it has a quality that tantamount the class and scope of those great gangster masterpieces. Its genius lies behind its recognition of basic gangster elements (immoral bunch of blokes, awful crimes, shoot-outs) whilst possessing a certain liberal control in its narrative, throwing any hint of cliché out of the window. Employing a flashback structure, the film opens with a zip-flash editing – sharpening of knives, running feet and a fugitive chicken – the camera in Paul Greengrass mode, jumpy, intensely kinetic, coursing through the grimy favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the titular Ciudade de Deus, introducing us to the slum’s hooligans and the main hero, then propelling the storyline back decades earlier in the sixties. Notice its indelible influence on Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, the editing is spectacular. The control of narrative here is impressive, drawing a densely woven crisscrossing of tales, Rocket, as the protagonist, the photographer-wannabe, serving as the lynchpin to where other different stories spin on. The childhood portrait of astonishing delinquency is masterfully evoked. Nasty robberies around the underclass household estate rub elbows with the extreme poverty gripping the place, with children witnessing these events and at the same time getting their moralities blurred. Thanks then that it doesn’t preach about morals. It is dizzyingly violent but never gratuitous, artistically charged yet never gimmicky and complex without being too complicated. There are plentiful of stories here and tons of characters, but it still stays in the right side of comprehensible.


City of God barely advocates what’s right or not; it simply illustrates what life in the crime-ridden favelas is like and the inexorable attitudes of its youth, with guns and cocaine as their bread-and-butter. Yet it’s never dumb. There are extremely powerful scenes of certain knowing and eloquence of character study – Lil’ Dices sudden gun-toting spree in a motel out of bullying, the interplay between cool thug Bené and gang boss Lil’ Z, the revenge psychosis of Knockout Ned, and most shattering of all to watch is when a gang newbie is forced to shoot one of the two little boys from the block. These miniscule performances from many different unknown actors are staggeringly life-like.


VERDICT:

Brutal and breathless, City of God dismounts any scintilla of romanticism present in gangster films like The Godfather. This is a sprawling crime epic; uncompromising, vigorous and will leave its audience slack-jawed. It is that brilliant.



RATING: A+

Cast: Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland

Director: Michael Curtiz

Screenplay: Maxwell Anderson

Running time: 1 hrs 46 mins

Genre: Dramas



CRITIQUE:


In the Bette Davis oeuvre, there are arguably a handful of not-so-great films only made worthy owing to her stellar performances. Such is the case of this historical drama The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. More pomp and pageantry than compelling substance, the histrionics beneath the tempestuous romance between Queen Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux, is overtly familiar, the narrative lacklustre and the historical tension at the magnitude of a rather bum-numbing chess game. Michael Curtiz had to mount elaborate, sumptuous costumes and sets to mask the material’s lack of action. Technicolour cinematography is employed to vibrant effects and the scenes inside the Tower of London appear heightened, with Davis displaying a sensational portrayal of the Virgin Queen (since when did Davis give a bad performance?). Confined in enormous, ostensibly asphyxiating costumes, Davis had to make her acting mannerisms physical in her broad gestures, arm jolts and hand jitters. It is an impressively calculated performance, making the anxieties of the Queen externalised. Unafraid to look unsightly in part, she embodied a woman insecure of her appearance yet assured of power. Errol Flynn, much to Davis’s umbrage for Waner Bros. for letting Flynn play the role of Essex (she originally insisted on Laurence Olivier for the part), is surprisingly fitting as the ostentatious, naively ambitious Earl, his quicksilver charmer almost like a natural characteristic of the doomed historical persona. Historical inconsistencies aside, since cinema is no basis for accuracy study, one could only wish the drama is as affluent as its spectacle.

Cast: Bette Davis, Paul Henreid

Director: Irving Rapper

Screenplay: Casey Robinson

Running time: 1 hrs 58 mins

Genre: Dramas



CRITIQUE:


Former Bette Davis collaborator Michael Curtiz was once attached to helm this modern reworking of the classic fairy tale ‘The Ugly Duckling’. Davis, ever the adamant diva, both persuaded Warners that she’s perfect for the role of the repressed Bostonian dame Charlotte Vale and subsequently refused to work with the director. Curtiz dropped the project and went off to make Casablanca, whilst Davis toiled away with Irving Rapper, whom she would further collaborate for three more films. Strangely enough Casablanca and Now, Voyager were released the same year; of course, the former now being gilded in the annals of great American cinema whilst the latter ended up backlogged in the women’s picture canon. Davis must have been furious. It’s easy to claim that Casablanca is a far superior film, but that shouldn’t undermine the fine qualities of this Bette Davis three-hanky weepie – branding this as a women’s picture is not only fair as much as apt. See its influence on James Cameron’s sinking-ship tearjerker Titanic, which still dominate the all-time box-office stakes. Thou shall not belittle the all-mighty power of women, eh?


This swoon-inducing love story of a bushy-browed spinster-turned-glamorous-chick is the stuff that fairy tales are made of, hence its morally cleaner narrative compared to, say, Casablanca. Here, this is a world where unattractive women, socially secluded women domineered by prissy, supercilious mothers (here Gladys Cooper reigns as the monstrous matriarch) have the chance to cruise on ships, wear fabulous ensembles and gets hitched with good-looking men. If not for Rapper’s sparkling direction and the excellent performances all around, this may be classed as a soaper. Cynicism aside, at the crux of this tale is a rousing spectacle of a woman claiming her right to freedom from parental jurisdiction. Davis is superlative and impeccably poised as the emboldened Vale (one of her most famous roles), drawing a brilliant character arc at the final act. The black-and-white photography gives a smoky, understated presence to Vale’s transformation, and Max Steiner’s Oscar-winning killer score emphasises much of the melodrama. And of course, who could forget Paul Henreid’s classic gesture, lighting two cigarettes at once and handing the other to Davis – pure exquisite. If that isn’t enough for reinforce its status, Davis’s concluding line, with tears glittering like pearls in her eyes, “Don’t let’s ask for the moon, we have the stars,” may be Now, Voyager’s “Here’s looking at you, kid.”


VERDICT:

A quintessential Hollywood soaper featuring a glittering performance by Davis, a debonair Henreid and a lot of cigarettes. Unapologetically romantic and perhaps one of the finest melodramas ever made.



RATING: A+

Cast: Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu

Director: Cristian Mungiu

Screenplay: Cristian Mungiu

Running time: 1 hrs 53 mins

Genre: Drama/Foreign Film



CRITIQUE:


The year is 1987. The Communist regime of Ceausescu is still gripping Romania like an iron fist. Two roommates check into a nondescript hotel room in Bucharest. It is in this room we realise the state of things. 4 Weeks, 3 Months and 2 Days is a film about abortion, hence the title, and if it wasn’t so clever, it would directly locate us to its time and place at the onset. Instead we decipher details as the film charts the ordeal of a college student Otilia throughout what seems to be another day of banality from her dormitory to the streets of Bucharest. Until she finally got hold of a room, along with her friend Gabita and a mysterious man named Bebe, the dangerous situation is made clear. And it is a harrowing one. Ironically, it is within this four-walled hotel room that the entire score of the situation is drawn: 4 Weeks is not only an abortion movie, but also a politically-hued, humanist masterwork, told in a way that eschews telling and moralising and rather lays bare to its audience the heart of the matter.


The tale is deliberately distanced from the very subject of abortion, the pregnant Gabita, and instead focused the point-of-view on the friend Otilia, whose conflicted and suppressed emotions give the story its stunning complexity. Otilia is clearly world-wise and more level-headed than Gabita, a gallingly naive, self-centred and insensitive undergraduate, and the interplay of these two characters present the conundrum: if the entire situation be reversed, would Gabita go through the same lengths for her Otilia? The latter is losing certainty and throughout the rest of the film, we witness an exceptional mixture of horror, anger, sympathy, doubt and weariness of the society she exists in, all subtly composed in the face of Anamaria Marinca. This is an extraordinary performance. Watch the excellently staged dinner scene where Otilia tries to swallow her anxiety and rage to attend her boyfriend’s mother’s birthday party. Shot in an unbroken long take, the result is persistently convincing and real, Otilia’s face palpably showing the strain of the day’s events.


Director Cristian Mungiu uncompromisingly composes his shots with less cuts as possible, following almost a real-time chronology, something that intensifies its documentary feel. Hand-held shots frame the backstreets of Bucharest, dread filling the dark, noirish corners of this city, and the unflinching power of close-ups captures the every minutia of emotions on the actors’ faces. See that static shot of Marinca after the abortion ordeal with abortionist Bebe, the effect is tense and deeply unsettling and claustrophobic.


VERDICT:

Calling this as merely an abortion movie is almost like an insult to Mungiu’s disquieting work of art. This is a cleverly pitched, shot, directed and acted film – one that glimpses on a very real and human nightmare.



RATING: A+

Cast: Demi Moore, Michael Caine

Director: Michael Radford

Screenplay: Edward A. Anderson

Running time: 1 hr 49 mins

Genre: Drama/Thriller



CRITIQUE:


With the promising, if not eccentric, pairing of Michael Caine and Demi Moore, this heist thriller seems to guarantee electrifying results. Flawless, nevertheless, is anything but. Instead it’s a low-wattage, averagely assembled heist romp that could have been utterly disposable if not for the good, sensible turns from its talented leads. Although not really the career resurgence, Demi Moore brings enough intelligence, refinement and maturity to her Oxford-educated American executive in London circa 1960, where her career opportunities in the renowned (and much fracas-centred) London Diamond Company, or Lon Di, is discriminated just because she’s the only female in the business hierarchy. Feminist undercurrents stream successively, and Moore, just in the right age to portray a middle-age woman-in-crisis, balances weariness and wrinkles with resoluteness, a sharp-suited woman who sees her downfall just beyond the smoke haze of her cigarettes. Caine, meanwhile, plays a much low-key role yet of equal performance power as the company’s janitor. They two obviously do as much as they can with the script they’ve been given – but the flaw in Flawless really lies on its plot and structure. It’s a heist film – you’ll end up sighing rather than dumbstruck by the grand design of the robbery. After all, this is not a comical caper by way of Ocean’s Eleven, there’s plenty of character observations here but it tries to be a serious, dramatic heist-romp with a moral coda afterwards. We just couldn’t help shaking our heads when Moore’s Quinn and Caine’s Hobbs sets a highly-secretive plan to steal a ton-load of diamonds in, of all places, a pub.


VERDICT:

With a clunky plot, lazily structured storyline and an underwhelming finale, Flawless only stays in the right side of watchable, thanks to the pairing of Moore and Caine for bringing depths to their characters.



RATING: B-

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Laura Linney

Director: Robert Pulcini

Screenplay: Robert Pulcini

Running time: 1 hr 46 mins

Genre: Comedy



CRITIQUE:


Let’s dare to start with a wad of prediction: if Scarlett Johansson carries on making rom-coms for the chick-lit generation (she just followed up this one with He’s Not Just Into You), she’ll probably end up like Drew Barrymore – a loveable Hollywood pin-up star whose talent will always be under-seen and underrated. Her presence in The Nanny Diaries just about provides a facelift on an otherwise bland, overly-familiar tale of fresh graduate facing the employment world. Compromised Annie had to sacrifice anthropological pursuits for baby-sitting jobs, and head-butts against East Side ice-cold boss, an über-dressed, über-Botoxed Mum. So far, so The Devil Wears Prada. It says a lot, since the elements are entirely familiar here: girl accepts job, girl hates job, finds a hunk next door, life is not so bad, then at the end realises that money can buy Mahnolo Blahniks but never happiness. Johansson is watchable, but frankly, it is Laura Linney that clearly having the peach of a role here. Frosty as your freezer in sub-zero, porcelain appearance as brittle as china, smile as perfectly mechanised as clockwork, Linney’s ice-queen, indifferent mother serve as a bitch-slap to those Gucci-handbag toting, manicured, high-heeled control freaks. But then this supposed satire lacks the sheer bite it needs, and rather ends up toothless and pedestrian.


VERDICT:

Cast: François Begaudeau

Director: Laurent Cantet

Screenplay: Laurent Cantet

Running time: 2 hrs 8 mins

Genre: Foreign Film/Drama



CRITIQUE:


At the mention of French Palme d’Or winner Entre Les Murs and its premise, it can possibly empty an entire movie-house filled with cinéphiles and hardcore critics. Classroom drama only welcomes clichés with open arms. Only that the Palme d’Or was no fluke; and The Class jettisons every single sight of cliché. The outcome is a mesmerising, maddening, often-electrifying piece of cinema, a classroom drama like no other. There is nary a rose-tinted histrionic of Dead Poets Society here, but rather the rawness of modern European film in the vein of Gomorrah with a Parisian classroom as the setting to which forces repel, like two pieces of sandpaper rubbed against each other. The grittiness lie within both the intelligently structured dialogues, the interplay between teacher and students, and its documentary machinations of its camera. Where modern filmmaking relies on authenticity and realism, hand-held movements are employed to bolster its edgy feel, as though we’re watching real life unfold before our eyes. There are no heroes here; in this classroom situated in the rough Parisian suburbs, constituting multi-ethnic students of modern France, issues of racism, sexuality, class division, violence and humanity are touched upon through the eclectic yet gripping classroom discussions. François Begaudeau, former teacher, delivers a richly-nuanced performance as the French teacher, by no means perfect yet sincerely in bringing discipline in an entirely unleashed, hellish behaviour of his students. The latter, meanwhile, constitute the vignettes of the diverse culture and life where educational system rarely understands. Life is what happens in a classroom, but most of the times, teachers rarely understand what happens in life outside the classroom. Never depicting the exterior settings, it sidesteps soap opera and handles the issues that it stokes with intelligence, wit and flair. Laurent Cantet, along with his cast of superb youngsters, surely beams wide with that Palme d’Or.



VERDICT:

A classroom drama like no other, Entre Les Murs is the antithesis of most high-school-set Hollywood films: there is no linear plot, no easy answers and absent of any neat endings. And it’s all the more remarkable for that.



RATING: A

Cast: Ana Torrent, Fernando Fernan Gomez

Director: Victor Erice

Screenplay: Victor Erice

Running time: 1 hrs 39 mins

Genre: Drama/Foreign



CRITIQUE:


At its exterior wrapping, The Spirit of the Beehive sounds like either a cloying family melodrama or a mystical mood-piece fantasy. Although it has a bit of both, it is neither cloying nor fantastical. Mainstream audience might find this too slow-burning that staring into a candleflame might seem to be a more exciting spectacle, but this 1970s Spanish arthouse is much revered and beloved that its languid pace is interpreted as dreaminess and its dawdling, honey-tinged cinematography is called for poetic grace. And for those who understand and appreciate poetry, they will find Beehive as a masterpiece of evocative filmmaking. This tale – a simply-constructed one at the surface – is about a six-year old girl Ana who develops a strange relationship with Frankenstein shown in a local pulpit in an idyllic, no-happening Spanish village. But deeper in this story are themes of isolation, loneliness, political undercurrents and the loss of innocence, all elements that populate the early films of Spielberg e.g. E.T. and Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. That is because both Spielberg and Del Toro venerated Victor Erice’s elegiac and haunting childhood evocation. 

Cast: Bette Davis, Joan Crawford

Director: Robert Aldrich

Screenplay: Lukas Heller

Running time: 2 hrs 15 mins

Genre: Horror/Suspense/Drama



CRITIQUE:


Which – in your opinion – is the biggest bitch-fight in movie history? Meryl Streep versus Goldie Hawn in the bonkers that was Death Becomes Her? Renee Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones battling it out in Chicago? Anne Hathaway against Kate Hudson in Bride Wars? These sisters-turn-arch-nemeses plots do not come as rabble-rousing, sadistically thrilling than Bette Davis and Joan Crawford clawing each other’s throats in this atmospheric suspenser Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? In fact, the rivalry in this film had extended so much in real life that these two veteran thespians plot to destroy each other in the name of Hollywood glory in the production of this movie. Cue Davis’s haughty demeanour, piping that she played the titular Baby Jane and that Miss Crawford played ‘whatever’. The bitchfest didn’t end there – at the Oscars, Davis’s was nominated and clearly expecting a triumph, but the ever-vindictive Crawford elbowed her way and accepted the Best Actress for the absentee Anne Bancroft. Strangely enough, whilst they thirst for each other’s downfall, the world watched with a psychotically unexplained, maniacal glee.


This black-pitch comedy is actually flogged as a horror piece, director Robert Aldrich visibly borrowing Hitchcockian elements (Psycho being released two years earlier); the black-and-white cinematography, the dark shadowy house of the Hudson sisters, even the duplicitous, lunatic characters with a fetish of flesh torture. The set-up here is the jealousy between the siblings, Baby Jane being the centre of the limelight as a spoilt-rotten vaudevillian child-star and other sister Blanche, always hidden under the shadows, harbouring venomous bile. A car accident on one night sets this bizarre drag-queen contest. Cut to decades later, they are both aging actresses: Blanche on a wheelchair, but still despairing to look glamorous, hair pulled to a bun, reliving her old-screen persona, and Jane, a decaying, decomposing pensioner, white-faced with make-up and sashaying like Judy Garland in a musical. Crawford and Davis both give their performances amounts of sheer talent, albeit with lunacy, but it is Davis’s terrific Baby Jane’s show. Playing an abominable old hag, she reminds of a Miss Havisham but only more deeply deprived of Botox. Unafraid to defy glamour and even parody her own persona, Bette Davis gamely romp around looking like someone who just walked out of a crematorium, even miming Crawford’s glamour-puss air as she talks in the phone, ordering fags and booze. The result is blackly funny and endlessly horrifying. Yet this is not a horror without depth; it’s also a psychological exploration into one of the most horrific things in Hollywood – aging and ageism. Crawford’s Blanche could not shrug off her ruinous contempt and Davis’s Jane is demented as she is unable to accept the dimming of her sparkle and eventual failure.



VERDICT:

A hell of a freakshow. Possibly one of the most memorable bitchfights you’ll ever see in the past century. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? is a dynamite of an entertainment, thrilling and equally disturbing. Crawford might look like the glamour-puss damsel-in-distress, but it is Davis’s hysterical, scene-stealing performance that makes this a classic watch.



RATING: A+