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+