What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

Director: Robert Aldrich                               Writer: Lukas Heller
Film Score: Frank De Vol                            Cinematography: Ernest Haller
Starring: Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Victor Buono and Maidie Norman

It’s unfortunate that, for many people my age, our first exposure to Joan Crawford came via television and Robert Aldrich’s horror classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Bette Davis, it seems, not only didn’t suffer from her psychotic portrayal, but it led to a whole new reevaluation of her work and the fact that she lived a decade longer than Crawford kept her memory alive. Crawford’s reputation, on the other hand, was justifiably sideswiped by her adoptive daughter’s autobiography and its attendant film, Mommie Dearest, which made her out to be psychotic in real life. Whatever personal demons may have haunted Crawford, her work on the screen should stand apart, from the silent era through the sixties, as a brilliant career, a powerful character, and a genuine movie star. Her reputation deserves to be rescued so that people can see here for the great actress she really was rather than the joke she eventually became.

Aldrich begins the film by establishing the characters right from the beginning. Child star Baby Jane is a spoiled brat who manipulates everyone around her to get what she wants. Sister Blanch, however, is patient and perseveres, eclipsing her sister’s former fame by becoming a films star while Jane becomes box office poison. The director used clips from Davis’s films Parachute Jumper and Ex-Lady, and from Crawford’s Sadie McKee. Then one night, when Blanch opens the gate for the car, Jane apparently rams the car into her paralyzing her sister. There’s certainly more than a bit of Sunset Boulevard here, from the decrepit old mansion to the aging stars playing demented versions of themselves. And like Gloria Swanson in that film, both stars here give tour de force performances with Davis earning an Oscar nomination for her work.

The plot doesn’t really get going until the present day, with the two old women in the house. Crawford is confined to a wheelchair in the upstairs bedroom, while Davis runs the household and must wait on Crawford. The tension between the two is palpable, and one has the sense that it’s been that way for a long time. The crisis comes when Crawford decides to sell the old mansion and have Davis put in some kind of institution because of her drinking and her obvious decline in mental stability. But before that can happen Davis launches into a horrifying campaign of psychological terrorism against Crawford until the final reveal makes sense some of it all. Watching as a young person one Saturday afternoon, I was transfixed by the two stars--though I had no idea who they were--and was particularly horrified by Davis’s actions. To my mind it was, and still is, more horrifying than any monster movie.

Robert Aldrich made the startling Kiss Me Deadly in 1955, but had his best run of pictures in the sixties with The Dirty Dozen and Flight of the Phoenix in addition to his two “horror” films with Bette Davis. Victor Buono, the unfortunate accompanist who was lured into aiding Davis’s Baby Jane comeback in the film, was mostly a television performer, most notably in the Batman series of the late sixties. This is the aspect of the film that sometimes earns the film the tag black comedy. And it is pretty funny watching Davis rehearse, and even funnier seeing Crawford’s reaction when she does. But little else in the film has much humor, and the film draws as well on Hitchcock’s Psycho as we watch the disintegration of Davis and her torture of Crawford, powerless to stop her. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane is simply a magnificent film featuring two screen giants. And though it spawned a dozen copycat films shortly after, it still remains the most powerful and most original of the lot.