The Gothic Grandeur of Baby Jane

I first read of the film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane in a paperback book published by Pyramid in the 1970s, entitled Karloff and Company: The Horror Film by Robert F. Moss. It was a slim volume that had a surprisingly exhaustive series of essays about the development of the horror genre, all the way from Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari up through the 1960s-70s Hammer Film period. This is where I first became interested in scary movies as varied as Dracula and Frankenstein to Rosemary’s Baby--and Baby Jane. As an “illustrated biography”, the Pyramid series offered a good mix of words and pictures to capture the imagination of a 10-year-old budding movie buff.

The first picture I ever saw of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis

It was the gruesome photo that accompanied the section about the 1962 shocker starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford that made me pause and take notice...a pancake-faced old blond woman, dressed as a little girl, sitting on a beach with a grotesquely gray-faced brunette expiring beside her. The doll-like blond lady was grimacing and the brunette’s big eyes were full of pain.

At this moment in time, I had never even heard of Bette Davis or Joan Crawford, but I vowed to find out more. Who were these two scary ladies, and why did they both seem so intensely compelling?

Baby Jane was a movie that was never on television in the 1970s when I was growing up. I first saw it in the mid 1980s, thanks to the magic of videotape. Just prior to the Blockbuster Video era, when studios put out all the classics on VHS tapes, small Mom & Pop video stores would not only rent you the tapes but the videocassette player as well. In college in Chicago, my best friends and I would trudge miles in the snow lugging the video player and tapes, to watch movies we had heretofore only read about--or had only seen in edited-for-television versions.

The Hudson Sisters: Blanche (Joan Crawford) and Jane (Bette Davis)

Naturally, my two gay college friends and I were instantly transfixed by this black-and-white horror classic. A forgotten vaudeville child star and her former movie star sister have shut themselves away in a decaying old house amid regrets and recriminations, as the alcoholic Baby Jane (Bette Davis) taunts and tortures her crippled, long-suffering sister Blanche (Joan Crawford) with gleeful malice.

Reel life melds with real life as actual clips of youthful Davis and Crawford are used to illustrate their 1930s movie careers in one of the extended flashback sequences in the prologue. The Bette Davis clip is used to show what a terrible actress Baby Jane was, and indeed, Davis’s 1933 performance in Ex-Lady is wooden and leaden, replete with a cringe-worthy southern accent. She really does “stink” — Davis must have had quite a sense of humor about herself to allow that clip to be shown. On the other hand, Crawford is beautiful, elegant and flawless (if a little affected!) in her own clip from 1934’s Sadie McKee. The juxtapositions of past and present and young and old, are perfect exposition to precede the two aging stars’ first appearances.

Of course, it is the performances that make this movie a classic. Without a doubt, Davis steals the picture with her balls-out portrayal of the alcoholic, bitter and mentally unhinged Jane.  As caregiver to the crippled recluse, former movie actress Blanche Hudson, Davis’s former child star Jane Hudson is now the “fat sister” slouching around the dingy dark Hudson house, yawning, mugging, shuffling and clomping around, rattling through a multiplicity of empty gin and scotch bottles, beginning her endless guzzling as she prepares her wheelchair-bound sister’s breakfast tray.

"This is my very own Baby Jane doll"

With Mary Pickford sausage curls and heavily lipsticked cupid bow mouth on a chalk white face, Davis transforms herself into a monstrous life-sized doll. (Her performance of the child star’s theme song “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy” truly has to be seen to be believed.) Jane is a grotesque madwoman but also a psychopath and a sadist, serving her disabled sister first their pet canary then a big juicy rat from the cellar under a silver cloche. She savagely kicks Crawford around the room then trusses her up with the precision of a BDSM dominatrix, but not before coldbloodedly murdering their housekeeper Elvira by bludgeoning her with a hammer.

Davis plays the role with a savage gusto, as if she knows this may be her last chance to prove herself on the silver screen. She is truly a force of nature--and Jane Hudson remains one of her most unforgettable roles. Already a two-time Oscar winner, she received her final Academy Award nomination as Best Actress for the role, but lost to Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker. (Ironically, Joan Crawford famously accepted Bancroft’s award that night amid glamorous fanfare, completely upstaging her former costar.)

Joan knew how to look like a winner!

Though Crawford was supposedly incensed that she had not received a nomination herself, she too had garnered strong reviews for her more sedate performance. Crawford was heavily praised by many critics, including reviewer Paul V. Beckley in the New York Herald Tribune: “If Miss Davis's portrait of an outrageous slattern with the mind of an infant has something of the force of a hurricane, Miss Crawford's performance could be described as the eye of that hurricane, abnormally quiet, perhaps, but ominous and desperate.”

You can’t underestimate Crawford’s contribution to the film, both on screen and off. It was Joan who found the novel by Henry Farrell and brought it to director Robert Aldrich, with whom she’d done Autumn Leaves. As the crippled Blanche Hudson, Crawford wisely chose to underplay to her costar’s flamboyant histrionics.

When the character of Jane imitates her sister Blanche’s voice over the telephone, Davis is obviously miming Joan Crawford’s own voice--and Crawford exaggerates her own hoity-toity, piss elegant delivery, neatly spoofing the saintly, holier-than-thou  “Bless You” Crawford image. It’s obvious Joan  was savvy to the joke and able to poke fun at herself for the sake of a good story.

Maidie Norman as Elvira: "I can't remember the last time I saw words like that written down!"

Victor Buono and Marjorie Bennett: "This is Mr. Flagg's seck-etary...I think you'll find he's very well qualified."

B.D. Merrill (later Hyman) and her Mommie Dearest

Obese and effete young actor Victor Buono (best known as the evil King Tut on Batman), who was only in his early 20s at the time, was inspired casting as the pianist and potential “love interest” for Jane, and he earned a well-deserved Oscar nod himself for Best Supporting Actor. Other standouts in the cast include the reliable Maidie Norman (Torch Song) as Elvira, and British character actress Marjorie Bennett’s (Promises, Promises) broad cockney characterization as Edwin’s coddling mother.

Rounding out the cast are Anna Lee (The Sound of Music, General Hospital) as the nosy next-door neighbor,  and a flat-voiced B.D. Merrill giving the worst performance in the film as the neighbor's daughter…obviously reading her lines off a cue card, practically pausing in the middle of a sentence till the next card is turned  (Of course, B.D. Merrill Hyman is Bette Davis’s less talented daughter who later wrote the Mommie Dearest-inspired hack job My Mother’s Keeper in Bette’s waning years.)

Director Robert Aldrich confers with his stars

Baby Jane is the film that spawned a brand new movie genre—the Grand Guignol, named for the grotesque and violent French theatre that played ironically until 1962, the year this film was released. Guignol horror pictures of the 1960s revitalized the careers of the grande dames who headlined them, and created a new stereotype--the aging movie actress as either victim or killer. Some were well-produced and notable, but most were schlocky and exploitative, but almost all made money and kept leading ladies of a certain age working and in the public eye.

Some of my own guilty pleasures of the period include Die, Die My Darling! (with Tallulah Bankhead), What’s The Matter with Helen? (Debbie Reynolds), Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice? (Ruth Gordon), Lady in a Cage (Olivia de Havilland) and The Devil’s Own (Joan Fontaine). Later on, into the 1970s and even the ’80s, Elizabeth Taylor in Night Watch and Betsy Palmer in Friday the 13th kept the subgenre alive.

Crawford kept up her new image as Scream Queen with Straight Jacket, Berserk and Trog, while Bette Davis returned often to the Guignol, first in Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, then in The Nanny, Burnt Offerings and The Dark Secret of Harvest Home.

Why does Baby Jane remain a classic? The bottom line is that it is a very solid low-budget horror  movie, suspenseful, taut and well-plotted, infused with dark humor. This grotesquely gothic film is a camp classic, yes...but it’s so much more than just that. The inimitable style and attention to detail of director Robert Aldrich (The Big Knife, The Killing of Sister George) are everywhere apparent, and the film is photographed with flair by the brilliant Ernest Haller (Gone with the Wind, Mildred Pierce). The charisma and combustible chemistry of its two leading ladies adds an undeniable layer of excitement.

Much has been written about the making of this unique film, and the legendary feud between the two stars, a lot of it myth and legend and hearsay. One particular writer, Shaun Considine, has compiled all the Baby Jane lore into an engrossing book called Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud. How much of it is true and how much is fiction is debatable. Perhaps some of the more outlandish stories were made up or exaggerated by the participants themselves specifically to sell tickets to the film. 

Joan and Bette's reunion in Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte was not meant to be.

But it’s safe to say that Davis and Crawford were never the best of friends...to put it mildly. Their first teaming was such a box office bonanza that Aldrich convinced them to reunite in a new movie, Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, but on location in Louisiana Joan reportedly fell ill and then quit the picture just as filming got underway. Bette’s old friend Olivia deHavilland took over the role. Yep, their mutual enmity was most likely real!

And yes, of course I am watching (and LOVING) Ryan Murphy’s FX series Feud: Bette and Joan starring Susan Sarandon as Davis and Jessica Lange as Crawford. Both actresses are absolutely marvelous in it! It’s must-see TV for classic movie freaks like me.

Mildred à Deux

Strong woman. Single mother. Never having to depend on a man, enjoying the thrill of making it on her own, but willing to sacrifice it all for the sake of her beloved daughter. That’s Mildred Pierce in a nutshell. Both film versions of James M. Cain’s gritty 1941 novel—the 1945 Warner Brothers classic and the 2011 HBO miniseries—are masterful works in their own right, with very different approaches to the material, but both films make strong feminist statements that continue to resonate, and fascinate audiences.  

At its core, Mildred is a twisted mother-daughter love story; in both versions the men in Mildred’s life are mere supporting characters. The real drama centers around a mother pining for the approval of her cold fish daughter, attempting to buy her love, to no avail. Housewife Mildred dotes too much on her children and her unemployed husband finds solace in the arms of another woman. She kicks him out and finds a job as a waitress to support herself and her two daughters, eventually finding a way to open her own restaurant. When Mildred loses her youngest daughter to pneumonia, Mildred redoubles her efforts to make her new venture a success—to give her spoiled surviving daughter Veda the glamorous life she craves.

Joan Crawford as Mildred

The 1945 version is a film noir masterpiece, directed by the legendary Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) and photographed superbly and inventively by veteran cameraman Ernest Haller in moody black and white. For the film, Cain’s frank and hardboiled yarn had to be sanitized to pass the stringent Motion Picture Production Code. but screenwriter Ranald MacDougall manages to retain the tension and conflict in his tightly plotted script while skirting the novel’s racier passages. Curtiz and Haller elevate melodrama to an art form with the use of film noir techniques, using light and shadow to suggest and underline the more lurid story elements and character motivations.

Glamorous noir, with Blyth and Crawford

By contrast, Todd Haynes’s 2011 miniseries is far more faithful to its source material, gutsy, raw and real. Haynes, who had paid homage to Douglas Sirk with Far From Heaven (in which the production design unfortunately far exceeded its ho-hum storyline) recreates 1930s Depression-era Los Angeles in painstaking detail. And on HBO, there’s no need to shy away from the more explicit and adult angles to the story...Mildred and Veda’s numerous sexual entanglements and the clearly incestuous underpinnings of their fragile relationship are explored in unflinching detail. But in its way, Todd Haynes’s vision of Mildred is just as stylized as its classic counterpart, touching the subconscious with its vivid imagery...it is the director’s most inventive and magical work since his 1998 masterpiece Velvet Goldmine.

Kate Winslet as Mildred

Mildred Pierce marked a comeback for Joan Crawford, who had unceremoniously exited MGM after 17 years as one of its top stars, following a string of box office failures. The 1945 Warner Brothers film was originally planned as a vehicle for Bette Davis, who turned the role down upon learning she was to play mother to an adult actress. A desperate Joan Crawford said that she’d play Wally Beery’s grandmother if it was a good role, and campaigned actively for the part. Director Curtiz resisted working with Crawford and made her submit to a screen test before casting her in the title role.

For Crawford, Mildred turned out to be a career-redefining role.  It revitalized her image, won her her a Best Actress Academy Award and secured her career longevity for the next 20+ years. Crawford carries the picture on her capable shoulders; her performance is luminous and compelling. Haller’s haunting close-ups show a radiantly beautiful, maturing Crawford, whose famously large eyes had registered human emotion since the silent era. Her scenes with Ann Blyth as daughter Veda crackle with excitement and chemistry, as Crawford generously and wisely underplays as the long-suffering mother.

Kate Winslet is an altogether different brand of Mildred. Winslet, herself an iconic movie beauty, eschews the glamour angle to bring the “common frump” Veda calls her mother to vivid life. Winslet’s Mildred is more than a pound or two above her ideal weight, and her sometimes slovenly appearance illustrates the sweaty hard work of waitressing. (By contrast, the perfectly coiffed Crawford sports her trademark ankle-strap shoes and Adrian shoulder pads under her waitress uniform, creating a perfect movie star mannequin silhouette.) Moreover, Kate’s Mildred is a sensual and sexual animal, rolling into and out of bed with the men in her life with lusty abandon, often merely to achieve her aims. As Mildred, Winslet is electrifying and unforgettable.

Ann Blyth and Evan Rachel Wood as Veda

Pretty Ann Blyth (The Helen Morgan Story)  was never better than as the bitchy, self-centered Veda in the 1945 film. The promise she showed was never completely fulfilled (she received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nod for her work), though she did make a series of light musicals over the next decade. The 2011 version features an equally remarkable performance by beautiful young Evan Rachel Wood (True Blood) as Veda, who gives Blyth a run for her money. (Morgan Turner, too, is very good as the younger Veda.)

Guy Pearce as Monty

Guy Pearce (L.A. Confidential, Adventures of Priscilla) whose slim physique and chiseled face closely resemble the leading men of the 1930s and 40s, is perfectly cast as Monty in the 2011 film, lending a dangerous air of depravity and debauched sexuality to the character originally played by a smarmy and somewhat effete Zachary Scott. (We have to give props to Mr. Scott, too, in the sex appeal department, especially in the beach scenes where he rocks a black speedo paired with a polo sweater.)

Though both films are carried by the talents of their titular stars, it’s their fine supporting performances that give them depth and dimension and brand them as classics of their times. The 1945 version is leavened by the humor and energy of veteran supporting actors like Jack Carson, Eve Arden and Butterfly McQueen. The 2011 version is darker, deeper, and peopled with fine actors at every turn, including the wonderful Hope Davis and the underrated James LeGros and Brían F. O’Byrne.  

Eve Arden as Ida

The role of Mildred’s mentor and confidante Ida, played with trademark comic timing by the brilliant Eve Arden, is actually a composite of two rival characters in Cain’s novel, and Haynes’s version casts the versatile Mare Winningham as the no-nonsense waitress Ida, and Oscar winner Melissa Leo (The Fighter)  as Mildred’s best friend Lucy, who both vie for Mildred’s attentions. In Haynes’s film, in fact, all the womens’ relationships completely overshadow the male characters—obviously by design.

Mare Winningham as Ida

Melissa Leo as Lucy

Both these fierce Mildreds are “women’s pictures” but for different reasons. The 1945 film can be summarized as the story of a woman—Joan Crawford as Mildred Pierce; while the 2011 version seems to be a story about all women, how they survived during the dark days of the depression, how they raised their children, where they succeeded and failed.  I treasure both of these fine films, which stand next to one another in my DVD cabinet to be enjoyed equally, year after year.