ON THE SEVENTEETH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), directed by Robert Aldrich. This legendary work of psychological horror stars Bette Davis as a former child star, the titular Baby Jane, now in her sixties, who imprisons and torments her sister Blanche, played by Joan Crawford. Jane seems to have been driven mad by the adulation she received as a child, in Shirley Temple-esque song-and-dance revues, and by her jealousy over her sister’s rise to stardom as an adult, after Baby Jane was forgotten. One night, it appears that Jane cripples Blanche by running her down with her car. Decades later, the sisters live together in a gloomy Hollywood mansion as shut-ins. When Blanche decides to sell the mansion, Jane snaps and retreats into a delusional fugue in which she believes she can return to the stage with her old Baby Jane act. Cruel pranks like serving her dependent sister a dead rat for lunch soon escalate to grand larceny, battery, and eventually homicide, as Jane’s mind regresses further and further back in time.
A feud between two faded starlets might seem an unlikely premise for a horror classic, but there is something so indelibly creepy about Bette Davis’ sexagenarian (she was actually only 54 at the time but did her own makeup to age herself up—Davis should have won Oscars for both Best Actress and Best Makeup) dressing, talking, acting, and at one point singing like a six year old girl, utterly convinced she hasn't aged a day. The thought of being the helpless captive of such a person is chilling, so it’s no wonder this movie inspired a whole subgenre of horror, amusingly known as “psycho-biddies.” These include Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972), and Night Watch (1973). (And once again, let us mention Stephen King and note that he must have been inspired by this genre, and by this film in particular, in writing one of his best novels, Misery, where a lonely middle-aged woman driven to insanity by her obsession with the entertainment industry imprisons and torments a helpless individual.)
However, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? itself must have been inspired by Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), which I think is a great work of gothic horror, though it is usually categorized as film noir. There, a delusional old woman who was once a beloved silent era ingenue hires a screenwriter to write a script for her imaginary return to film. Similarly, a subplot in this film features Jane hiring a pianist for the imaginary rebirth of her musical act. Both the screenwriter and the pianist are down-at-heel showbiz hacks who cynically humor the old women because they are desperate for work—Faustian bargains that they both soon regret. So, both films shine an intense spotlight on the psychological abominations spawned by Hollywood, but What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? distinguishes itself with its thorough exploration of murderous jealousy and the acute nastiness of its manifestation in siblings. And Davis and Crawford are both spectacular. In fact, they seem to have taken their roles so seriously that they became bitter rivals in real life, to the point that they disrupted the film's press tour and sabotaged one another’s Oscar bids.
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