What Ever Happened to Baby Jane ? (1962)

After she run down her sister, your precious Jane Hudson ran off and left her there to die like some poor animal. She ran off and disappeared for three whole days! In 1917, Baby Jane Hudson (Julie Allred) is a spoiled child performer appearing in vaudeville across the country with her father Ray (Dave Willock) who acts as her manager and accompanies her on stage on the piano. Her success is such that a line of porcelain dolls is made in her image. Meanwhile, her shy older sister Blanche (Gina Gillespie) lives in her shadow and is treated with contempt by the haughty Jane. As the sisters pass adolescence, their situations undergo a reversal; Jane’s style of performing falls out of fashion, and her career declines as she turns to drink while Blanche becomes a successful Hollywood actress. Blanche attempts to maintain a semblance of a career for Jane, going as far as to prevail on producers to guarantee acting roles for her. One evening in 1935, Blanche’s career is cut short when she is paralysed from the waist down in a mysterious car accident that is unofficially blamed on Jane, who is found three days later in a drunken stupor. By 1962, Blanche (Joan Crawford) and Jane (Bette Davis) are living together in a mansion purchased with Blanche’s movie earnings. Blanche’s mobility is limited due to her reliance on a wheelchair and the lack of an elevator to her upstairs bedroom. Jane, psychotic and resentful of Blanche’s success, regularly mistreats Blanche and prepares to revive her old act with hired pianist Edwin Flagg (Victor Buono). When Blanche informs Jane she intends to sell the house, Jane rightly suspects Blanche will commit her to a mental hospital once the house is sold. She removes the telephone from Blanche’s bedroom so she’s cut off from the outside world. When Jane goes out one morning Blanche desperately drags herself down the stairs and calls her doctor for help. Jane returns to find Blanche on the phone and beats her unconscious before mimicking Blanche’s voice to dismiss the doctor. After tying Blanche to her bed and locking her in her room, Jane abruptly fires their housekeeper, Elvira (Maidie Norman) when she comes to work. While Jane is away, the suspicious Elvira sneaks into the house and attempts to get into Blanche’s room. When there’s no response she tries to break open the door with a hammer. Jane returns home and reluctantly gives Elvira the key. As soon as Elvira enters Blanche’s room, Jane takes the hammer and kills Elvira. …  After all those years, I’m still in this chair. Doesn’t that give you some kind of responsibility? Jane, I’m just trying to explain to you how things really are. You wouldn’t be able to do these awful things to me if I weren’t still in this chair. Or, What happens to ageing Hollywood actresses. This adaptation of the novel by Henry Farrell (by Lukas Heller, a regular Robert Aldrich collaborator) was the first of a cycle of so-called hag movies. Hardly director Aldrich’s intention, he nonetheless fuelled it himself by doing a sort-of sequel, Hush … Hush Sweet Charlotte two years later with Bette Davis and the original star proposed here, Olivia de Havilland.  Davis and Crawford’s offscreen rivalry made their casting as desperate old ladies with one living off faded childhood stardom, the other failed actress condemned to a wheelchair, a riff on rumours feeding into Hollywood legends plundered here with gusto. It’s a psychological horror but it’s also the blackest of comedies. Time‘s critic said it was the year’s scariest, funniest and most sophisticated thriller and Pauline Kael called it a confused mixture of low camp and Grand Guignol. This is a marvellous comment on what the theorists might call the monstrous feminine, the terrible toll that Hollywood takes on actresses, and the sheer deadening effect of living in a dayglo Los Angeles suburbia. Who knew what went on behind the walls of all those Spanish houses before this came along? The twist is brilliant. Perfect California Gothic. The tale of sibling rivalry provides a perfectly maggoty coating over the longtime rivalry of two of the industry’s greatest performers whose offscreen loathing created another layer of a meaning in a business which had fleeting respect for women once they were past their prime and stardom had passed. The story of the film’s production and Crawford’s campaign against Davis’s Academy Award nomination for Best Actress is perfectly memorialised in the TV series Feud:  Bette and Joan which is adapted from the vastly pleasurable book by Shaun Considine. Hollywood watchers will enjoy the excerpts from Davis’s Thirties movies Parachute Jumper and Ex-Lady as well as Crawford’s Sadie McKee. Davis’s daughter B.D. Merrill plays Liza Bates, the girl next door (a great plot pivot in Feud). Beautifully shot in shimmering monochrome by Ernest Haller and scored by Frank De Vol, this section of L.A. looks wonderful, in a transitional movie era which we had glimpsed in a different way courtesy of Sunset Blvd. A magnificent embodiment of the screen goddess of vengeance, twice over, this is sublime. Who the hell was Baby Jane Hudson?

The Beast in the Cellar (1970)

Aka Young Man, I Think You’re Dying. Lancashire, England. Soldiers stationed at a rural army base are being mauled to death in the surrounding woodland. The authorities suspect a wild cat but Joyce Ballantyne (Flora Robson) and her sister Ellie (Beryl Reid), who live in a nearby house, fear that the soldiers are actually being murdered by their brother Steven (Dafydd Havard), who has been locked in their cellar for nearly thirty years. Joyce and Ellie find out that Steven has dug a tunnel out of the cellar, allowing him to come and go as he pleases. They also find the body of one of the soldiers. As they fill in the tunnel, Joyce suffers a fall, forcing Ellie to complete the task alone. Ellie then buries Steven’s victim near the house. With Joyce bedridden, Ellie realises that she can’t cope on her own and calls in the army and police. She tells them that Steven is her and Joyce’s younger brother, born after their soldier father’s return from World War One. Their father had been left suffering from shell shock and was violent towards Steven. After their parents died, Joyce, not wanting Steven to end up like his father, resolved to prevent him from being called up at the start of World War Two. She and Ellie drugged Steven and placed him in the cellar, thereafter lacing his water supply with sleeping pills to keep him under control. After being physically abused by his soldier father, then incarcerated for three decades by his sisters, Steven has developed a hatred of uniformed army men and regressed to the level of a savage … A leopard? In Lancashire? There was a cycle of hag horror films which commenced in the early 60s with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and that of course remains a classic dayglo Los Angeles Gothic. There were some variations on the theme, including this late entry in the English cinema, produced by the venerable distributor and horror exploitation maestro Tony Tenser (who also has Polanski’s Cul De Sac on his CV as well as Witchfinder General).  Starring Reid and Robson, grandes dames with daddy issues who live together in a country cottage, a spate of murders occurs in the locale and eventually the culprit is caught … in their cellar. Figuring out which is nuttier is most of the plot. It’s well shot but a bit silly however the gravitas has to do with the beast’s origins in deadly conflict and consequent confusion. A song co-written by Barry (Delilah) Mason doesn’t hurt plus appearances by lovely Tessa Wyatt as Nurse Joanna Sutherland and Irish actor TP McKenna as Superintendent Paddick add some theatrical chops and enliven an overly talky script. They don’t make them like this any more – more’s the pity. Written and directed by James Kelley. He has escaped from the cellar!