WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962)

PHENOMENALITY: *naturalistic*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *irony*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*


Though I can at times appreciate the acid wit of producer-director Robert Aldrich, many of his works strike me as pointless exercises in grotesquerie, as if he were desperately trying to convince critics that he was a master of Nabokovian cultural observation.

I hadn't re-watched BABY JANE in over thirty years. I remember thinking that it did satisfy me in terms of delivering shocks and lurid emotions, and I'm certainly not against either of these in principle. During my recent re-viewing, though, I found BABY JANE tedious going-- and not simply because it was a horror-thriller in the naturalistic mode.

For the most part, it's a two-character story. Blanche (Joan Crawford) and Baby Jane (Bette Davis) are sisters brought up in the vaudeville tradition, though in their earliest days Baby Jane was their father's favorite, in that she had a Shirley Temple-like appeal for audiences. The film opens by showing the child-actress doing a routine that some would call "kitschy," and Aldrich, presumably following the book, uses this incident not only to detail the early conflicts between the sisters, but to make fun of the unsubtle commercializing of Baby Jane's image by her father.

Later, as adults, the sisters' fortunes are reversed: Blanche becomes a popular actress, while the studio considers Baby Jane used goods. A mysterious accident, possibly caused by Baby Jane's resentments of her sister, leaves Blanche crippled. The two sisters live for years in the family house, Blanche supporting Jane with her wealth as Jane supports Blanche as a caregiver, but Jane still nurses deep resentments and drinks to excess. When Blanche makes the decision to sell the house and find medical treatment for Jane, Jane reacts by keeping Blanche prisoner in the house and terrorizing her.

Though BABY JANE reputedly sparked the so-called "horror hag" subgenre, the 1962 film isn't nearly as interesting as Aldrich's follow-up, HUSH HUSH SWEET CHARLOTTE. (In my review I observed that CHARLOTTE felt like "a dumbed-down imitation of Tennessee Williams," but hey, that still plays better than a half-assed version of Nabokov. Crawford is fine, but Davis's hammy performance is tiresome. Victor Buono got his only Oscar nomination for a supporting role as a pianist who answers Baby Jane's deluded advertisement for an accompanist, and though he's good too, I can't help feeling that when his character expresses lordly contempt for the low-class kitsch of child actors, he's expressing the very sentiments-- whether from the original book or solely from the screenplay-- that made the project attractive to Aldrich.