With the exceptions of director Robert Aldrich, Crawford and Davis, nobody thought 'Baby Jane' was a good idea. Warner Brothers potentate Jack Warner viewed the project with the same revulsion he felt about the studio's 1954 foray into atomic horror, "Them!" (The box office proved him wrong both times.....the grotesque spectacle of Davis as a pop-eyed gargoyle tormenting her invalid sister played by Crawford became as much of surprise hit for the studio as "Them!" and its rampaging giant ants. )
Aldrich came to 'Baby Jane' with an already extensive filmography loaded with lurid melodramas, and explosively violent war movies and westerns, almost all of them graced with larger than life performances by Hollywood's top stars. 'Baby Jane' played perfectly to his strengths.....an emotionally exaggerated premise that allowed iconic actors to go at each other with a duel-to-the-death fervor of two gladiators. What better guy to direct this movie than the creative force behind "Kiss Me Deadly" with private eye Mike Hammer and a portable jack-in-the-box nuclear weapon.
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'Baby Jane' turned out as an almost one-woman show for Davis .Caked in industrial strength makeup, she flounces around a crumbling mansion in a haze of alcohol and madness, terrorizing Crawford who's confined to wheelchair-bound simpering and whimpering.
To Jack Warner's everlasting surprise, this theatrically nutty brew of vintage actresses, pathetic madness and murder,all of it capped off with an ironic twist, packed in the crowds. No one had seen anything like it.......so Aldrich and the author of the 'Baby Jane' novel Henry Farrell wasted no time in concocting a duplicate movie.....a horrific story that would have Davis and Crawford at each other's throats yet again, this time in a Southern-Fried Gothic with a higher body count and even some random body parts strewn about.
Heads would roll.....literally.
They did indeed, but most of the juicy melodrama in "Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte" occurred off screen. After four days, Crawford, deciding life was too short to wage another World War with Davis, feigned illness and left the production. Aldrich groveled and begged Olivia de Havilland, the last remaining Golden Age actress willing to talk to him, to step in for Crawford. She did.....and we often wonder if Crawford ever regretted her decision to pull out, since the "Charlotte" script offered a far more even match between the two leads than 'Baby Jane'.
Although once again Davis gets to shriek like an air raid siren and bulge her Bette Davis eyes to the bursting point, de Havilland's character takes charge with a vengeance in the film's third act, at one point furiously bitch-slapping Bette into submission. ( Another extra plus: a young Bruce Dern in the exact same function he served in the previous year's Hitchcock film "Marnie".....a cameo flashback on which the entire plot hinges...)
Alas, 'Charlotte' didn't quite match the runaway success of 'Baby Jane', even with its extra helpings of histrionics and all-out horror. It did achieve one major (some would say dubious) accomplishment..... opening the gates wide for the weirdest sub-genre of 1960's movies - the aging actress horror film,....a veritable geriatric Grand Guignol flooded theaters. Stars like Davis, Crawford, de Havilland, Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead, Lana Turner and others seized the opportunity to gobble up the scenery amid flowing blood and fresh corpses. Robert Aldrich, however, moved away from such movies.....he had no desire to become the AARP Hitchcock.
If you're planning to watch Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange in their Davis/Crawford celebrity death-match, BQ recommends a bloody good time visiting (or re-visiting) this gruesome twosome. 4 stars (****) to both 'Baby Jane' and her even crazier cousin 'Charlotte'.
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