Note: This post is my entry in today’s blogathon, dedicated to tough-guy specialist/”psycho-biddy” pioneer Robert Aldrich and organized by the esteemed Dennis Cozzalio of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. (Keep track of the whole thing here.) You’ll also note that some of these folks are way on the brainy side and that I’m probably the only one doing this who doesn’t have images on his site. I hope to start that soon (the pictures I mean; in terms of braininess, I’m stuck with what I’ve already got).

Also, possible spoilers ahead for Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? If you’ve never seen it, and want to anytime in the near future, take heed.

****

I came to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? — the classic horror film in which aging child star Baby Jane (Bette Davis) viciously torments her disabled washed-up movie star sister (Joan Crawford) — believing that I’d somehow managed to completely miss an important movie milestone over decades of film geekery. I’ve seen my share of horror films featuring middle aged and older women over the years, but somehow I’d missed producer-director Robert Aldrich’s original — a real movie snob shanda.

However, just as Baby Jane was concluding, I recovered a memory of accidental cinematic child abuse. I’d realized I had actualy seen its brilliant, wildly disturbing ending as a three or four year old — probably walking into the living room when I wasn’t really supposed to be there.

It might not sound like much, but it’s quite a horrific image for a preschooler to digest: the clown-like, hideously overmade-up Ms. Davis, complete with drawn on eye-lashes and about a three inches of pancake make-up, reliving her vaudeville child-star past by doing a pathetic little dance as her sister lay dying, is at least twice as frightening as Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera.

Give or take a couple of well garnished dead critters, there is no onscreen blood and only brief moments of shocking violence in Baby Jane, but, arriving a couple of years after Psycho, its unhinged, highly ironic, grotesquerie was surely part of the mainstreaming of a harder-edged type of horror.

By an odd coincidence, OC Weekly writer Greg Stacey has just this week described Baby Jane as “Hostel nasty.” I’d say he’s over-reaching pretty outrageously, but then I’m too big a cinema-chicken to ever want to see Hostel, so maybe. Certainly, Baby Jane broke new ground in terms of movie cruelty in 1962 and upped the emotional ante further by juxtaposing it with twisted, but possibly sincere, love. I could be wrong, but I doubt there’s much love of any sort in Hostel.

Regardless, Baby Jane is deeply creeply and involves activities which would not be considered torture by the present U.S. administration, but which might get you sent to jail if you were caught performing them on your pet gerbil. But it never descends into simple sadism. There is art here and we are never far from the eerie pleasures of show biz, appropriate in a film that opens with a Jack-in-the-Box that seems to cry. It’s a Bunuel moment, but a vaudeville style musical number is also coming.

From there, Lukas Heller’s screenplay, an adaptation of Henry Farrell’s novel, tells a story that is both craftily unpredictable while embelishing on themes from elsewhere. Specifically, Baby Jane’s attempted seduction of down on his luck “serious musician” and momma’s boy Victor Buono plays like a semi-farcical downscale version of Sunset Boulevard. In terms of visuals, Aldrich and his DP, Ernest Haller, use long tracking shots in several key scenes with Bette Davis that may be partially cribbed from Billy Wilder’s and John Seitz’s baroque treatment of Gloria Swanson, but without that film’s gauzy-yet-creepy glamour. All Aldrich allows us to see is bone-deep ugliness.

And, as played with fearless and naked artifice by Ms. Davis, ex-child star gone-seriously wrong Baby Jane Hudson is not only Norma Desmond for pedophiles, she’s Blanche DuBois turned inside out and sideways, and a weird foreshadowing of our present, post Jon Benet Ramsey, world. (Okay, maybe I’m going off the deep end with that one. But at least I didn’t mention Dana Plato or Screech.)

Joan Crawford’s Blanche (!) — Jane’s crippled, sympathetic yet believably vain former movie star of a sister is one part Stella Kowalski, one part passive-aggresive Mildred Pierce, and one-part something a little stranger than either. She may be her sister’s victim at the moment, but we know this is only the final battle of a very long war, and that Blanche has been more than capable of holding up her own end of the battle.

Still, it’s California and Southern gothic descendants notwithstanding, Baby Jane is its own film. For 1962, it’s downright outre it in its of use of hand-held camera and odd angles at key moments, which work like exclamation marks after more conventional noirish set-ups. The humor is more bitter than either Williams or Billy Wilder could manage (and they could obviously manage a lot) and, on an aural level, it adds a more strictly Aldrich-esque (Aldrichian?) tone of morbid irony via the score, which the film credits to DeVol (aka Frank DeVol), but which IMDB credits to others. Whoever wrote and arranged it, it’s a twisted masterpiece of musical sarcasm worthy of Fernwood Tonight’s Happy Kyne.

I could go on, but I find myself a little dazzled by Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? It might have been better if I’d seen it ten or fifteen times before starting to write about this severely weird and fascinating film. But I’ll be happy to revisit Baby Jane.

Up to now, I’ve had slightly mixed feelings about the Aldrich cannon — well, the films that I’ve seen. It’s hard to ignore the brilliance of his best work, but I’ve found some, including the film geek classic Kiss Me, Deadly, kind of emotionally dead. But after a first viewing, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? is striking me as the first of his films I’ve seen that’s truly great.

Time for a closer look.