dir. Robert Aldrich
writ. Lukas Heller (screenplay), Henry Farrell (novel)
feat. Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Victor Buono, Wesley Addy, Marjorie Bennett, Maidie Norman
It's refreshing to see Hollywood superstars of the classic era so willing to play characters as grotesque and weak as Davis and Crawford do in Baby Jane. Both are cast directly against type as though specifically selected to run their old characters through the ringer. And the tale itself, one of gothic decay, is played against its setting of Los Angeles, land of sunshine and success. Unfortunately, despite a number of wonderfully unsettling scenes where Davis sinks to discomfiting depths, the story seems to have missed a meeting or two to flesh out the middle.
Instead, we're stuck with a redundant (and implausible) series of "race against the clock" scenes as Jane (Davis) twaddles around LA on errands and Blanche (Crawford) desperately tries to think of ways to escape or alert authorities, only worsened by Blanche's poor choices. The woman is being starved and tortured and she calls the local shrink! Of course, one grants concessions in a stylized piece but the missed opportunities keep piling up, and when Blanche neglects to call for help when Edwin (Buono) is milling about downstairs, it's difficult to remain sympathetic to her plight.
The richest scenes and characterization are dealt solely to Jane, making Crawford's presence and numerous solo scenes merely perfunctory, thus committing the greatest cinematic sin with frequency, that of boring the audience. And when a late revelation is finally coughed up, it seems more a joke than a twist, laughably misguided, throwing the whole story in front of the bus by suggesting that a short conversation between the two women conducted anytime in the past 30 years might have prevented all the horror. By then, it's too late to play the Twilight Zone theme music and pull off the shift in meaning, the bloated tale already sunk by its own inertia.
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