"I wouldn't give 5 cents for those two rancid old ladies…" Jack Warner, studio president of Warner Bros., barked at the director who sat across from his marble desk. But Robert Aldrich persisted, finally convincing the powerhouse executive to scoop up a meager budget so he could direct "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?"
Aldrich's 1962 film adaptation of Henry Farrell's gothic novel would star Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, both in their 50s, as feuding sisters, confined to a sepulchral Los Angeles mansion filled with skeletons. of the past and a harmful resentment that lingers in the environment.
However, the 1950s film Sunset Blvd., starring Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, proved that the story of a delusional older woman scorned could be powerful. And in the shadow of the huge success of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960), Warners knew that a cheap horror film dealing with eccentric lonely women haunted by pernicious secrets could still move audiences.
If the Ryan Murphy-produced TV series Feud, which explored the love-hate relationship between Davis and Crawford, is to be believed, Warner (played by Stanley Tucci) was only interested in the expectation of being able to watch daily previews of scenes. while he drank his morning coffee, attacked with laughter seeing the friction between his protagonists that emanated fire from the projector.
"What Happened to Baby Jane?", released on Halloween 60 years ago, contradicted all of Warner's negative forecasts. Though it didn't immediately resonate with critics (“This isn't a movie, it's a cartoon,” the Chicago Tribune wrote in a dour review), it garnered five Oscar nominations and appealed to diverse audiences deeply captivated by the film. filmic depiction of toxic sisterly rivalry and the desperate struggle of two women trying to break out of their self-imposed cages. Costing $900,000 to produce, it grossed $9 million at the box office (equivalent to $90 million today).
Davis plays Baby Jane Hudson, a former child star who, after being a pampered schoolgirl diva who sold out her smug tap-dancing and yelling for ice cream, ends up a forgotten hermit. Despite the passage of time, Jane still dresses garishly like the girl she was at 9, complete with pigtails and a dusty face that she can't hide the wrinkles from. Davis perfectly balances the innocence of a lost childhood with lawless disdain, her split personality the result of a life that was once glamorous and is now bleak.
Crawford plays her less imposing sister, Blanche, who breaks free of Jane's oppressive shadow to become a successful (and much more stylish) Hollywood star in her own right before a mysterious car accident destroys her promising future. A fearful shadow of her former self, relegated to a wheelchair, Crawford roots the film, unleashing Davis' over-the-top histrionics and providing a constant target for her character's uncontrolled jealousy. Every time Crawford and Davis appear on screen they are explosive, emotional, and impossible to ignore.
Much of the enduring fascination with this film (which in 2021 was preserved by the US Library of Congress for its "historical significance") stems from the drama of the two actresses' infamous off-camera rivalry. Reports at the time suggested that a scene in which Jane viciously attacks Blanche with forceful kicks was not fully acted.
Separately, Davis claimed that Crawford - perhaps bitterly irate after being passed over for the best actress Oscar nomination in exchange for her co-star, in a film she had championed long before Davis was hired - allegedly used his contacts in Hollywood to ensure that Davis lost when the awards were handed out in 1963; that was an accusation Crawford personally denied: "Joan didn't want to get that Oscar!" an elderly Davis exclaimed in an interview with Barbara Walters many years after the dust had calmed.
The Baby Jane clones that followed
But beyond all this gossip and conjecture, the most significant legacy of "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" can be found in the movies that she spawned. In the years following its release, Hollywood began producing a spate of films billed as Hagsploitation (literally: "exploitation of the old hag theme") which, like Baby Jane, catered to veteran actresses including Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead, Shelley Winters, and Debbie Reynolds with deliriously exaggerated villain roles in horror movies that ensured continuity in their careers.
This film subgenre has been given other names including psycho-biddy horror, hag horror, and Grande Dame Guignol, all of which deal equally with the idea of women who slip into dementia with age).
From the name itself, it's a deeply troubling subgenre. "Hagsploitation is a misogynistic and age-discriminating term applied to female movie stars who were reimagined as these grotesque specters," says Dr. Christopher Pullen, Professor of Media and Inclusion at Bournemouth University.
"I recognize that these films were a great opportunity for [older women] to find roles, but in many cases, they were demeaning roles that conveyed problematic stereotypes about the aging female body and the opportunities in life that could be offered to older women.
In many ways, this is hard to argue with. The genre of Hagsploitation tended to develop around the dubious idea that advancing women whose inability to keep a man by their side or properly raise a child caused them to fall into a state of mental disorder, therefore that committing murder or screaming at the sky were among the only things from which they could still derive pleasure.
Take Dead Ringer ("Who Lies in My Grave?"), in which Bette Davis plays twin sisters, Margaret and Edith Phillips. The latter is rich and glamorous, the former aged and poor, working in a seedy bar. Edith makes the decision to murder her twin, assuming her identity and seizing her wealth in a brilliant Machiavellian move. The film disseminates the damaging stereotype that a woman who ages and is unable to achieve security through marriage is virtually worthless, and will therefore harbor an uncontrollable anger that will define her life.
The same year Lady in a Cage ("Ten Hours of Terror" or "A trapped woman") was released, which promotes the same metaphors, with a story centered on the character of Mrs. Hilyard, played by Olivia de Havilland, a sultry, honey-voiced single mother who has spoiled her adult son so much that he has no choice but to abandon her and leave her a letter confirming his suicidal feelings due to her domineering nature.
When de Havilland's character, suffering from a broken hip, finds herself dangerously trapped in an elevator she installed in her home, various criminals decide to take advantage of her and ransack her home, treating her with complete indifference. They mock Mrs. Hilyard's desperate cries of "I am a human being, a thinking and feeling creature!" until she gradually freaks out, something that tended to be a formality in the hagsploitation genre. In this film's perspective of a cold, survival-of-the-fittest society, de Havilland's character is worthless, an obvious metaphor for how the US viewed menopausal or postmenopausal women.
Another pivotal film that falls under the Hagsploitation category is Die!Die!My Darling ("Die, die, my darling!"), a 1965 horror film produced by the Hammer company. Starring in her role is Tallulah Bankhead as Mrs. Trefoile, a bitter old woman who is enraged when her late son's girlfriend dares to visit her. The grumpy Mrs. Trefoile considers red dresses "satanic" and forbids all condiments from the food table. She fully embodies the kind of misogynist idea that once a woman reaches a certain age, her existence should be barren and devoted purely to God, motherhood, and memories of past glories.
"The notion of the old hag at its core points to how, in many cultures at least, older women are loathsome figures," Deborah Jermyn, a film studies researcher at the University of Roehampton, explains of these films.
"In a society where women's capital is almost expressly linked to beauty and fertility - and beauty and fertility is the realm of youth - therefore older women cease to have a demonstrable function, and their presence becomes annoying. , disgusting and heavy. That's why older women stand out so much among those who have historically been accused of being witches; Hagsploitation cinema crystallizes all of these ideas."
