Including: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969)
[Warning: Not-entirely-nice rhetoric is in the intro, merely to paint a background for the more relevant (and humorous) points. I have a feeling Oprah Winfrey is watching me with glowering reproachful eyes that say, “On behalf of all my sisters of all races, colors, and creeds, We are not amused.”]
[May have errors fixed in future. Became more complicated to produce than expected.]
Anybody who ever wondered if Time is not always on our side ought to consider the sad fate that seems to befall more women than we would care to admit. It may seem cynical to say so, but women’s Big Day (or Days) is generally when they’re young, while men seem to have come more into their own in middle age and later.
You can see it, on a level, well underway during high school. The young women look like young women, while the males still look like boys. The virtues of attractive appearance are inculcated insidiously at all steps along the way. Baby girls are made to wear earrings when the girls are so small, you’d be afraid they’d swallow the earrings if they were loose. Girls of about nine now dress and act in ways as if they’re starting to be sexually active.
And of course, as we can observe among young people through, say, their early thirties, young women seem to have the world on a string; the world’s an oyster in their stew; they distribute flirting to passing males like nickels to hoboes, and everyone excuses them; etc., etc. A whole lot more can be said in line with this, from very different viewpoints and camps: how much women (lamentably or not) have so much freedom and rewards of some type when they’re young and most attractive to mates, versus how our society’s focuses on female image, sex, epicurean liberties, etc., end up enslaving women in what they only illusorily think is their freedom to be attractive and its ramifications, or some such thing.
The bigger point I’m making is that, while men seem not apt to be fully “in their prime,” “ripe for being taken fully seriously,” etc., until in their thirties at earliest, and then have more or less smooth sailing until death, for women, if I may adapt a statement by F. Scott Fitzgerald, there is no Second Act. Once they’re had their jobs as twenty-somethings (if they’re so inclined), and have raised kids, and then have started to look inevitably older, heavier…and finally cross The Point of No Return of menopause, so that often, they’re no longer so on top of the world, and never will be again, though they may well be materially provided for.
It isn’t just the looks. It’s the psychology, the attitude; girlfriend, you don’t want me to go “there” with this sort of analysis for too long, but consider the fates pretty young women might end up in: the Sourpuss, the Old Bitch, the Old Grey Mare, the Volcano of Recriminations, the Geyser of Regrets, the Oil Well of Excuses, the Yenta, the Nag, the Stubborn Old Fool, the Smug Brickhead, the Perpetual Complainer, the Perpetual Player of the Victim Card, the Projecting Cripple, the Around-the-Man’s-Neck Albatross All of Whose Instincts Are Wrong, and so on. (Of course, these categories aren’t mutually exclusive.)
And then there’s the category that could be quite sad or funny, depending on the context in which it’s considered: the Crazylady.
Gentle humor about the concept of the “crazylady” is essential here; for more explanation of the assumptions from which I speak, see the “After-dinner” explanation at the end of this entry. Now we go straight to the films.
1. Sunset Boulevard: “grandma” of the crazylady flick
Sunset Boulevard (or Sunset Blvd., as the movie titles have it) is a famous and much-discussed film. It is one of director Billy Wilder’s gems—he also did Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), Some Like It Hot (1959), and numerous others that are considered classics of their genre. This film, like Double Indemnity, falls into the film noir category, though the earlier one was a more obvious and exemplary case of this, while Sunset Boulevard is in more of a class by itself.
Of course, Gloria Swanson portrays Norma Desmond, former silent-film star (like Swanson herself), a character so celebrated in entertainment history following this film’s release that, for one thing, Carol Burnett did one of her variety-show, movie-fan caricatures of her; and today the character should stand for a certain archetype like numerous other characters, real or fictional, in American history. Erich von Stroheim, the German film director, plays Max von Meyerling [sp?], Norma’s butler and dedicated factotum, looking like a sort of mix of the Addams family’s Uncle Fester and some mildly creepy kraut functionary. William Holden plays the putative protagonist Joe Gillis, the unsuccessful screenplay writer who accidentally ends up on Norma’s property and thereby gets snared into her environment, designs (both business-like and emotional), and ultimate tragic influence.
The movie ostensibly lampoons Hollywood—the fates that befall its stars; the pretensions and politics; and so on—amid a story showing how the “current” (1950) talkie-movie world relates to the silent era, rather like one new on-the-make, hip regime replacing an older, differently pretentious regime, with all the sense of times-gone-by (for old stars), comedy of manners (in one generation relating to another), etc., that implies. There is also an earthy sense of people trying to make a go of it in a difficult economy—not least, Joe Gillis with his desperation to scrape up cash while auto repo men are trying to take his car; Norma with her wanting rewrite work on her script on Salome; and so on. One film commentator is Nancy Olson, who played young hopeful Betty Schaefer in the film (and was about 20 when she did it), and, in her seventies now, is probably the only living major performer from the film; on the DVD she says, as she was enlightened to by someone else, everyone is this story is an opportunist. (Changing times may make this assessment look harsher than is justified by the circumstances in the story.)
Not only do Swanson and von Stroheim—whose own star was eclipsed after the 1930s or so—portray “has-been” personages that were not far from themselves, but current or not-long-faded Hollywood royalty of the day have cameos—Cecil B. DeMille and the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper among them. (Silent-era comic actor Buster Keaton, rather sadly, plays one of Norma’s group of movie veterans who come for periodic bridge games, who Joe refers to sardonically as the “wax works.”) More reflective of the Hollywood establishment (at least at Paramount) in 1950, the famed costume designer Edith Head and score writer Franz Waxman contribute to this film—and both would work with Alfred Hitchcock later, if they hadn’t already (certainly Head would work with Hitchcock for many years).
Billy Wilder was a Jewish Austrian émigré [some sources I’ve encountered identify or suggest his country origin as Austrian, but the Wikipedia article on him suggests he was born within the former Austria-Hungarian empire in a place now in Poland]. He had a lot of talent and apparently a rather jaundiced view of humanity, though (I would say) not without a sense of balance. His film noir work follows the template in presenting a hard-boiled, more or less cynical (or at least disillusioned) mentality, and in this film, which is heavy with narration, the worldly-wise viewpoint is positively poetic with machine-gun one-liners that not only are summary and retrospective, but reflect a kind of rueful mentality we can best appreciate when the movie comes to its end. For instance, when the opening shot of Gillis shows him floating appallingly in a pool, the narrator drily says, “The poor dope—he always wanted a pool.” What we may not realize immediately is that the narrator is actually the man shown dead in the pool, which we find out later.
A ninth-rate creative writing teacher will tell you you can’t have a story narrated by someone who is already dead, but in this case it seems apropos, if a bit jarring. The reason is that the story Joe Gillis finds himself snared in, and ends up telling (“from beyond the grave”), is a sort of revelation that can only be possible from the victim of something the revelation recounts. In other words, to use a political metaphor, the fuller story of Stalin’s tyrannical rule could only start (or very usefully come) from one or more members of his Politburo (or Presidium—whatever it was called at the time) who was/were “present at the creation” of some of the regime’s horrors. But this could only occur after Stalin was dead in 1953, starting with the so-called “Secret Speech” by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956. When Khrushchev was asked why hadn’t he spilled some of these beans earlier, he said, in effect, with the way Stalin was, do you think I could have, and lived?
Well, something of the same thing may be going on with Sunset. Norma Desmond was such a tragic character, and such a licentious one, snaring and ultimately killing the hapless Joe Gillis, that the horrible story of why he died could only be told by him, somewhat in Khrushchev’s Secret Speech style, after a death: though it would turn out to be his death, not Norma’s. (See end note about the issue of the narration by a dead man.)
What was there to reveal by a dead man? This is an ostensibly satirical story of a fifty-ish woman (that was older then than now) whose best career days are behind her; indeed, the industry itself has passed her by—who nevertheless lives in a dream world about what she is now, and what she can do in the future to resurrect her star status. Norma at first seems downright preposterous with her living in the past, her baroque mannerisms, her caricaturish hauteur, and her living arrangement (she was in a mansion regarding which Joe says, and I paraphrase, “the whole place [was] struck by a kind of creeping paralysis”).
Despite how Sunset Boulevard has been looked at for its meaning over the 60+ years since its release—and I’m sure views will change in future years—today it might have its biggest appeal in being about a kind of personality, a feminine one in particular.
I think what gives Sunset its greatest staying power is it is about the capacity of women to nurture their entire measure of themselves in terms of self-image, not where they stand with respect to current achievements that are measured outside their domestic or otherwise highly limited environment (even if, or especially when, this environment is in a certain segment of the work world).
As Joe Gillis deals further with Norma—first agreeing cannily to work on her script partly to serve his own financial needs—he finds that her living in a sort of fantasy world is something he can, practically, work with and around, and yet can only go so far to “test”: “You don’t yell at a sleepwalker—he may fall and break his neck.” (Later, when he is invited to use a bedroom in the mansion proper rather than the garage apartment, he is duly told by Max that that had been her husband’s bedroom—and she’d been married three times, the sort of fact that would get today’s version of Joe Gillis racing for the door.)
I need not analyze the many features of this film—it can best be measured for its merits and appeals by seeing it, and you should be ready for a dense experience—not only are visual details important (though not piled on manically), but the narration and the dialogue, despite occasional dated references and idioms, come on fast, and the humor usually remains effective today. Wilder was not the kind of director who used a lot of camera movement and tricks to tell his story—this story is such as could easily be presented on a stage. He was quite like a writer who knew how to fashion a dense script within Hollywood
That this is an instance of film noir is shown when Gillis, who got away from his months-long residence at Norma’s mansion for a break on New Year’s Eve, finds himself impelled to rush back to Norma’s home after finding from Max on the phone that Norma tried to commit suicide. Now we have the jaded male snared by the femme fatale—to this extent, the film follows noir conventions.
Of course, when things are more normal for her, Norma seems a relatively harmless sort living in a fantasy world. But in fact, given a change in key circumstances, she can reach near-psychotic proportions, yet as is often the case with such women, she can appeal enough with a certain vulnerable, needy, and (occasionally) even pathetic side, that she gets some hapless shlub helping her out, with the eventual result that he will deeply regret getting involved with her.
This is not a story merely of 1950; we see this even today. Despite the women’s liberation movement, despite Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and others of that school of thought, and despite the ways women are more of a significant part of the U.S. work world than 45 or more years ago, the problem still goes on of some individual women being idiosyncratically declined enough emotionally in older age to be more than anything else about their fantasies, recriminations, and failure to equal the demands of the more modern world. The real trick for the artist is what to say about it and how. Can such women be helped? Are they only laughingstocks? In what way can we engage in generous humor about them, if/when that is appropriate?
As old-fashioned as some of today’s younger women may find this film—and perhaps they identify in some sense with the complex Norma Desmond more than might have been expected in 1950—what saves it from being mainly tasteless or an unsympathetic pillorying of a certain personality type is how Gloria Swanson both makes the character rather ludicrous and allows the character to exhibit a little of her own sense of humor: showing that women themselves can laugh a bit at what kind a Norma Desmond has allowed herself to become. Even the bird-talon-like right hand that oddly poses “on its own” as she smokes a cigarette, or later clutches at Joe Gillis shortly after her suicide attempt, is a way to depict a character that both seems like a satire (from a male’s point of view) of a certain kind of preposterous woman and yet a way that women can admit they have a generous sense of humor about this kind of occasional, not-universal development in their gender, too.
2. First among equals in semi-camp: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
This is an odd movie, for several reasons, esthetic and historical. It was the first, and perhaps the best, of the string of “two grand-dame actresses put at odds with each other in a crazylady film” that came out over about a decade, mainly the 1960s. This one was directed and produced by Robert Aldrich, who produced a later film in the unofficial series, What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (I’ve seen two forms of whatever for this film, as two words and as one; one is correct today, but with two is how the film was first marketed). Aunt Alice was in color and “hipper,” and which in its relatively rattletrap way shows the what-the-hell fun of these films.
Baby Jane, the “trailblazer” of its genre, also featured Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, which may appeal to those who are fans of those actresses. And while I am not big fans of them—largely because I am not as well versed in (and in love with) older (pre-1955) movies as others may be—this movie still may appeal to younger viewers for the sense of humor about themselves that these actresses bring (at least, that Davis brings), which is essential to what makes this movie work as in a peculiarly humorous genre and keeps it from being quirky camp. In fact, Bette Davis received her 10th Oscar nomination for her role here; and the movie did win an Oscar for costume design, which you can appreciate in its photographic and production scheme that features the more baroque, kooky-world possibilities of black-and-white texturing.
Based on a novel, the movie looks at the relationship of two sisters, with backstory delivered ploddingly up front, one of whom was a child vaudeville star—Baby Jane Hudson—who in 1917, as the piece de resistance of her stage act, sang the cloying schlock “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy,” and whose hucksterish father had dolls made of her to sell (or give away?) after performances. She is a demanding brat, too, and her solemn-faced sister watches with reserve and some jealousy, and accepts her mother’s admonition to treat her sister and father in the future with more kindness than she is treated now.
This sister, Blanche, apparently makes good on this “agreement,” and by 1935 becomes a bigger talking-film star than does Baby Jane, carrying the breadwinning and fame load for them, until (that decade) Baby Jane—it seems—deliberately runs her car into Blanche in a driveway and leaves Blanche, from then on, crippled in a wheelchair.
In the present day (1962), Blanche is portrayed by Crawford, effusing star-like cheer and poise that belie the humble condition of her wheelchair-bound state, while Baby Jane is portrayed by Davis, looking quite the haggard frump, lit uncomplimentarily (and made up somewhat ghoulishly) to emphasize dissipated age. The slouching old Baby Jane shuffles rather lethargically but with a chore-bound air around their large house, attending to her sister (not always sincerely thoroughgoing in her daily chores). She speaks with a flat, sour, and/or peremptory voice to people she doesn’t care to make a good impression on, and only comes gleefully alive (with a naughty smile) when making fun of or imitating her sister.
Oh, and Baby Jane is a not-at-all-secret alcoholic, about which the sober-faced maid Elvira (played by Maidie Norman, an actress who I think also appeared in The Manchurian Candidate) is under no illusions. Before long, sister Blanche comes in an adult enough fashion to the realization that Baby Jane is getting worse and should be put away in a special home, and their current house sold (though this latter possibility is not just based on the consideration about Jane’s state—there is also Blanche’s claim that money is running short).
All this comprises the premise for Davis Davis
New to movies at the time, actor Victor Buono appears as Edwin Flagg in the latter half of the film; Edwin is a potential partner with whom Baby Jane preposterously wants to resurrect her career. He is an aspiring musician, who lives with his earthy, doting British-sounding mother, and he would stoop to just about any paying work, though he sees through Baby Jane’s hopelessness quickly enough.
As you can see, this is a film that either you would love for its mischievous, guilty-pleasure laughs, or find droll but a little silly. It is a bit slow-paced, and I have to say that, in a past year, I got more laughs out of it the first time I saw it, and found it fell flat with the second viewing shortly after, which normally is not a good sign for how deep the humor or humanity of a film is. This plus the fact that it seems the film has had a hard time being marketed well—its DVD case and I think commentators over the years have suggested it is a sort of horror flick, which seems not quite the right category—means, I think, that, in its genre style and assumptions, it lies somewhere between (1) the more genteelly dry black humor of Arsenic and Old Lace, The Trouble with Harry, and such, and (2) the more anti-Establishment, let’s-make-fun-of-anything type of humor that fell into place starting, arguably, in the later 1960s. And it ends up being in an odd class by itself. It seems to occupy a position between a comedy that needs a few more riotous laughs, and a more serious drama that can potentially be quite poignant at times, but really isn’t interested in being that.
It’s worth one look, but you might not want to see it more than that.
Incidentally, the DVD (from about the early 2000s) has the option of during-the-film commentary by two men that show how this film is really (for better or worse) catalogued in a sort of (not fully explicit) “meta/ironic/camp” way, by Warner Brothers as well as by others: the two men include the actor John Epperson, who has appeared onstage as the drag queen Lypsinka; and the other man, whose name I forget, sounds as if he moves (career-wise) in GLBT circles also. They appear to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the movies and lives of Davis and Crawford, making them eminently qualified from a facts/trivia standpoint; and they add such viewpoints associated with the sensibility that enshrines “gay icons” (Ethel Merman, Cher, Liza Minnelli) as enthusiasm for Crawford’s facial features in a sort of statically appreciating way. (I don’t fully understand, or endorse, the culture that enshrines “gay icons,” but I report some of it here as fairly as I can, for what it’s worth, which may be a lot.) They seem like a couple of chatty, precisely opinionated but agreeable enough connoisseurs, adding to the larky fun of seeing the film a second time, if that’s your bag; the New York City flavor of two “poofy” commentators may make you feel you’ll have to pay too much for your food if a check comes.
4. A later, more modern entry: What Ever [sic] Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969)
This was produced by Robert Aldrich but not directed by him. It bears an obvious “series”-like relationship to Baby Jane, but is different in a few ways—including not being as good or original overall, but also being more modern (including being in color, and with not-stagy duds and home for the heroines) and more aware of itself as a sort of campy lark.
I had never heard of it before until it was shown, apparently for the first time ever, on Turner Classic Movies in about January of this year. Geraldine Page, renowned for stage work, is the lead actor (and crazylady), as a widow who hires successive housekeepers with appreciable estates of their own, whom she then kills off after having arranged to get their money. Trees growing in the front yard mark the graves (though not yet known by others). She starts to meet her match when a new housekeeper comes who is actually investigating whatever happened to the earlier ones: this one played by Ruth Gordon (in oddly colored wig or natural hair), this role occurs historically between the more notable ones in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Harold and Maude (1971).
The movie hits all the campy buttons: Page’s go-for-broke crazylady is skilled at using a shovel to off her prey; among the lesser characters is an earnestly concerned young couple including a blonde cutie with a fashionable bob-type haircut; the editing sometimes seems clumsy, unwittingly in Quentin Tarantino style; and even a snarling dog has a bit part, adding to the “Not that too!” humor. The mix is topped off by soundtrack music with a definite late-’60s vibe, a little reminiscent of a time of patchouli and joss sticks, maybe making us ask about the score producers, “What were they smoking?” A film not loaded with a lot of socially redeeming features, but good for a few hoots on one Saturday night that you don’t care about wasting with fluff.
4. “After-dinner” explanation of some assumptions
a. Attitude toward women
A lot of my education about women, though certainly not all, has come from working in the media realm. I’ve long thought that 80 percent of men would not want to work in the media realm, because of how women—who often make up more than half the staffs at such companies—can be there (for better and worse). I’ve long felt I could get along well with the typical excesses there, since (in part) I’d learned to live with unusual female behaviors in my home life. But after all these years, and with the inevitable increase in conservative views that comes with age (and cumulative kicks in the ass over the long term), I reach a few conclusions.
First, in the career realm, women are more likely than men to measure their worth along the lines of self-image—either in what they think they are now, or in what they want to be. Men, contrarily, more often esteem themselves in terms of measurable units of what they’ve achieved in work: items of products, years of a certain kind of experience, etc. Of course, there are excessive cases among in both sexes: the worst kind of measurable-results male can be a boneheaded ox who seems to count the dopey bricks he’s laid; and at worst, a female can be to all appearances completely delusional about the basis for her status as some kind of professional.
Also, as a personal matter (I will try to summarize a complex set of experiences and principles, and inevitably oversimplify a bit), I usually tend to want to be supportive (at some point in a process of dealings) of younger women whenever conflict in the workplace arises, where our interests are in some kind of conflict, or where the interests of both of us are at risk of being harmed, often due to a problem arising from outside us. To this extent, I am not a “male chauvinist.” I could say more that is significant and encouraging on the topic of younger female coworkers, but leave that for now.
The situation with older women (especially 10 or more years older) is a little darker. It’s hard to generalize here, and maybe I should put it this way: I would not get into a beastly conflict with an older woman in a career connection unless there was a solidly good reason from my perspective to do so. And those who feel that I was inscrutable or excessive in how I waged a conflict with an older woman probably need to know all the relevant facts, and if they did, they’d see my justification more. That is, they would see more of the justification as coming from someone else’s perspective, if they wouldn’t fully agree with it themselves.
I tend to be less inclined to accede to the one-sidedness or excessive reach of an older woman than I would a younger; and as a more empirical matter, older women who trample on my work or other career rights tend to thereby exhibit the lesser qualities of what they usually are, older baby boomers: which is to say, the qualities of the older baby boomers (born within 1945-54) that they have the capacity for, being self-centered, grossly self-promoting, and seemingly willfully blind to the interests of people with whom their interests intersect, especially those of younger people. What I have found several instances of, which I feel is unambiguously identifiable and to be condemned, is a baby boomer woman trampling quite heedlessly over the rights of considerably younger women in the particular work milieu they share.
I hope all this explains that when I hold Norma Desmond up as a sort of paradigm of dramatic representation of a self-deluding media professional, this does not reflect, nor should it be taken to reflect, that I am a male chauvinist ogre when it comes to media females, but that I hold out this Desmond paradigm amid a complex understanding of, and humor toward, female media professionals.
b. Humor
The other main point is that of humor. Humor is a sort of universal skeleton key for opening up possibilities of understanding, or ameliorating a sense of difference or alienation, between different people. Humor about a certain type of person shouldn’t be taken as mere finger-pointing, but also points a finger of humor at the joke-maker: thus it can be more of a handshake. Humor asks us all to wake up and ask what we really are thinking about when we set up a Norma Desmond to laugh about, or put up any comical depiction for our entertainment.
When we deal with a psychologically disturbed person, one way to try to get him or her to steer back to reality and sanity is by showing some self-understanding—as they say, if you can see you’re going a bit mad, you’re that much further from actually doing so. And a good way to head toward self-understanding is by means of a joke, about oneself or something else. Regarding the more troubled people I’ve dealt with, if I haven’t actually tried to use humor as a way to “spiritually lighten” the air between us, I regret I didn’t do this more. And when someone is so disturbed, while intruding on others’ rights, that even trying to insert humor into the situation doesn’t work, then, as appropriate, either you blame the other person mostly or entirely for the problems between you and her, or you use some other, less-generous way to try to “defuse” the situation—for instance, scorn, which is harsher than simple “let’s be reasonable” humor.
End note
