Under the occasional series head: Third Acts in American Life
Subsections below:
Two tough-minded
women define the film—by their illustrious real-life careers, as much as by the
story
Davis’ heyday was
past by 1962, but she still had “goods to deliver” in older age, which has
helped define her at least as much as early success
The film has ended up
defined by, or curated by, post-Vietnam esthetic sensibilities
A trove of DVD extras
[Edits 6/2/16.]
I reviewed this film in spring 2012, and picked it up recently for mere entertainment while I had
other film ideas I was grappling with and more serious about. But as I watched
this film, and the copious extras on its 2012 DVD (two disks), I was struck by
how it was still worth talking about.
Amid this, I had a sense of a bit of “cognitive dissonance”
in terms of (1) trying (with Brooklyn,
1+ weeks ago) to deal well with the sensitive, appreciative treatment of “young
hopefuls” and ethnic flavoring, while (2) also mulling over (with Baby Jane) the combination of camp,
horror, black comedy, and facetiousness about women in the 1962 film.
Two tough-minded
women define the film—by their illustrious real-life careers, as much as by the
story
This film is probably best known today as the one where two
old Grand Dames of classic American cinema, Bette Davis (1908-89) and Joan Crawford (~1904-77), play characters (sisters) in a
pitched battle in a domestic situation, echoing (supposedly) something of their
real-life relationship. While the 2012 DVD packaging may seem to go along with
this, and also presents stills of the actresses’ faces (in black-and-white) as
if you’re in for a campy good time, this all oversimplifies the film quite a
bit.
(Davis won Oscars for best actress for film year 1935, for Dangerous, and for film year 1938, for Jezebel. Altogether over her career, Davis received at least
10 Oscar nominations for best actress [including for Baby Jane]. Davis also was the first female recipient of the
lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute, in 1977. Crawford
won an Oscar for best actress—her only one—for Mildred Pierce [1945].)
I think Baby Jane
was made to capitalize on the excitement (and box-office windfall) that emanated
from Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), showing
that a horror film need no longer be defined by rubber-suit monsters, or campy
counts in capes and suits, or extensively bloody doings, but instead by human
drama, amid average middle-class doings, especially if the drama involves
first-degree relatives and some “underlying psychological baggage” originating all
the way back in early youth. (Optional during-the-film commentary also makes
references to Sunset Boulevard
[1950], which is an important cultural reference point for this film, too.)
In comparing Psycho
and Baby Jane, both regarding
cultural hindsight and how the two films stand on their own artistic merits, I
think Baby Jane is rather second-rate
as a “psychodrama”; in fact, I think it doesn’t care to be terribly smart about
psychological theorizing, though it is certainly entertaining. Meanwhile, I
think Psycho is clearly an ingenious
cultural milestone, in terms of being a sort of almost archetypal “gestalt” of
a piece of gothic fiction (even though it, too, is rather deficient regarding
educating about psychological issues).
That is, their psychological aspects are key to the horror,
while being written as more loyal to the horror aims than to educating the
audience about psychology, though—to me, as an award-winning psychology major
in college who later had articles published on psychological topics—this is
fine, as showing our culture’s liberality and sense of humor.
One obvious way that Psycho
is superior is that it came first, and defined its horror type first (and had
the benefit of Hitchcock having worked expertly in suspense, and in line with
pet themes, for many years), so it has the merits of originality, while Baby Jane (directed and partly produced
by Robert Aldrich, who would have a producing hand in one or more later
“hag-horror” films) is clearly trying to copy Psycho’s horror style and ideas to some extent. Meanwhile, Baby Jane is well-made on a craftwork
level (it imitates Psycho in some
ways, but in complimentary and not slavishly derivative ways, such as in the
black-and-white spookiness of a cluttered, old-time house), and generally
embroiders together some good film tropes and techniques. (Frank DeVol did the
score for it, which sometimes imitates Bernard Herrmann, thus being a bit
derivative, while still often being strong in its own right. Lukas Heller did
the screenplay from Henry Farrell’s novel.) (End note 1)
One could add that while Psycho,
reflecting Hitch, is mischievously humorous, indirect, and myth-following about
“an impossible old woman,” while Baby
Jane spells out, even revels in, the “ugly face” of the “impossible old
woman” in a way that practically defines its main cultural value (and
notoriety), for better or worse, over the decades since it was released.
You’ve heard the expression “Talent does because it can, but
genius does because it must”? Well, taking off from this point tangentially, Psycho is a work of genius, while Baby Jane is a work of talent—though the
Davis component could be considered a matter of genius.
##
In fact, what I think is really worth enjoying in Baby Jane is Bette Davis’ performance,
not just in how the film uses her—as it was clearly designed, the film
oscillates between camp/black comedy and horror, with some basic everyday-life drama
stuck “in between” as story-facilitating transitions. But Bette Davis (born
Ruth Elizabeth Davis) is clearly the better actress between herself and
Crawford (born Lucille LeSueur, according to Wikipedia).
Davis’ Wikipedia article, compared to Crawford’s, shows her
to be the more long-term-disciplined and distinguished actress, as a scan of
its introductory paragraphs will show. (It could also be well argued, as I will
look at in Part 2, how Davis was the more emotionally deep/rich actress, even
if she has been described as a “character” actress, while Crawford was more
emotionally shallow as an artist, even if she still has appeal today.)
Though I am not very familiar with a lot of films from the
“Golden Age” of the 1930s and 1940s, when both Davis and Crawford first
flourished, Davis through her decades of activity sticks out as a
personality/actress, as a look at the profile of her on the 2012 DVD set will
show (I will list and annotate the DVD extras at the end of this entry). The
DVDs contain profiles of both actresses independently, but Crawford’s is
basically an interview, in black-and-white, by a British interviewer, Philip
Jenkinson (of the BBC), done I would estimate between 1967 and 1970. In this, Crawford
seems a bit stiff and mannered (stultified) in her later middle-age, like an
“old actress” (though a second look allows her to appear more sympathetic); and
she is even so square as to opine that there should be a return of old-time
romantic films (people are so angry today, she laments with a sort of contented
person’s tone), and young men should cut their hair and young women should grow
theirs, to be more promising members of society (or films—she is breezily
generalizing).
Still, she could be as sure of certain facts or views as,
arguably, Davis was, with Crawford not hesitant to correct (or rebuff) the
interviewer on some points—such as his offhand remark about the studio system
having manufactured stars: Crawford says, “You manufacture toys, you don’t
manufacture stars.” As she spells out a little later, actors come alive (reveal
their talent) in the creative process in producing a film (the point is more
exactly: when Jenkinson remarks how films have become more about multifarious
interests and making a lot of money, Crawford echoes the money detail, but also
notes how one stake of films is that “there is so much talent to be made, or
lost,” too). (End note 2) She
basically stopped making films in the 1970s, some years before the end of her
life, and died in 1977.
As their Wikipedia bios take pains to show some facts about,
Davis started on the stage, and in the early 1930s had a bit of a bumpy start
getting her career going in films (receiving critical help from a male actor,
George Arliss, who had formerly been a teacher at a drama school she’d
attended, and who insisted on her costarring with him, as ended up
jump-starting her acceptance in the film-studio world).
Crawford, for her part, was established in films before
Davis was. She first aspired to be a dancer, and was in sound-era dancing
films, including with the likes of Fred Astaire. She had started in the last
years of silent films (in the late 1920s). One of her earliest film roles was as
a “flapper,” a 1920s-era party girl. She worked for MGM for 17 years, until
1942, when she contracted with Warner Brothers (where, it happened, she would
be a sort of rival with Davis). She was esteemed enough by her studio that she
was in the multi-star Grand Hotel
(1932), appearing in scenes with the likes of John Barrymore (incidentally,
this is the kind of film, esteemed even today, that I really am not familiar
with).
Davis’ strength in acting was reflected in her securing a
series of roles (and value to Warner Brothers), and even her first Oscar, from
early on. But her appearance, including her big, slightly spaced-apart eyes,
marked her as “not a classic beauty,” which effectively meant she had to excel
in emotional expression. Her first Oscar for a 1935 film showed her talent was
impressive after only about three years. (Davis’ family origins make for a sort
of “rags-to-riches” story similarly to Crawford’s, but there is something
touching about how Davis came from a family where her father left the home, in
a divorce, as a development rare and scandalizing for its day in her home-turf
New England, and thus there were three remaining members—Davis, her sister [who
was mentally ill, long-term, and who Davis apparently found ways to support as
the years went on], and her mother, a professional photographer who encouraged
Davis’ going into acting. The three women as the “early family nexus” with the
father who divorced his way out obviously shapes how Davis later would be noted
for a distrust of men, and with a series of marriages, four, to help support
this idea.)
On the other hand, Crawford had a different experience and
set of preferences regarding the issue of appearance: she went through a series
of “images” that suited to audience tastes, first a sort of “shop girl who
makes good” (when she also, appearance-wise, had a youthful, spry appeal on
screen, her bone structure only hinting at her later look); she did not have
her more “trademark” look with her heavy brows and even her shoulder pads until
years later (by the early 1940s). I have to say, in re-reviewing some old movie
clips of Crawford shown in the DVD extra focusing on her, I appreciate how she
cut a distinctive figure (in simple appearance and “in motion”), but she
strikes me as actress-y in a dated way, though others could obviously still
value her.
So, in a way, Davis’ strength as “her own woman,” while
Crawford was more of a slave to fashion, defined them early on.
As it happened, though Crawford seemed all-but-finished as a
major star still making movies by the end of the 1960s, Davis managed to keep
making films into the 1980s, before dying in 1989 at age 81. She worked in the
TV series Hotel, and appeared in a
number of feature films and TV movies in the 1980s, including in The Whales of August (1987), costarring
with Lillian Gish, the silent-era actress who was so long in the business that
she’d worked with D.W. Griffith (Gish died in 1993 at age 99).
In the DVD extra on her, Jodie Foster (in bright-red
lipstick, in an early-1990s Turner special) narrates a brief bio of Davis,
including many film clips as her life is marched through, during the 1930s and
on. She made many films for Warner Brothers starting in 1932 and up to 1949, when her contract or association was
unceremoniously discontinued by the studio, though she had won two Oscars
during her flourishing Warners period, and obviously enough allowed the studio
to make a good bit of money off her work. She pulled off a neat trick by
appearing in one of her most famous films, All
About Eve, in 1950, just following her tenure with Warners (this film is
where she made the famous remark, “Fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a
bumpy night”).
Davis’ heyday was
past by 1962, but she still had “goods to deliver” in older age, which has
helped define her at least as much as early success
Davis fell on career hard times enough in the 1950s to do a
TV commercial (and how strangely self-conscious those early TV commercials could
be). And though my brief sketch of Crawford’s career suggests she was not quite
as accomplished by about 1950 as was Davis, Crawford would be making films more
often than Davis did in the 1950s. Yet Davis
was of enough interest to be tapped to play Baby Jane Hudson in the 1962 film
I’m reviewing, in something of another comeback.
Joan Crawford was an important co-star of the film, with her
own tone helping define the story (a DVD comparing the two actresses and with
many “talking heads” includes how Crawford was
defined as filling victim roles from about Mildred
Pierce on), but Baby Jane overall
meant an opportunity for Davis to deliver a fuller, more memorable performance
than does Crawford. My closer look at Baby
Jane in Part 2 will show how the two actresses show their respective stuff
in their later career years.
Incidentally, as something I only very recently have become
more aware of, the success of Baby Jane
prompted many of the same principals behind it to try capitalizing on it, with
another film, Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte
(1964), also a sort of darkly baroque psycho-drama, including director Aldrich,
writers Lukas Heller and Henry Farrell, Davis herself in a leading role, and
fellow actor Victor Buono (though Crawford is absent, and present as another
old-time player is Olivia de Havilland). In this film, Davis plays the victim-relative;
I’ve haven’t seen this film, and it doesn’t seem as highly rated or widely
known about as Baby Jane, but it
seems worth checking out.
After Baby Jane, starting
in the late 1960s, Davis seems as apt to have turned up on TV talk shows as in
any films of great note. Though clips in the Jodie Foster–narrated extra show
Davis to look older yet still “her trademark self” in color TV renderings
(1971, ~1979, etc.), we can see a constant to Davis’ personal style: through
her early films and into the 1970s, we see the same face, hear the same
confident, clipped delivery, appreciate the same forthright (but not really
nasty) opinions. (She said in an interview in about the 1970s, regarding Errol
Flynn, with whom she costarred in a film in about 1939, that he’d said “I don’t
know anything about acting.” Davis remarked retrospectively in the interview,
“I admire his honesty because he was absolutely right.”)
As a classic-era actress, she may not be known for any
particular 1930s or ’40s role the way Vivien Leigh might be known for Gone With the Wind or Judy Garland for The Wizard of Oz (both films, 1939), but
Davis’ style as a sort of proto-feminist, and capable of “unpleasant
characters” that are still interesting to watch on-screen, makes her not only
recognizable as an individual but, I think, very watchable for modern viewers,
of all the classic-era actresses.
(While a lot of Wikipedia articles can often have ungainly
sentences and questionable judgments, I think Davis’ article reflects, as does
Crawford’s, her fans’ continued loyalty guaranteeing some careful historical
recordings about her, and one sentence I think is worth quoting to sum her up:
“Her forthright manner, clipped vocal style[,] and ubiquitous cigarette
contributed to a public persona, which has often been imitated and parodied.”)
That is, Davis’ sardonic deliveries and slightly tough
manner make her a lot more of a modern-style American personality than, say,
Crawford, and this difference helps define the nature of the two lead
characters in Baby Jane. As it
happens, the only film of Davis’ I’ve watched (beyond bits) is Baby Jane; and while fans of classic
U.S. cinema might like her more in the old films (1930s-40s), to me her
strength as an actress can be appreciated as much in the 1962 film as the early
ones. While some classic-film actors aren’t best seen in late fare—it’s a shame
to think you know James Stewart from his appearance in the 1970s Airport-sequel clunker, and not from his
Frank Capra or Hitchcock roles—Davis seems able to appear in a complimentary
light in a late film, perhaps because her personality was “made for more modern
times.”
Given her strength as an actress, we can appreciate in the Foster-narrated
DVD extra how she seemed “still herself, if older” when interviewed on 60 Minutes in 1980, or on some other
talk show in the early 1980s. When a 1987 clip shows her having endured a
stroke as well as a mastectomy, she seems almost appalling for her
somewhat-broad face’s being shrunken, and her wrinkled appearance making her
look at least 10 years older than her late-70s age. She seems like a mummified
version of herself, a bit, but her courageous way of talking is still there,
and she even jokes about how if she wasn’t smoking—a lifelong habit that
probably didn’t help her aged state in 1987—people wouldn’t recognize who she
was.
##
By the early 1970s, the Golden Age of cinema was enough of a
received-wisdom “staple” of American culture, and the generational change was
such, that you knew a certain segment of TV viewers (older ones gobbling up
talk shows) would appreciate seeing Davis—along with an older-looking William
Wyler (the director) and actress Olivia de Havilland—appearing on TV, considered
opinions and all. The variety-style Carol
Burnett Show managed to appeal to young as well as old when spoofing some
of the classic-era films, with Burnett burlesque-ing things up by, e.g.,
appearing in a gaudy dress derived from curtains, with the curtain rod still in
it. Davis and others spoke on TV talk shows representing an older
generation—those who had fought in World War II and maybe gone on to work at
General Motors or the like—while younger viewers were “into their own thing,”
appreciating the new styles and mores represented by Coppola, Scorsese, and
others, while the young-Turk filmmakers were still influenced in some ways by
older film practitioners.
And through this, Davis
wasn’t to sound like an old fogey, opining that young men should cut their
hair, etc. She would appear in modern-day films as she could, even if it was in
TV movies in the 1980s. Crawford moved into retirement in the 1970s as if the
times had passed her by, but this didn’t really seem the case for Davis.
The film has ended up
defined by, or curated by, post-Vietnam esthetic sensibilities
Another interesting aspect of all this is that, today, Baby Jane seems, when marketed to more
modern tastes, slotted into the “delicious camp”/“gay-icon” category, as is
suggested by the DVD presence, as film commenters, of two men, one of whom is John
Epperson, who under the stage name Lypsinka has performed as a sort of drag
queen. Jokes in more modern films about Crawford being a “gay icon” seem well
supported by her 1962 look, with those heavy brows and dark eyes being
certainly a trademark feature, while she also has a slightly mannish look to
her. Her face is as recognizable as the front of a mid-1950s Chevy. But Davis
in Baby Jane seems to both serve and transcend
the “gay icon” category, though she might still be embraced and celebrated by
those who follow that esthetic: she seems to push for camp and a sort of
comic/horror vibe, while offering enough character complexity as to inspire debate
and hearty discussion, and comes out clearly the actress more worth watching in
this film all these years later.
(You can also understand how, apparently, the playwright Edward
Albee wanted Davis to play the role that Elizabeth Taylor got in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? [1966],
the film debut for director Mike Nichols, and a boundary-breaker/trendsetter in
terms of what would today be called its rated-R language and concerns. This
1966 film seems to have done all right for Taylor’s
stretching herself to define the performance, but we can consider that Davis would have done a
respectable job in Woolf, as long as
she didn’t stray over into camp a bit, and didn’t seem at times a little
old-fashioned. Davis
could certainly have brought the emotional vinegar to the role.)
A trove of DVD extras
The set of extras on the two-disk 2012 set is quite as full
as fans would want, and go beyond an earlier DVD incarnation of this film. Not
in the order in which the DVD lists them:
* The profile of Davis alone, narrated by Jodie Foster and
originally made by Turner Broadcasting, is substantial. Amusingly, near the
end, a snippet of the 1981 pop song “Bette Davis Eyes” is played (Kim Carnes sang
it, but it was originally written and recorded by others in 1974), which really
wasn’t about Davis (the lyrics, if you listen to them, suggest a skill set on
the song’s character’s part that are not the actress’s).
* The interview with Crawford by the BBC’s Philip Jenkinson
isn’t bad, but a little sketchy, and the print-quality is flyblown.
* The extra comparing the two actresses, with many talking
heads, is substantial, but I only got to see it once, unlike the two profiles
noted above. Interestingly, actress Carol Kane is quoted—she was notably active
in the 1970s and ’80s, including in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977)—and she remarks that Davis was a “character actress,”
a good enough point; and she comments how Davis insisted that she look like the
character she performed.
* A snippet from a 1962 installment of Andy Williams’
variety show (and the snippet is in color, obviously filmed that way, though it
would only have appeared on TV in black-and-white) has Davis singing a pop-type
song in support of Baby Jane. The
film was released in October 1962, and this TV spot was in December 1962. By
the early 1960s, the film industry was, by almost any standards we’ve known since
the late 1960s, “weird” when it came to supporting a current release with pop
music. By 1962, the influence of rock ’n’ roll over the larger culture was only
beginning. (Even Hitchcock was approached with efforts to support his films
with pop, such as his Marnie [1964],
whose score was famously done by Herrmann, being considered by music-savvy
Universal for a hit single by a famous pop star, though this never came to
fruition. The idea was to duplicate the way Doris Day’s “Que Sera” supported The Man Who Knew Too Much [1956].) In
the Andy Williams spot, Davis seems a bit “old”—though she was in her early
fifties—moving slightly frumpily but gamely while singing banal lyrics (with a
backing band mixing a rockabilly rhythm with classical-type strings) that do
nothing to convey what a camp/horror-fest the film is. Davis actually can sing
in a sort of “rough college try” way, but not beautifully; think of your mom,
or Hillary Clinton, singing somewhat hoarsely but not entirely impossible to
listen to. I mean, you would not put Davis’ rendition on your iPod, but you
admire her for what she would, tongue slightly in cheek, do in later life to
support a film, in an era (the 1960s) where an aging actress still being
bankable was a rare phenomenon, indeed.
* A “making-of” doc for the film, made from informal footage
filmed during production—and a sort of thing rare in that day—is on hand,
though it is narrated, without people shown speaking. It includes the fact that
some 58,000 feet of film was exposed by August 1962, which suggests a bigger
deal than the budget seems to have demanded. By the way, Ernest Haller, rather along in years by 1962, was Baby Jane’s cinematographer.
All these extras are on the second disk.
* During the film, on the first disk, you can listen to
Charles Busch and John Epperson comment, and they—like any good commenters
during a DVD film—liven things up a bit, and expand your appreciation. But for
those of a more conservative bent, the sort of “poofy” flavor you might get
from their enthusiastic comments—both men come from the drag-performance world—might
get a modern-day red-blooded meat-eater in the U.S. asking “if I should be
worried” if he has to go to a public restroom in the near future.
To be continued.
End note 1. The
more you look at Baby Jane, the more
you see it imitating, or otherwise winking at, Hitchcock. For one thing, the
next-door neighbor, a friendly woman with a grown daughter, is named “Mrs.
Bates” (no explanation needed). Also, a situation where Jane Hudson is hustling
a dead body out to her car, to dispose of it, while interrupted by an
approaching vehicle with its sweeping headlights, is echoed in Psycho (though this sort of scene
probably occurs in many suspense/crime films through the decades). There is
even a late scene, with Edwin Flagg waiting at a gas station to use a pay
phone, where a sign is focused on that advertises an undertaker—a sort of
“stolen-shot” detail with some Hitchcockian humor.
Also, the ways the films were produced seem to have
interesting parallels, though I don’t know all the details about Baby Jane. With Psycho, whose production arrangement I’ll be sketchy on, Paramount, Hitch’s main
studio for the better part of a decade (much of the 1950s), didn’t care for the
Psycho idea. Though it was the studio
that bankrolled the film (and its logo still appears in prints), while
Hitchcock was in the process of being wooed over to a long-term association
with the Universal studio (courtesy of his agent Lew Wasserman, whose company
MCA would be buying Universal), Hitch made the film on a Universal lot, and his
own company was in charge of production (he would have an ownership stake in
the film, while Paramount would recoup at least some of its money). So the film
was a sort of production hybrid, regarding Paramount (which didn’t really want to be
associated with the film, while bankrolling it) and Universal. (Patrick
McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in
Darkness and Light [ReganBooks, 2003], pp. 580-81.)
Seemingly similarly, Warner Brothers would distribute Baby Jane, but it wasn’t really
producing the film. (The trade name “Seven Arts” is associated with the film,
and Seven Arts was some company allied with Warners for some years [it merged
with WB in 1967-69] until WB started to get new, rejuvenating executive
direction in the later 1960s; but all indications are that Warner Brothers the
longtime studio was not what directly made this film.) Strangely, the production
team is listed in credits as “Associates and Robert Aldrich,” with the order
suggesting the “associates” put up (or were in charge of) more money than was
Aldrich, who also directed the film, but presumably the associates didn’t want
to be named. And of course, the credits take pains to show that Warners merely
distributed the film. (Adding to it all, per the Wikipedia article on the film,
Davis and Crawford arranged to take a percentage of the film earnings in
exchange for lower production-time salaries, suggesting its
speculative/shoestring nature.)
It’s interesting that both films, today, are not only
favorites among some film buffs, but have received various types of scholarly
attention over the decades, so the respective studios’ embarrassment over these
films was (in hindsight) mistaken; and of course the Warner Brothers logo is
present enough on modern DVDs of Baby
Jane, while Universal, as it has with much of Hitch’s other films (due to
his late-life arrangement with the studio), is publicly associated with
distribution of modern incarnations of Psycho.
End note 2.
Despite the long-time assumption that the two actresses hated each other over
the long term, in the BBC interview, Crawford has enough loyalty in a sense to
Davis that when the interviewer mispronounces Davis’ first name like “Bet,”
Crawford immediately responds with “She’d kill
you if she heard you say ‘Bet.” And she says this with a tone as if she’s
basically on Davis’ side. On answering the interviewer about how Davis was to
get along with, Crawford says she was a “fascinating actress to work with.”
It’s almost as if her supposed campaign to deny Davis the Oscar for Baby Jane had never happened.
