Review of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) by Ryan M — 13 Aug 2009

Knee-jerk reaction:

For a director with at least two great films already under his belt ('Kiss Me Deadly' and 'Vera Cruz'), Aldrich does a surprising amount of nothing here. The movie can barely run on its own fumes. I'm glad the synopsis bills it as a comedy, because that's to my mind the only way to account for how frivolous the film is. Aldrich deals almost entirely in broad strokes here. Davis' hyper-regressive personality is dead-on-arrival, and not because it's uninteresting but because Aldrich can only play it for cheap thrills. So too with Crawford's victimization. The movie would almost come to a standstill if it weren't for the arbitrary secondary characters, who are nothing but sub-Hitchcockian cogs in the suspense-machine this film wants to be. As far as "perverted innocence" 60s thrillers go, I much prefer Preminger's 'Bunny Lake is Missing', which at least manages not to telescope its every intention in the first 10 minutes. The argument that this movie turns a mirror on the "dark side" of Hollywood capriciousness is I think overstated (or just over-obvious), and anyway I prefer the Aldrich that worked with less solipsistic subtext. It's salvageable only because it induces the occasional laugh -- usually at its own expense.