Fleapit revisited:What Ever Happened To Baby Jane.

There are huge gaps in my film knowledge. There are many influential and important films that, despite knowing of their place in the canon, I have simply never watched. One of those films is Robert Aldrich's 1962 'gothic horror' What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? Based on a novel by Henry Farrell, it was recently shown on BBC2 and is still available, if you're quick, on the iPlayer.

I went in - and I'm glad I did. The story tells of sisters 'Baby' Jane (Bette Davis) and Blanche Hudson (Joan Crawford). Now in their dotage, the former Hollywood stars are living - uneasily - together in what we're supposed to believe is a decrepit and decaying Hollywood mansion. Even though it looks rather magnificent to me.

That's set in what was then the present day - the early sixties - but we begin right back in 1917 with the young Baby Jane (Julie Allred) a huge child star who commands massive audiences with her twee song 'I've Written A Letter To Daddy'. She's known as The Diminutive Dancing Duse From Duluth and, in the auditorium after her shows, frankly creepy life size Baby Jane dolls are presented to audience members.

But young Jane is prone to a tantrum - especially if she can't get ice cream - and her father Ray (Dave Willock) indulges her. Both Jane and Ray are utterly merciless in their cruel and neglectful treatment of Jane's older sister Blanche (played, as a child, by Gina Gillespie) but as Jane's style of acting falls out of favour and her star starts to wane it is Blanche who becomes an even bigger star.

One of the biggest in the whole of Tinsel Town we learn. Jane descends into alcoholism, but honouring a pledge she had made to her mother Cora (Anne Barton) many years ago, Blanche does her best to keep Jane in work. She even has it written into her contract that for every film she appears in, Jane must be given a movie too.

But, in 1935, a mysterious car crash brings a premature end to Blanche's career. She is paralysed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair and when we meet the sisters again in 1962 that is how she remains. Having not called in John Stannah to have a stairlift fitted, Blanche, like the caged bird she keeps in her room, is essentially a prisoner.

The bird escapes (or seems to) but will Blanche? Not if Jane can help it. Though Blanche's earnings pay for the roof over their head, Jane is never once seen to be grateful. She is insanely jealous about Blanche's success and distraught and angry that her own career never continued into adult life.

Jane drinks, she belittles Blanche, slags her (and her films) off, and she opens Blanche's fan mail, reads it, and throws it in the bin without Blanche ever so much as seeing it. I would she goes quietly mental but when she goes mental it's often pretty loud. It becomes clear that no matter what she does, no matter how transgressive or plain wrong her behaviour is, it will always, always, be somebody else's fault. 

Probably Blanche's. Jane looks utterly ridiculous too. Their neighbour Mrs Bates (Anna Lee) and her daughter Liza (B. D. Merrill, curiously - Bette Davis' real life daughter) deliver flowers for Blanche but Jane is rude to them and the flowers seem to get no further than the downstairs sink. Housekeeper Elvira (Maidie Norman) is more switched on and senses what Jane is up to but will kind hearted Blanche believe her?

Is it easier to forgive a family member? Is it harder to believe their intentions are not as they should be? When Jane decides to revive her career she places an ad in a paper for a musician and arranger to work with and it's answered by slobbish mummy's boy Edwin Flagg (Victor Buono) who, for some reason, affects to be a camp Englishman in order to try and impress Jane.

Flagg and his mother Dehlia (Marjorie Bennett) are pretty much skint so it's easy to see what their motivation is although it's not immediately apparent what the addition of these characters really adds to the story. Perhaps that's because Crawford and Davis are such dominant screen presences nobody else, bar Norman as Elvira, really gets a look in.

People acted, in both senses of the word, very differently sixty years ago and sometimes What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? feels even older than it actually is. Not everything has dated that well but the general feeling, underpinned by Frank De Vol's jumpy score, is, as the film progresses, one of both tension and a terrible feeling that something really awful will surely happen.

Early on in the film, the camera has a tendency to cut away to blank faced dolls. It's jarring rather than creepy and the disgusting meals that Jane prepares for Blanche are just that. Disgusting but not scary. Jane's inane cackling is far worse. But the chills do come as the film progresses. I'd expected that but I'd not realised just how nasty the whole thing would get. What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? is a great illustration of how a toxic person can not just destroy themself but almost everyone around them. After watching this I'm not so sure having Bette Davis Eyes is such a great thing after all.