What happened to Baby Jane? (1962) Aldrich – Review

Private without cinema. With cinema.
Between strange and satirical black-vein comedies, poignant notes, multiple self-referential levels, and entertainment community thinking, What happened to Baby Jane? By Robert Aldrich still keeps his explosive pack, which has been entrusted to an unforgettable interstellar challenge between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Polished with a ruthless and moving style.

I wrote a letter to my father

In 1917, young Jane Hudson was a successful child star who kept sister Blanche in the shadows, suffering from the family’s low respect for her. Years later, the roles were reversed: Blanche became an appreciated movie star, while Jane herself tries the acting path but with very few results. After being in a car accident, Blanche lost both of her legs, and several years later the two sisters, now aged, live isolated in a Hollywood villa. A step away from psychotic delirium, alcoholism, the rude and the refugee longing for her successes as a child, Jane has reduced herself to a caricature of herself taking care of Blanche but behaving towards her full of hate, resentment and sadism. Convinced that she can relaunch her career, Jane calls a musician to re-suggest the silly show that made her hit as a child. Meanwhile, the threats and abuses against Blanche became more violent … [sinossi]

In the exhibition Monsters Born from Psychological Burns, she brought together the world of cinema and entertainment in the broad sense of Jane Hudson What happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962) has occupied a prominent place since appearing in theaters. He is a character who has now risen to an archetype, a model of a delicate psychotic profile resulting from the fall of illusions in the face of declining fame and success. It falls even more shocking because Aldrich’s masterpiece deals with a specific class of show business characters, and young stars are extremely vulnerable to anonymity and forgetting once they reach a more mature age. Between those who literally disappeared from the radar and those who returned to the esteemed adult profession after going through their own personal hell (the case of Drew Barrymore, among many in Hollywood comes to mind), movie street paved with children steeped in fame and then spend the rest of their days living in distress or almost Not always, but often. With his usual sour and disillusioned outlook turned into the world of entertainment and in a broader sense of American culture, Aldrich devoted himself to transforming the novel of the same name by Henry Farrell, published in 1960, in which he, in turn, resorted to a double level of self-reference with the world of cinema. While the story is on the one hand devoted to the fate of two sisters, a children’s theater star and then a poorly gifted young film actress, the other beloved former star is doomed to be in a wheelchair after a car accident, and on the other hand, to embody Jane and Blanche Hudson, two true-to-life stars of varying degrees. From Degradation, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Both deeply indebted to great American cinema in the studios of the 1930s and 1940s, Davis and Crawford provide two completely contradictory guides: Jane entrusted with a complete, theatrical and exhilarating outward interpretation (literally a wonderful proof of Bette Davis), and a remarkable highlight in the strange meaning of physical traits, while the character of Blanche gives evidence Equally impressive for Joan Crawford but for a completely different record, neat and very disciplined, detailed in curvy and polite use of language. It is a literal competition for skill, which has now passed through the annals of cinema history, between two female singers in the style of distant acting.

However, the overall narrative record bends in favor of Jen’s character, adopting the same penchant for weird acid with hints of satirical mockery, framed open to static notes of super-black comedy. Initially, Baby Jane was a very early-season star also affectionate towards her sister Blanche, but she was highly spoiled and fed with tantrums through a show system that she turned into a money-making machine (and Jane, despite being a child, is well aware). Aldrich bends down to the brutal distortion of all means of production unfolding around Jane as a mass phenomenon. Through her dances and songs, the little girl also embodies a whole moral and valuable world related to a delicate American anthropological profile: songs dedicated to her father, tenderness of a child who is not afraid of confrontation with the theater, full. Family discourse (hypocrisically associated with a wealthy business) in everything that concerns a backward scene image and parallels audiences willing to relieve childhood and forget about it the next day. Administrative interests, trade, print, and dolls reproducing her features are moving throughout Baby Jane. About the doll, one of the film’s most interesting motifs is expressed at a suggestive level, as well as being repeated in several moments of the story. Years later, as a defeated, psychotic old woman who lived in self-worship when she was a child, yearning for the happiness of a distant past, Jin keeps her blood and becomes a doll of herself, wearing blond curls and ribbons and clothing in keeping with her outfit. An ancient myth, an arsenal of hairstyles called to bend to the face that has become brutal and increased excessive make-up. Contrary to all logic and reasonableness, the elderly Jane repeats herself as a child on her body, and at the same time finds compensation in the dolls of the past, which are not subject to the passage of time as inanimate, And it does not age, it does not change, and it continues to suggest itself as a freeze frame for a fixed moment in time, without time, after time.

On the one hand, Baby Jane dolls also hint at other expressive motifs Aldrich announced from the film’s bold first shot: a kind of self-scene from inside a box-spring, a children’s game with an ugly character in a romper. Primitive street entertainment aimed at a childish audience, the spring-loaded romper actually elicits a reaction of fear and tears in the child who witnesses the make-up, and a tear falls on the romper’s face as well – it fell from the child’s eyes, or is it the clown himself, who discreetly realizes his condition, He cries with sadness because, like a future Jin, he is causing terror in his fans instead of entertaining and entertaining as he would have liked? On closer examination, the idea of ​​the mechanisms, of both mechanical and artificial reality, passes several times through the narrative fabric of What happened to Baby Jane?. Old Baby Jane is herself a romper who was taken advantage of as a child in the show community who ends up in oblivion to cry over her inanimate nature. The spring-loaded box matches Blanche’s bird cage in the room, and both hint at an automatic and carousel capture that has been evoked multiple times visually. Just think of one of Blanche’s horror letdown moment, when she was scared of her sister continuing to spin around her wheelchair as if in a raving whirlwind, as the dramatic notes grinds up again with a sarcastic and sarcastic smile. Constantly, Jen’s laughter remembers the automatic and smiling voice of the rompers on the first appearance. Jane will then re-suggest the circular motion in the final match at Beach, in the final shots, when bathers and police surround her, the baby star introduces herself to her fans. The circuit is thus a prison and ravings at the same time, just like the mechanism of a spring box doomed to repeat the same inanimate acts forever. Extremely vibrant, the peaceful and complex Edwin Flagg comments. Lifelike, realistic, “life-like”. A Life Mimic, just to mention Douglas Circus’s latest American melodrama (The mirror of life, 1959).

A purely quantitative datum also affects vision. What happened to Baby Jane? In fact, it spans over a long period, exceeding 130 minutes and the settings vary very little, just as the story is almost entirely reserved for the ruthless examination of the sadistic victim / executioner, the servant / master relationship between the two sisters, the two central heroes who rarely share the set with other characters of a certain thickness. . The framework is actually very important, as it is a symbol of the 1960s US status (daily TV consumption, stardom, economic luxury, and the satisfying curiosity of neighbors of the two former sisters), but in principle, the story, is very focused, sandwiched between the four walls of the villa. These quantitative indications bear witness to the great dramatic wisdom of Aldrich, who voices his story in two rather distinct phases, one from the slow growth of suspense and the other to a convincing solution to suspense. Gradually, the tones become more terrible and illusory, and we allow ourselves to explicitly expose the unprecedented violence of contemporary American first-class cinema – about the nature of the whole process between the so-called A-series and the B-series there will be and then there is much more to say, but the rhetoric will be very long. With cruelty, she is wonderfully happy to play the forgetfulness and aging of two real female singers at sunset and, above all, and especially in the case of Bette Davis, generate a new expressive model that the actress will follow next several times as she teaches her second artistic youth – after What happened to Baby Jane? In fact, Davis will create a self-feeding myth about her poor old age, an image that is repeatedly exploited in cinema in low-cost products that close to horror and sometimes dedicated again to the topic of the psychotic relationship between two sisters, from the second part. Slowly … slowly, my sweet Carlotta (Robert Aldrich, 1964), always inspired by a short story written by Henry Farrell, A. Who is lying in my coffin? (Paul Henried, 1964), A. Nanny, Governor (Seth Holt, 1965).

It should also be noted that the Aldrich returns many times before and after Baby Jane, To conduct harsh tests of the world of Anglo-Saxon entertainment, and to suggest other stories of psychotic relationships and cruel existential perversions, often dedicated to complex female characters. In addition to the supplementary paragraph mentioned above Slowly … slowly, my sweet Carlotta, It was initially designed to exploit the success of Baby Jane With the same actors and the same author in the literary source (but in the end the sick Joan Crawford was replaced by Olivia de Havilland), he assumes among other things a certain importance Sister George is murdered (1968), and centered on the gradual execution, both publicly and then privately, of an elderly gay television star removed from the series that had led her to success for years. In this cruelty scene, always one step away from or after a ridiculous satirical excess, Aldrich finds one of the most fertile juicers he has ever produced. Certainly Baby Jane He manages to combine a ruthless portrayal of the United States as an inclusive society of a scene with a timeless and entertaining consumption scene. Compelling, beautifully photographed and photographed, she entrusts the good hands of two old female singers who, after much psychological horror, mockery and mockery, in their final on the beach, arrive at wonderfully moving notes.

informations
What happened to Baby Jane? above Wikipedia.

Massimiliano Schiavone 12/26/2020