Cinema
Comedy of Horrors
By ISABEL QUIGLY
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Warner and general
release; 'X' certificate.) Baby Jane was once a child star who sang songs addressed to Daddy, then a grown actress
given parts because her sister Blanche (Joan Crawford), by then a star herself, insisted on it. Thirty years after, the pair of them are still together, Blanche in a wheelchair, where it is said her sister put her, at the height of her career, by ramming her with a car after a drunken party. Jane is serving her meals of rat from the cellar or poisoned pet bird, or, as time goes on and the madness grows in her, stringing her up to an iron ring from the ceiling, with a strip of sticking-plaster across her mouth, above which Miss Crawford's great eyes gaze out more eloquently and enormously than ever.
Horror and humour (pace Hitchcock, Bufiuel and others) do not as a rule mix very cosily, but, speaking as one who has abjured the term 'black comedy,' that convenient hold-all for everything except the Carry On series, I must admit that kobert Aldrich has made the most spendid spicy pudding out of his varied, indeed contradictory, ingredients. I have, I need hardly say, been more charmed or moved, more shaken or wsthetically delighted, by films in the past few months; but for sheer amusement, unpre- tentious (though resonant, allusive, crowded) funniness and general jollity, jokiness of all kinds from the basic joke of casting two old rivals as sisters to the final, eerie, dying joke on a sunlit beach, in which the sunlight suddenly demolishes Miss Davis's make-up and for a second makes her seem nearly beautiful, this beats the lot.
The horrors are not beyond bearing, like the murder, say, in Psycho; the grand guignol trap- pings are reassuringly apparent. Miss Davis's outsize performance is first touching, secondly funny, and only lastly horrific, never horrible; Miss Crawford's is a marvel of restraint when
she must have been tempted into rival histrionics. The literal horrors of the plot are kept at one remove—we never see the bird poisoned, the rat trapped, or the lovable friend knocked on the head with a hammer. Pathos, too, is always just bearable, and caricature, however hair- raising, never cruel. A film that makes one shud- der and laugh, and be strung up with ordinary tension and extraordinary sympathies, is really managing something when it can be moving as well; and Miss Davis's, `D'you mean we could have been friends all these years?' as she sits beside the sister she has been starving, is, given the circumstances, the beach and sunlight, and death so near, a very moving madwoman's speech.
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