Stars: Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Victor Buono
Director: Robert Aldrich
Oscar History: 5 nominations/1 win (Best Actress-Bette Davis, Supporting Actor-Victor Buono, Cinematography, Costume*, Sound)
(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars
(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place over three different time eras. The first is when both Blanche (as an adult, Crawford) and Jane (as an adult, Davis), are children, and Baby Jane is a star on the vaudeville circuit. The little girl is spoiled rotten, and indulged by her father, and treats her entire family with contempt. As adults, though, the roles are reversed-Jane is an unsuccessful actress in movies, only allowed to make pictures because the studio doesn't want to upset her sister Blanche, who is a big star. At the peak of her career, Blanche is in a car accident (and we're meant to assume for most of the picture that it's Jane who was driving, as this has passed into urban legend), and is paralyzed, destroying her career. We then retreat to the present day, where Blanche & Jane live together in an old house, with Jane living off of Blanche's money & mistreating her sister, who isn't able to stop Jane from abusing her (basically by starving, psychologically torturing, and eventually tying up Blanche to prevent her from selling the house and institutionalizing her mentally unwell sister). The film has a subplot involving a conman named Edwin (Buono) trying to bilk Jane as an accompanist for her ridiculous attempts at a comeback, which combines the two stories when Edwin discovers Blanche bound-and-tied. The film ends with Blanche confessing that it was she who was driving the car, and trying to run over Jane for her years of cruelty, and in the process ruined both of their lives. Jane, now fully insane, dances for onlookers as the police arrive.
The movie has entered a whole different level of lore in recent years thank to Ryan Murphy's Emmy-winning series Feud, which chronicled the bitter real-life rivalry between Crawford & Davis, and the filming of this movie and its spiritual sequel Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte, so it's intriguing to go back to the movie after all of these years and find out it's really good. There's a certain level of camp that is unavoidable here (hell, movies like Baby Jane basically invented modern camp), but that doesn't mean that it doesn't feel real. The story is petrifying-you spend most of the movie not sure if Blanche will make it out alive or not, and intrigued by what Jane might do next. You also have a lot of great throwbacks to Davis & Crawford's careers (this was the final important movie of either of their careers, though they'd both continue working for the next few years, and in Davis' case, the next few decades), including footage of them as younger actors.
The Oscar nominations were all pretty well-earned as well. The costume work is intriguing, particularly the garish ways that Davis turns Baby Jane into almost a creature dressed as a little girl (this surely would've been a Makeup nominee had that category existed yet). The sound work is fine, if not quite as inventive; the movie's best sound effect trick is the sort of screeching moment of the car accident between two unknown figures, and then the opening credits come forward announcing a different kind of movie than you might have expected before. The same can be said for the Cinematography, which has some iconic shots (the final sequence being the most obvious, though Ernest Haller does a good job of making us feel like we're peering into the lives of famous people gone to hell in a way others might not have been able to achieve).
The film won two acting nominations. I'm always stunned by how young Victor Buono was when this movie was made (he was only 24), and he has a menace to his character even if ultimately it doesn't feel like he has a full-enough grasp on who his character is. I liked his chemistry with Davis (which ultimately won him this nomination), but his motives other than greed remain unclear, and you are left wondering why he is the way he is. The script doesn't help here, but neither does Buono.
Davis famously won her 10th and final Oscar nomination for her work here, and was expected to win the Oscar (how she didn't is a story most of you probably know if you've made it this far in this review, but let's just say it's epic). She's great-she makes Baby Jane a concoction of horror & sympathy all at once, and while she was applauded at the time for letting her vanity go (she makes herself older & uglier to sell the part), it's really the way that she underlines how Baby Jane wasn't allowed to grow up, and the trauma of having success at such a young age, that really sells this movie. Crawford just missed with the nominations (you have to assume she was sixth place), but is very good in a subtler role. Yes, she looks awfully glamorous for a shut-in (Crawford, ever vain from being "the most beautiful woman in movies," would try to make herself look better against the wishes of director Bob Aldrich), but she finds great moments in the movie to hint at the woman she might have become without Jane, and to provide hints of the sort of person who would destroy their sister's life for their own mistake. I loved that scene where she's watching an old movie, complaining, but all-the-while knowing that she looked great & succeeded in a way that her sister never could. Baby Jane is a legendary movie not because of the offscreen feuds (lord knows countless movies have had costars who despised each other), but because that rivalry didn't stop a truly mesmerizing movie from taking place.
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