The title line is an excerpt from noted French film historian Georges Sadoul describing the filmmaking style of Robert Aldrich. When you look up Aldrich’s name on IMDB the three film titles that get highlighted as the ones he’s “known for” are The Dirty Dozen (1967), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), and The Flight of the Phoenix (1965). I’m surprised Kiss Me Deadly (1955) doesn’t make the cut.
Bottom line: it doesn’t matter. Anyone who has seen Kiss Me Deadly knows it belongs there.
“Love with a capital L. has never been depicted in my films. It is the basis of life, of mankind, but the attachment which a man can have to a way of life or a cause is perhaps more durable than the attachment to a woman.” Even in a film like Baby Jane, which centers around two sisters with scant any man around aside for a nervous piano player (a great, sweaty, twitchy Victor Buono), this quote by Aldrich clearly applies. That their way of life centers around show business, and that the sisters are played by Bette Davis and Joan Crawford - two stars trying to protect and resuscitate their place in the Parthenon of entertainment – only adds to the depth and layers.
Aldrich cut himself off from a family fortune to work in the entertainment business, starting with a clerical job at RKO Radio Pictures and on upward from there. Soon enough he got into film production with various gigs as as an assistant director, and he worked with the likes of Jean Renoir, Joseph Losey, Charlie Chaplin, … Milestone, Polonsky, Dmytryk, Wellmann, Fleischer… and on it goes: an absolutely incredible list that is the embodiment of show business.
The funhouse of mirrors in Baby Jane, with startling black-and-white cinematography by Ernest Haller, goes meta in ways the 1960 book by Henry Farrell could not anticipate. As our two Golden Age superstars play spider and fly, we see films playing on the television from 30 years prior in Davis’ past (Parachute Jumper, Ex-Lady) as well as for Crawford (Sadie McKee). Reality and fiction dance through the ages.
Davis allows the twin spires of delusion and dementia to spiral out of control with riveting aplomb, while Crawford, who some felt had been unfairly snubbed of an Oscar nomination, holds her own as the wheelchair-bound prisoner inside a Gothic mansion, the kind of place where one can feel murder around the corner. Even if you know about Mommie Dearest, you still feel for Crawford’s charactor and nothing can quite prepare you for an astonishing end that contains the depth of Greek tragedy.
Did the real and offscreen rivalry between the two stars really add to their onscreen frisson? It’s hard to imagine it didn’t, but despite the rumors both actresses denied behaving unprofessionally. If true, Crawford was definitely wrongly overlooked for an Oscar, given how Davis had accused her of sleeping “with every male star at MGM except Lassie”. Talk about being served a rat on a tray, methinks Aldrich packed Baby Jane with more than just a few visual metaphors.
TCM screens What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? today and in preparation I rented the DVD. It runs over two hours long (134 mins) which might test the attention spans of some, but I still find its mojo so powerful that I watched it twice. It makes me want to revisit Kiss Me Deadly too, which I still can’t believe IMDB doesn’t list as a film Aldrich is known for. At first I figured this lapse was due to algorithms based purely on box office. But when I typed in Stephen Spielberg’s name into IMDB the film’s he’s “known for” are: Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List, and … A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Really? If Spielberg isn’t “known for” Jaws I’d say the artificial intelligence at IMDB is somewhat lacking.
