The tagline for Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? might as well have been: “Watch two aging Hollywood legends claw each other’s eyes out while the camera keeps rolling.” In theory, that sounds irresistible—a mix of Gothic horror, psychological thriller, and behind‑the‑scenes catfight. In practice, the film is a bloated, shrill chamber piece that mistakes screaming for suspense and grotesquery for depth.
The Plot: Sister Act from Hell
The story begins in vaudeville, 1917. Baby Jane Hudson is a child star—spoiled, screechy, and cursed with a voice that could peel wallpaper. Her older sister Blanche, shy and overlooked, simmers quietly in the background. Time flips the tables: Jane’s career fizzles as she drinks her way through Hollywood, while Blanche blossoms into a successful actress. Until, one night, Blanche is crippled in a mysterious car “accident” unofficially blamed on Jane.
By 1962, the sisters share a decaying mansion like ghosts haunting each other. Blanche (Joan Crawford), confined to a wheelchair, is the picture of dignified suffering. Jane (Bette Davis), a drunken wreck, torments Blanche with psychological and physical cruelty—serving her a dead rat for dinner, imitating her voice on the phone, locking her in her room like a prisoner of war. Blanche dreams of escape, but Jane spirals deeper into delusion, rehearsing her old vaudeville act with the help of a lecherous pianist (Victor Buono).
It’s misery porn dressed as a thriller. Two hours of Crawford gasping and Davis cackling until the film staggers to a beachside finale where Blanche reveals, in a soap‑opera twist, that she caused her own accident. Cue Davis’s baby‑voiced lament: “You mean all this time, we could have been friends?” The line is meant to devastate. It mostly inspires eye rolls.
Performances: High Camp, Low Returns
Bette Davis goes full kabuki as Baby Jane. With caked makeup, smeared lipstick, and bug‑eyed hysteria, she delivers a performance so big it doesn’t fit inside the frame. Subtlety isn’t on the menu; every gesture is dialed to eleven, as if she were auditioning for Psycho on Broadway. At times, it’s mesmerizing. Mostly, it’s exhausting.
Joan Crawford, meanwhile, sits in her wheelchair like a martyr carved from marble. She acts with her eyebrows and eyes, telegraphing fear in silent‑movie pantomime. It’s dignified, yes, but monotonous. After ninety minutes of wide‑eyed gasps, you start rooting for Jane to push her down the stairs just to shake things up.
Victor Buono, in his debut, at least injects some life. His pianist Edwin Flagg is grotesque in his own right—opportunistic, greedy, and almost cartoonishly slimy. He’s the only one who seems to know he’s in a camp horror melodrama and plays it with the appropriate leer.
Style: Grand Guignol or Just Grand Guignonsense?
Aldrich clearly wanted to create a Gothic nightmare, filled with decaying Hollywood mansions, shadows, and grotesque caricatures. What he delivers is more of a slog. The film’s pacing is glacial, dragging its one‑note conceit through two hours of repetition. The same beats recur: Jane screams, Blanche pleads, Jane drinks, Blanche schemes. Rinse, repeat, refill the whiskey bottle.
The cinematography, in stark black‑and‑white, occasionally conjures atmosphere. But more often, it highlights the theatrical staginess. You can practically hear the camera operators yawning between setups.
Dark Humor: Dead Rats and Flat Twists
If the movie has value, it’s in its unintentional comedy. Baby Jane serving her sister a cooked rat on a silver platter plays less like horror than like a grotesque episode of Hell’s Kitchen. Jane’s drunken rehearsals of her vaudeville routine are so overblown they verge on self‑parody. Watching Davis belt out “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy” in cracked baby‑voice is terrifying—but not for the reasons intended.
And then there’s the ending. Blanche’s sudden confession that she crippled herself is meant to reframe the entire story as a tragedy of misunderstanding. Instead, it feels like a desperate twist slapped on to wring sympathy for Jane. “All this time, we could have been friends,” Jane laments. No, Jane, all this time we could have been watching a better movie.
The Real Horror: The Crawford–Davis Rivalry
Much has been written about the legendary off‑screen feud between Davis and Crawford. Their mutual loathing fueled the film’s publicity, and perhaps its initial success. But as a cinematic experience, knowing that the actresses hated each other doesn’t make the shrieking matches more compelling. It makes them tawdrier, like watching two divas locked in a reality‑TV cage match decades before Bravo existed.
What’s worse, the film relies on this feud to prop itself up. Without the Crawford–Davis backstory, the movie is little more than a drawn‑out domestic squabble with horror window dressing.
Reception: Acclaimed Then, Overpraised Now
At release, the film was hailed as daring, grotesque, and psychologically bold. It earned Davis her final Oscar nomination and revived both stars’ careers. Over time, it’s been canonized as a camp classic, a pioneering “psycho‑biddy” film, and even preserved in the National Film Registry.
But strip away the cultural baggage—the feud, the camp appreciation, the novelty of watching two Hollywood titans go feral—and what remains is a one‑trick pony: two hours of misery and overacting. Compared to Hitchcock’s lean Psycho(1960), released just two years earlier, Baby Jane feels like a carnival sideshow stretching a single grotesque gag into eternity.
Why It Fails: Repetition, Not Revelation
The problem isn’t the premise. Sibling rivalry curdled into madness has plenty of potential. The problem is execution. The film never develops its characters beyond grotesques. Jane is a drunk banshee, Blanche a saintly victim. Their dance of torment never evolves, never deepens, just repeats until the viewer is numb. Horror depends on escalation; here, the only escalation is in decibel levels.
Final Verdict: Whatever Happened to Subtlety?
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? has its place in film history, but that doesn’t mean it holds up as entertainment. It’s shrill, overwrought, and ultimately exhausting, a spectacle more notable for its off‑screen gossip than its on‑screen artistry.
Yes, it birthed the “psycho‑biddy” genre, yes, it’s camp fodder, yes, it has historical significance. But as a movie to sit down and watch? It’s a rat on a platter—memorable, grotesque, and not particularly nourishing.
Rating: 2 out of 4 stars. More hissy fit than horror, more stunt casting than storytelling. Whatever happened to Baby Jane? She bored us to death.
