By the 1970s, Hollywood was still busy flogging the carcass of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? like a stubborn mule that refused to die. The genre was dubbed “psycho-biddy” or “hagsploitation”—aging actresses shrieking, stabbing, and staggering through melodramas that promised camp thrills and often delivered only embarrassment. Into this blood-spattered subgenre tottered What’s the Matter With Helen? (1971), directed by Curtis Harrington and starring Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters, a pairing so odd it makes you wonder if the casting director lost a bet.
The answer to the film’s title, of course, is “everything.”
Shirley Temples and Shirley Nonsense
The premise begins promisingly enough. Two Midwestern mothers (Reynolds and Winters) flee Iowa after their murderous sons are sent to prison. They relocate to Depression-era Hollywood, change their names, and open a dance academy to turn little girls into Shirley Temples. This could have been biting satire: stage mothers grooming starlets against a backdrop of sin and insanity. Instead, the film serves up endless montages of pigtailed children squeaking “Animal Crackers in My Soup” while Winters glowers like a demented lunch lady.
Horror thrives on menace. Helen offers tap shoes.
Shelley Winters Eats the Scenery
Shelley Winters, bless her hungry soul, never met a piece of scenery she couldn’t chew like a pit bull on a T-bone. As Helen, she lurches from paranoia to religious mania to outright lunacy, all while sweating like a woman trapped inside her own bad choices. She hallucinates, prays to evangelist Sister Alma (a wasted Agnes Moorehead), and slaughters rabbits for reasons known only to God and the screenwriter. By the climax, she’s grinning like an overmedicated carnival clown, propping up Debbie Reynolds’ corpse in a tutu while hammering out “Goody Goody” on the piano.
It’s meant to be chilling. It plays like an audition for The Gong Show.
Debbie Reynolds: America’s Sweetheart Goes Psycho
Reynolds, meanwhile, tries her best as Adelle, the prettier, perkier half of the duo. But no amount of Shirley Temple curls can disguise the fact that she is hopelessly miscast. Debbie Reynolds as a Depression-era murderess is like casting Doris Day as Lizzie Borden. She smiles, she flutters, she accepts marriage proposals from Dennis Weaver as if she’s still rehearsing for Singin’ in the Rain. Then Shelley Winters stabs her in the back—both literally and figuratively—and the film finally finds its dark heart, about eighty minutes too late.
Reynolds, to her credit, later admitted she produced the film herself and took no salary. Judging by the results, the money saved should have been spent on a better script, or at least a sturdier rabbit cage.
Dennis Weaver and the Men Who Didn’t Matter
Dennis Weaver shows up as Reynolds’ love interest, Lincoln Palmer, the kind of man who looks like he should be selling vacuum cleaners door to door instead of whisking starlets to elopement. His romance with Reynolds has all the heat of a bowl of cold oatmeal. Micheál Mac Liammóir floats through as Hamilton Starr, an elocution teacher whose main contribution is making everyone wish for an elocution lesson to cut through the ham. The rest of the cast is a parade of red herrings, background nuns, and pint-sized Shirley Temples whose tap shoes echo like nails in the coffin of tension.
Horror or High Camp?
Curtis Harrington was a director of some style (Games has its moments, and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? at least knew it was camp). Here, though, he never decides whether he’s making horror, melodrama, or a comedy of bad wigs. The result is schizophrenic: one minute Winters is hallucinating mutilated corpses, the next minute Reynolds is flirting under neon lights, and then suddenly a man is tumbling down the stairs in a scene shot with all the suspense of a fumbled dress rehearsal.
When Winters finally snaps and stages her grotesque puppet show with Reynolds’ corpse, the audience is supposed to be horrified. Instead, most viewers are fighting the urge to laugh—because nothing says “horror” quite like Debbie Reynolds lashed to a ladder while Shelley Winters bangs out Tin Pan Alley hits.
Production Gossip: More Fun Than the Film
The behind-the-scenes stories are juicier than the movie. Winters signed on without reading the script, which shows. Reynolds claimed the prop knife was switched with a real one before her stabbing scene—life imitating art in a way that makes one wonder if even the crew had grown tired of the project. Harrington originally wanted to set the story in the present day but changed it to the 1930s for nostalgia’s sake, which only makes the whole thing look like a studio backlot revival with added bloodstains.
The Psycho-Biddy Curse
The film desperately wants to join the pantheon of hagsploitation classics, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Baby Janeor even Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Instead, it limps along as a footnote, notable only for its bizarre casting. Winters had the grotesque intensity the genre required, but Reynolds brought the wrong kind of baggage: America’s perky sweetheart, forever associated with musicals, now thrust into a world of madness and murder. The dissonance is jarring.
It’s one thing to watch Bette Davis eat a rat. It’s another to watch Debbie Reynolds in tap shoes trying to look terrified.
Final Act of Madness
The ending is meant to shock. Lincoln arrives, expecting to elope with Adelle, only to find Winters hammering away at “Goody Goody” while Reynolds’ corpse stares blankly in sequins. Helen cackles, lost to insanity. The camera lingers, daring the audience to tremble. Instead, it inspires eye rolls. By then, the only insane thing is that anyone thought this script was scary.
Final Verdict: What’s the Matter With This Movie?
What’s the Matter With Helen? is the cinematic equivalent of a nervous breakdown in a vaudeville theater. It wants to be horror, but it’s too campy. It wants to be camp, but it takes itself too seriously. It wants to be a character study, but the characters are shrieking caricatures.
The film does have moments—Agnes Moorehead sermonizing as a radio evangelist, Winters slumping into madness with sweaty conviction—but they drown in a sea of tonal confusion. It’s neither frightening nor funny, merely tedious with occasional bursts of accidental hilarity.
What’s the matter with Helen? Shelley Winters, Debbie Reynolds, the script, the direction, the rabbits, and just about everything else.
If you’re a fan of unintentional camp, by all means, pour a drink, dim the lights, and laugh yourself silly. Otherwise, the best advice is simple: don’t answer the phone when this one calls.
