What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

The ultimate diva movie, with Bette Davis chewing up the scenery as an ageing ex-child star dedicated to tormenting Joan Crawford as her wheelchair-bound sister.

Even if a screening is sold out, tickets are often available 30 minutes before the start of the film at the box office at each venue.


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  • Director-Producer Robert Aldrich
  • Screenwriter Lukas Heller
  • With Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Victor Buono
  • USA 1962
  • 132 mins
  • UK distribution Park Circus

Is this the ultimate diva movie? It is certainly the most perverse, and one of the most acerbic takes on Hollywood since Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard – its grand guignol excesses leading to a rash of imitations, from Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte onwards. The setting is a decaying Hollywood mansion, where one-time child star ‘Baby Jane’ Hudson (Bette Davis) tends and mentally tortures her wheelchair-bound sister Blanche (Joan Crawford), resenting her adult success as a film star. Into this seething mix slithers opportunist Victor Buono, who is to help Baby jane revive her career. The film belongs to Davis, who adopts career-changing make-up and costumes to portray the grotesqueries of a Shirley temple caricature who can’t cast off her precocious infant past. Restored on its 50th birthday from worn and decomposing materials by Ned Price at Warner Bros, Baby Jane now looks as fresh and authentically musty as Aldrich intended.
Clyde Jeavons

Robert Aldrich filmography

1953 Big Leaguer
1954 World for Ransom [uncred]; Apache; Vera Cruz
1955 Kiss Me Deadly; The Big Knife
1956 Autumn Leaves; Attack
1959 Ten Seconds to Hell; The Angry Hills
1961 The Last Sunset
1962 What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
1963 Sodom and Gomorrah; 4 for Texas
1964 Hush... Hush Sweet Charlotte
1965 The Flight of the Phoenix
1967 The Dirty Dozen
1968 The Legend of Lylah Clare; The Killing of Sister George
1969 The Greatest Mother of Them All [s]
1970 Too Late the Hero
1971 The Grissom Gang
1972 Ulzana’s Raid
1973 Emperor of the North Pole (Emperor of the North)
1974 The Mean Machine
1975 Hustle
1977 Twilight’s Last Gleaming; The Choirboys
1979 The Frisco Kid
1981 ...All the Marbles (The California Dolls)