Attention, Scream Queens! In honour of Halloween, for the October Lobotomy Room film club presentation we’ve scheduled the apogee of the “hagsploitation” genre Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) starring Bette Davis at her most frenzied! Wednesday 16 October! Come and settle-in for an evening of spine-tingling Southern Gothic horror in the Tiki splendour of Fontaine's Bamboo Lounge!
Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies is the FREE monthly film club downstairs at Fontaine’s bar (Dalston’s most unique nite spot!) devoted to Bad Movies We Love, specializing in the kitsch, the cult and the camp! (Our motto: Bad Movies for Bad People!). Remember: admission is FREE so that you can buy more cocktails! (One drink minimum).
“Millionaire and southern belle Charlotte
Hollis guards a deep, dark secret. When cousin Miriam comes to stay with
Charlotte, mystifying events begin to occur, driving the latter closer to
insanity.”
/ IMDb’s synopsis for Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte
(1964) /
/ "Suspense that starts with a whisper … and mounts to a shattering unpredictable climax!” /
Here at Lobotomy Room we
love
hagsploitation. For anyone unfamiliar, it’s the disreputable and campy subgenre
(sometimes also referred to as Pyscho-Biddy or Grande Dame Guignol) whereby
aging,
hungry-for-work leading ladies of
Hollywood’s Golden Age swallowed their pride, lowered their standards and
slummed it in gruesome horror movies in the 1960s and 70s.
What Ever Happened
to Baby Jane? (1962) – which revived the flagging careers of arch-rivals Bette
Davis and Joan Crawford - is universally credited as inaugurating the whole
cycle, but you
could argue that Gloria Swanson as homicidal silent movie diva Norma
Desmond in
Sunset Boulevard (1950) was the original hagsploitation
anti-heroine. And surely Norman Bates' toxic mother in
Psycho (1960) merits a mention?
/ Bette Davis as Charlotte Hollis /
In any case, these horror flicks offered a temporary fillip to
the flatlining careers of actresses as disparate as Tallulah Bankhead (Die, Die
My Darling, 1965), Veronica Lake (Flesh Feast, 1970), Miriam Hopkins (Savage
Intruder, 1970) and Shelley Winters (in multiple Curtis Harrington-directed
thrillers like Who Slew Auntie Roo? and What’s the Matter with Helen? both
1971).
With some justification, the genre has been
denounced as both misogynist and ageist. It essentially positions the aged woman
as inherently horrific, after all. These are horror films about the ravages of
time! But on the plus side, these films also offered juicy, demanding lead
roles to veteran actresses who’d been otherwise sidelined by their industry for
the crime of growing older. It's complicated!
Hagsploitation movies mostly tapered-off by
the late 1970s, but it never entirely vanished from popular culture. Note how
sixty-something Oscar winner Jessica Lange (whose film career had long been in
the doldrums) triumphantly re-invented herself playing homicidal harridans in
Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story on television. I’d argue the campy
psychological thriller Greta (2018) starring Isabelle Huppert is a prime
example of modern hagsploitation.
/ Crawford and Davis promoting Hush at the beginning of filming, before it all went tits up /
Hush, Hush … Sweet Charlotte is the
follow-up to the unexpected box office victory of What Ever Happened to Baby
Jane? It was meant to jubilantly reunify director Robert Aldrich with his Baby
Jane leading ladies Davis and Crawford – but as you probably already know
(especially if you watched Ryan Murphy’s wildly entertaining 2017 TV mini-series
Feud: Bette and Joan) that went catastrophically wrong. Penny Stalling pithily
recaps what happened in her 1978 book Flesh and Fantasy:
“Despite the fact that Bette Davis and Joan
Crawford had been bitter rivals for years, Jack Warner managed to get them to
agree to co-star in his upcoming thriller What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The
press predicted that all hell would break loose when the girls got together,
but director Robert Aldrich, keenly aware that his budget couldn’t afford
costly delays, kept the girls apart as much as possible when they weren’t
working. When the two screen queens were reunited for Hush, Hush … Sweet
Charlotte, however, the predicted fireworks became a reality. Riding high as a
result of the earlier film’s success, Bette and Joan apparently felt they could
afford to engage in some impromptu histrionics for Charlotte’s cast and crew.
The hostilities ceased when Crawford became ill. After doctors told her that
she would have to bow out, Crawford cried for three days in her hospital bed.
When she read that Olivia de Havilland was to replace her, Crawford announced
that she was happy for Olivia since she “needed the work.” A victorious Davis
posed for on-the-set candids sipping a Coca-Cola.”
Interestingly, de Havilland was not the
first choice for Crawford’s substitution. The character of Miriam was also
reportedly offered to Katharine Hepburn, Loretta Young, Barbara Stanwyck and
Vivien Leigh first. (Some accounts claim Stanwyck was proffered the role of
Jewel Mayhew – the part played by Mary Astor – rather than Miriam). Leigh – de
Havilland’s co-star in Gone with the Wind - rejected the opportunity, bitchily explaining,
“I could just about look at Joan Crawford’s face on a Southern plantation at
6:00 in the morning; I couldn’t possibly look at Bette Davis’.”
(In fact, Hush was the second film in a row
in which de Havilland stepped into a role originally intended for Crawford.
Prior to this she played the lead in ultra-lurid shocker Lady in a Cage (1964)
when Crawford bowed-out. (This also means Hush wasn’t de Havilland’s first
foray into hagsploitation)).
Understandably, a lot of people are preoccupied
with what
Hush would have been like with Crawford as Miriam. As a great
cinematic “What If?” it ranks up there with Judy Garland as Helen Lawson
instead of Susan Hayward in
Valley of the Dolls (1967). But hell, I
love raspy-voiced
bitch goddess Hayward hamming it up and growling her way through
Valley, and I
love de Havilland in
Hush. To fixate on Crawford does de Havilland a grave disservice.
Why not appreciate de Havilland’s performance on its own considerable merits? In
the 1930s and 40s she specialized in exuding sweetness as exemplars of virtuous
femininity, most famously as the demure Maid Marion opposite Errol Flynn in
The
Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and as Melanie Wilkes in
Gone with the Wind
(1939). Cast against type, de Havilland is spellbinding in an evil role (sorry –
spoiler!), portraying Miriam with purring subtlety. It’s genuinely unsettling
when Miriam suddenly betrays her true nature and turns nasty or violent, her
usual honeyed ladylike voice abruptly shuttling to a snarl.
(I’m trying to think of other examples of
de Havilland exploring her inner bitch onscreen. She’s mesmerizing in the
underrated
The Dark Mirror (1946) playing identical twin sisters, one good and
one bad. The sociopathic one is inevitably far more compelling). It’s also
worth noting that de Havilland - now 103 years old – is the sole cast member of
Hush still alive and in fact is now one of the very few surviving Golden Age
Hollywood-era stars. At this point her only peer is Kirk Douglas (102).
/ Can you say
fierce? Joan Crawford as Miriam /
All the footage shot with Crawford as
Miriam has seemingly vanished and to this day remains unseen. Presumably it was destroyed at the time: if
it still existed, it would surely have cropped-up as a DVD extra or in a
documentary by now? But watch for the scene where Miriam’s cab first pulls up
to the driveway of Charlotte’s sprawling Southern mansion (approximately 28
minutes and thirty seconds into the film). De Havilland is wearing a hat and no
sunglasses. In one fleeting shot we get the briefest, almost subliminal but
unmistakable blink-and-you-miss-it glimpse of Crawford (wearing no hat and dark
sunglasses) peering out of the cab’s passenger window. Presumably this was left-in
in error. In all likelihood, this is the sole surviving fragment of Crawford as
Miriam.
/ Olivia de Havilland as Miriam /
The film’s original title was to be What
Ever Happened to Cousin Charlotte? (the title of the short story it’s based
on). But it was decided this was too like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and
it was re-titled (reportedly at Bette Davis’ own insistence).
The painting of young Charlotte displayed
on the wall is recycled from Bette Davis’ role as petulant southern belle Julie
in the 1938 film
Jezebel.
/ See Bette Davis scream and scream again (and again. And again. And then some more. Seriously, she screams a lot in this film!) /
Hush doesn’t just reassemble Davis and
director Aldrich from Baby Jane: the cast of Hush also includes Victor Buono (1938 - 1982),
seen in a flashback as Charlotte’s father. (In reality, Buono was young enough
to be Davis’ son). Speaking of age: as someone who certainly ain't getting any younger, it’s very
enjoyable watching a film in which all the lead characters are on the wrong
side of fifty!
The basic premise of Hush (people are conspiring
to make Charlotte have a nervous breakdown and pin a murder on her) is
essentially the same plot-line as Strait-Jacket starring Joan Crawford (1964).
Think of Hush as the Mercedes Benz or Rolls
Royce of hagsploitation. It was made with a luxe high budget, featured a distinguished
all-star cast (not just Davis and de Havilland, but Joseph Cotton, Mary Astor
and Agnes Moorehead) and was filmed on location on an actual Southern mansion
(the Houmas House Plantation and Gardens in Baton Rouge, Louisiana). The sultry
Southern Gothic atmosphere simmering with resentments, family tragedies and
secrets almost hints at Tennessee Williams terrain. The black and white
cinematography is exceptionally beautiful and velvet-y (watch for a haunting shot
of de Havilland peering out of a misty window).
In fact,
Hush is almost
too plush for its
own good: hagsploitation is better when it’s starker, nastier and more
hardboiled.
Baby Jane, for example, was made on a significantly lower budget. I’d
argue William Castle’s primal, trashy low-budget b-movie
Strait-Jacket starring Joan Crawford is
superior, more urgent hagsploitation than
Hush, which feels overextended and bogged-down
with flashbacks, art-y dream sequences and way too many cliched shots of
characters prowling around darkened hallways.
And
Hush shamelessly plagiarizes one climactic moment from the French
film
Les Diaboliques (1955)!
As Paul Roen argues in volume one of his
essential High Camp: A Gay Guide to Camp and Cult Films (1994), Hush is
pioneering in one regard, though: “the historical significance of Hush … is
that it brought graphic gore into the mainstream. There had of course been
other gory films before this one, but they didn’t have stars and weren’t
nominated for Oscars. (Contrary to popular perception, Psycho contains no
gore). Before we even get to the opening titles, Hush … shows us Bruce Dern’s
hand being severed with a meat cleaver, blood splashing on a cupid and Dern
waving the gruesome stump of his arm at the camera.”
Hush is also one of the shrillest, loudest
films you’ll ever watch, comparable to John Waters’ Desperate Living (1977)
where everyone screams their lines at full volume. It certainly captures volatile
monstre sacree Davis at full screech and at her most abrasive. Look, of course
I love Bette Davis. Everybody loves Bette Davis. But in Hush Davis is borderline
insufferable at points! Charlotte Hollis is not nearly as nuanced a
characterization as her earlier Baby Jane Hudson. Davis seemingly assumed the success
of Baby Jane meant she should crank up the histrionics even more. Was Aldrich
too intimidated by the volcanic Davis to reign her in? And she’s matched by
character actress par excellence Agnes Moorehead as loyal housekeeper Lydia: both
ham it up shamelessly. (Odd to think the usually excellent Moorehead –
overacting here as if her life depends on it – was nominated for Best
Supporting Actress Oscar for this performance). The acting honours in Hush
truly belong to the actors who dial-down the hysteria: de Havilland, Cotton and
notably Mary Astor. In her last-ever film, Astor makes a haunting impression in
a fleeting guest star appearance as Charlotte’s old rival Jewel Mayhew,
lamenting “the ruined finery” of her genteelly impoverished old age. Davis’ eye-bulging, jibbering nervous breakdown towards the end reminded me of Divine’s as Francine Fishpaw
in John Waters’ Polyester.
Further reading:
Read my analysis of Feud: Bette and Joan here.
Read Ken Anderson's essay on
Hush here.
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