Entertainment

Cult Movie: Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte the perfect companion piece to Baby Jane

Olvia de Havilland and Bette Davis in Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte
Olvia de Havilland and Bette Davis in Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte Olvia de Havilland and Bette Davis in Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte

ORIGINALLY made as a kind of sister film to Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? Robert Aldrich’s Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte is rarely remembered with the affection afforded to its predecessor.

Watching it today in its sparkling new Blu-ray release from Eureka as part of its 'Masters Of Cinema' range, it’s hard to see why. In many ways it is the perfect companion piece to Aldrich’s earlier sisterly love gone badly wrong epic.

Bette Davis hams it up mercilessly as Charlotte Hollis, an elderly woman left lurking around her creaky old southern mansion since her married lover was gruesomely murdered many years before.

When the county tries to tear her homestead down to build a highway, relatives and friends of the ageing spinster rally round to support her. Things get creepy, though, when the ghosts of the past start reappearing, with gruesome results.

As that plot suggests, this is a hugely entertaining psychological thriller, albeit a very silly and vastly overwrought one. I mean, what’s not to love about a movie that’s got the vicious Miss Davis furiously ripping through the scenery like a woman possessed, a cast that includes such Tinsel Town titans as Olvia de Havilland, Agnes Moorehead and Joseph Cotten and enough twisted moments of genuine nastiness to make you jump from your seat on several occasions?

It’s got all the 'Golden age of Hollywood Divas' vibe and high camp melodrama of Baby Jane and it looks amazing in stark black and white. It was a box office hit and clocked up an impressive seven Oscar nominations in 1964. It has a neat and nasty Hitchcock flavour and an air of southern melodrama that is massively appealing. The one thing that it doesn’t have, of course, is Joan Crawford.

As the splendid extras here reveal, Aldrich did originally reunite Davis and her notorious nemesis Crawford for this stab at recreating the gothic nastiness of Baby Jane, which had hit cinemas two years earlier, but the sparks that always flew between the two women made revisiting such a pairing pretty much impossible.

Filming down in hot and sweaty Louisiana, their famous rivalry spiralled swiftly out of control, with Davis hacking huge sections of Crawford’s dialogue out of the script and publicly insulting her in front of cast and crew.

Worn down by the onslaught, Crawford caught pneumonia and production was shut down for a few weeks. Once she did return her relapses were many and Aldrich sacked her, replacing her on screen with Davis’s old friend Olivia de Havilland.

Apparently Crawford cried in her hospital bed for nine hours straight before bitchily remarking to a reporter: “I’m glad for Olivia, she needs a good picture.”

Minus the tension that the Crawford and Davis interface might have brought to production Hush... Hush Sweet Charlotte may be a lesser film than Baby Jane – there are no rats, ringlets or outrageous sister assaults to enjoy here – but it’s still a gloriously overripe journey into the crazy world of Hollywood’s golden age and well worth revisiting.