Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)
Directed by Robert Aldrich

Film Review

Throughout the 1950s, Robert Aldrich had steadily acquired a reputation as one of Hollywood's golden boy filmmakers, although his dream of attaining complete independence was constantly frustrated by his struggles to raise the funding for his bold and innovative brand of cinema.  Even after such diverse and well-received works as Vera Cruz (1954), The Big Knife (1955), Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Autumn Leaves (1956), Aldrich still had difficulty attracting finance.  The unexpected success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), a pretty blatant attempt to cash in on the success of the nascent psycho-thriller craze spawned by Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), gave Aldrich the stimulus he needed at a critical stage in his career.  Through this digression into crass B-movie territory the director would have far more of an impact on the cinema of the 1960s and '70s than he could ever have imagined - by bringing into being a horror sub-genre that now goes by the name Grand Dame Guignol or hagsploitation movie.

Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte is a prime example of the trashy new horror offshoot that Aldrich fathered in the mid-1960s.  It was intended as a direct follow up to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, with Bette Davis and Joan Crawford once again thrown together like slavering lions in the arena, to bite lumps out of each other for the delectation of a sensation-seeking audience.  Pandering to the base sadistic cravings of a drive-in cinema crowd may not have been the noblest of motivations for a filmmaker who was already becoming recognised as a major auteur (particularly by the leading French film critics), but this dubious dive into cheap populism allowed Aldrich to gain sufficient financial independence and public recognition to prosper and extend his range, culminating in his biggest success, The Dirty Dozen (1967).

When the writer Henry Farrell - Baby Jane's creator - offered Aldrich his unpublished potboiler novella What Ever Happened to Cousin Charlotte? the director had what must have seemed like another sure-fire hit in his sights.  The public were clamouring for a Bette Davis-Joan Crawford rematch, although neither actress was keen on the idea, the experience of Baby Jane aggravating their mutual antipathy to pathological proportions.  Crawford bitterly resented Davis being nominated for the Best Actress Award on that film (while she herself was overlooked), and did her damnedest to prevent her rival from winning the coveted Oscar.  Davis would never forgive Crawford for this act of skulduggery, with the result that their anticipated rematch came close to being scuppered scarcely after the cameras had started rolling.

Even though both actresses adored and revered Robert Aldrich, neither was keen on rerunning the production nightmares of Baby Jane.  Davis only agreed to work on a follow-up if she was made an associate producer, but by having this privileged status she immediately had an advantage over Crawford which she exploited ruthlessly.  The production got off to the shakiest of starts during its location shoot in Baton Rouge, with Davis skilfully managing to alienate the entire cast and crew against her more glamorous co-star.  Crawford's insecurities and outrage made it impossible for her to work but, unable to release herself from her contract, she adopted one of Davis's old tactics, feigning a mystery illness so that she would be unavailable to shoot her scenes.  Aldrich even went as far as hiring a private detective to expose the fraud, without success.  After production on the film had ground to a halt, the director had no choice but to sack Crawford and look for an immediate replacement, or else cancel the movie altogether.

Actresses as diverse as Loretta Young, Katharine Hepburn and Vivien Leigh were considered to replace Crawford, but no one appeared interested in the role.  It was Bette Davis who, having vetoed umpteen other choices, suggested Olivia de Havilland, an actress she had worked with successfully in the past - on such popular films as The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) and In This Our Life (1942).  At the time, de Havilland was living in Europe and had little enthusiasm for working on what was being sold as a sequel to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?  She was finally won over by Davis, whom she both greatly admired and considered a close friend.  As it turned out, the casting of de Havilland was hugely advantageous for the film.  Having distinguished herself in a similar, teasingly ambiguous role in Henry Koster's My Cousin Rachel (1952), she was perfectly suited to play the cool, scheming Myriam opposite Davis's neurotic and dangerously repressed Charlotte.

Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte has many artistic strengths (as well as one or two glaring flaws) but the one thing that makes it such a powerfully compelling piece of cinema is the electrifying tension between the two central characters - each played with a ferocious authenticity by a superlative acting talent at the height of her abilities.  It is of course interesting to speculate how the film might have fared if Crawford had stayed the course.  There would undoubtedly have been more in the way of on-screen fireworks, but after seeing de Havilland in the film it is hard to imagine any other actress in the role of Myriam.  There is a measured subtlety to her performance, deeply unsettling in the way she toys with her character's ambiguities, that allows de Havilland to appear just as menacing and impactful as Davis, without the latter's stronger personality and penchant for histrionic explosions.

Unburdened by the in-your-face vicious competitiveness that turned Baby Jane into something of a super-sadistic Clash of the Titans spectacle, Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte has a sustained aura of under-the-surface malignancy, making it the more disturbing and authentically tragic of the two films.  We are constantly reminded of the awfulness of Charlotte's predicament - which grows inexorably as the outlandish narrative unfolds - with the help of Frank De Vol's lyrical score, which includes the eerie lullaby theme that runs through the film, becoming a hit single not long after its release.  (It was Davis who suggested renaming the film after the lullaby, to weaken its connection with Baby Jane).

Whilst its two leading ladies dominate the proceedings with consummate ease, Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte is incredibly well-served by its supporting cast, which includes some of the finest dramatic actors of the period - Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Cecil Kellaway and Mary Astor.  As Myriam's nauseatingly blasé partner in crime, Cotten plays a crucial role in the intrigue - at first seemingly a co-conspirator in a cunningly conceived plot to rob Charlotte of her sanity and personal wealth, but soon revealing himself to be a vain and greedy dupe, as easily manipulated as his victim by a woman who clearly models herself on the most damning account of Lucrezia Borgia.  Cotten's Dr Bayliss is emblematic of all of the male characters in the film, who are shown to be putty in the hands of the wilier female protagonists.  Even those who mean well - like Kellaway's charming insurance investigator, one of the few characters Charlotte takes a shine to - are powerless to prevent evil from triumphing.  As is the case in a surprising number of Robert Aldrich films with strong female characters, it is the women - and only the women - who are capable of driving the narrative and directing their own destinies.

As the fearsome-looking, shockingly bedraggled Velma - Charlotte's only dependable ally - Agnes Moorehead turns in the performance of a career, virtually stealing the film in her spirited but hopelessly doomed attempts to expose Myriam for the scurrilous hellfiend that she is.  At the time of the film's first release, Moorehead was best known to American audiences for her far more glamorous and amiable portrayal of Endora in the hit TV series Bewitched.  In Aldrich's film, she is virtually unrecognisable, a scowling Rottweiler-like crone without which no crumbling Gothic mansion would be complete.  It was fitting that Moorehead should pick up an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, winning the Golden Globe in the same category.  In what was to be her cinematic swansong, albeit a cameo role, Mary Astor also makes a strong impression.  As the widow of the man who was so brutally hacked to death at the start of the film (up-and-coming star Bruce Dern), Astor holds us enthralled for every second she is on screen, subtly exposing the agonising trauma that has long haunted her character (although the reason for her torment isn't revealed until the end of the film).

Plotwise, Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte lacks the logical consistency and plausibility of Baby Jane, and the overt similarities between the two films tend to make the later film resemble a less considered carbon copy of its forerunner.  The Grand Guignol theatrics, over-done black humour and absurd plot contrivances were typical of the Psycho-inspired thrillers of this era, with far less able directors than Robert Aldrich more than willing to serve up cheap gory thrills for a sensation-hungry audience of (mostly) adolescent cinema-goers.  The film begins with a visceral wallop of a shock - a human hand and head being hacked off in a frenzied meat cleaver attack by a mystery assailant - and then manages to maintain an aura of unbroken tension and suspense as it builds to its gloriously frenetic climax, lobbing the occasional dismembered body part at the spectator along the way.  This is schlock horror at its crudest but Aldrich gives it a touch of class, fusing the tropes of Southern Gothic melodrama, classic Gothic horror and contemporary psycho-thriller into something fresh and distinctive, pre-empting the seductively stylish Giallo horror trend in Italian cinema of the mid-to-late 1960s.  The film's second half is less of a complacent rip-off and more a respectful homage to H.G. Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (1955), a popular French thriller that had been emulated to death over the previous decade by unimaginative writers and directors all-too-willing to clamber aboard any passing bandwagon.

Robert Aldrich's mise-en-scène is as meticulous and visually compelling as ever, the highpoint being a stunningly weird hallucinatory sequence which sees Charlotte put into a drug-induced trance and forced to relive the traumatic incident that ruined her life almost forty years before.  The vibrant party scene that opened the film is seemingly rerun, but now from Charlotte's perspective, the faces of the guests washed out by some imaginative spot lighting and use of gauzes to make them resemble faceless dummies.  It is a genuinely unnerving representation of the dream state - far stranger, far more frightening than anything offered by any other film of the period  - and culminates in the film's most nightmarish image, Charlotte being invited to dance by her handless and headless lover.

The feelings of anxiety and repression, the hellish reality that has defined Charlotte's Stygian existence throughout her 37 years of solitary confinement, then worsened by Myriam's Machiavellian mischief-making, are starkly evoked by Joseph Biroc's atmospheric, overly emphatic noir photography.  Rich with oppressive shadows and ingenious optical effects suggestive of dark undercurrents and extreme mental derangement, this makes the most of William Glasgow's inspired art direction, which owes a great deal to expressionistic horror classics of the past, notably Paul Leni's The Cat and the Canary (1927) and Universal's long run of Gothic horror classics, from Frankenstein (1931) onwards.  Right from the start, trapped in her rotting labyrinthine Louisiana mansion like a willing tribute act to Norma Desmond and Miss Havisham, the reclusive Charlotte appears to be stuck at the mouldy heart of the nastiest cobwell in Hell.  The question we are constantly forced to ask ourselves is: which is she - the spider or the fly?  What are the reasons for the guilt and shame that keep Charlotte a prisoner in this creepy old mausoleum, in which her only companion is a mangy relic of a gorgon who looks like something that has just escaped from the attic of the Addams Family?

Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte's seductively stylish visuals and bold directorial flourishes offer ample compensation for a script (not one of Lukas Heller's best) which doesn't bear close scrutiny and abounds with patently risible plot inconsistencies.  Does it matter that narrative sense goes almost totally AWOL from the film's midpoint when the lead performances are so utterly and consistently enthralling?  Throughout her heyday Olivia de Havilland was best known for playing the virtuous maiden, but as the coldly conniving Myriam she earns a worthy place among the most memorable of Hollywood villainesses, a Tom Ripley-type arch-sociopath whose malevolent cunning is carefully concealed behind a mask of simulated compassion and gentility.  The screenwriter's crafty attempts at muddying the waters by diverting suspicion on to Velma or Charlotte (both made up to resemble seasoned habituées of a Bedlam-style madhouse) are what make the ultimate revelation of Myriam's extreme villainy all the more sickening.

De Havilland is stunning in this film but even she cannot help being eclipsed by her even more monstrously charismatic co-star.  Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte is arguably Bette Davis's greatest screen triumph, a part that connects her previous acclaimed roles (most obviously her Oscar-winning turn in Jezebel (1938)) with the rogues' gallery of matriarchs, misfits and monsters that would predominate in the gloriously eccentric autumn of her career.  Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte may have been sold to a '60s audience as a lurid shock-a-minute psycho-thriller but Davis elevates it to something much more worthy, an intensely profound and poignant study in human suffering - one that touches the heart as well as chilling the blood.

It is a tribute to Bette Davis's commitment to her art that she does not play down to the trashy nature of the subject matter but instead gives it her utmost with a performance of exceptional quality, one that is charged to a dizzying degree with pathos and gut-wrenching human feeling.  As Myriam's true nature comes into focus, we are shocked to discover just how wide of the mark our first impressions of Charlotte are.  So potent is the image of the cheating woman in her blood-soaked ball gown at the start of the film that it is hard to shake off the notion that Charlotte is a deranged killer.  Reinforced by the woman's uncontrolled outbursts and ill-treatment of others, our initial prejudices persist, until Davis finally compels us to connect with her character and we see the full extent of the injustice she has endured for so long.  It is in the gruelling inhumanity suffered by Charlotte that the film's true horror lies.

Bette Davis has earned many accolades in the course of her career, but here she deserves special praise for her shockingly convincing depiction of a human mind disintegrating under the strain of internal and external pressures.  Charlotte's final breakdown at the terrifying climax of the film is almost too painful to watch.  It is as if the poor woman's mercilessly crushed soul is being dragged out of her broken body by a pack of Satanically possessed wild dogs - the kind of unthinkable visceral suffering you would not expect to find outside the confines of a well-stocked medieval torture chamber.  How enjoyable is the payback that Charlotte is able to deliver in the surprise instalment that immediately follows - another sadistic shocker, but one that we thoroughly delight in as Nemesis seizes the day with a demonic vengeance.

Predictably, Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte was met with mixed criticism on its initial release in 1964.  Even though many critics were quick to write it off as just another example of B-movie psycho-trash, others gave it more positive notices and the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards (in categories that included Best Cinematography and Best Direction, but - unfathomably - no nomination for Davis).  It may not have been the unqualified smash hit that What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? had been (thanks no doubt to the long-anticipated Davis-Crawford confrontation) but it still turned in a decent profit and gave a further badly needed boost to Aldrich and his two leading ladies.

More significantly, the film established Grand Dame Guignol as one of the key horror sub-genres of the era, with countless similar 'hag horror' offerings being served up for audiences who couldn't get enough gargoyle-watching kicks.  For some time, Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte was considered a minor entry in Aldich's mostly impressive oeuvre, paling even in comparison with its slightly better behaved sibling What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?  Over the past few decades, however, the film has enjoyed something of a reappraisal, rising from minor cult classic to one of the most admired, certainly one of the most influential, horror offerings of its time.

Bette Davis allowed herself to become the queen of the hagsploitation genre, lending it an air of respectability in such cult classics as The Nanny (1965) and The Anniversary (1968), although legion was the array of fading divas from Hollywood's Golden Age who were willing to prostitute their talents and plaster themselves with grease-paint in a desperate bid to stave off obscurity as psycho-biddies - sinister talon-waving homicidal harridans - to satisfy a jaded contemporary audience's craving for the monstrous and macabre.  Robert Aldrich's two full-throttle contributions to Grand Dame Guignol are among the classier entries in this most dubious of exploitation genres - the trashy surface impressions belied by the intense psychological richness that lies beneath.  The personal tragedies of Baby Jane Hudson, Charlotte Hollis and their ilk have an all-too apparent resonance with the fate of those once esteemed pulchritudinous lovelies who ended up having to play them on screen in the latest development of the circus Freak Show.  Beauty is as transitory as youth, and once both are gone what is there to do but man up and grow old as disgracefully as possible?  As Bette Davis herself once remarked, 'Old age ain't no place for sissies.'

Film Synopsis

In 1927, wealthy Southern landowner Sam Hollis is outraged on learning that his young daughter Charlotte, a prominent society belle, has been having an affair with a married man, John Mayhew.  At Hollis's insistence, Mayhew breaks off the relationship, but a short while later he is murdered with a meat cleaver, his head and hand severed in a frenzied attack.  Charlotte is the obvious culprit as she appears not long afterwards at a party, her dress stained with blood, but Hollis's money and influence keep her safe from prosecution and the killer is never brought to justice.  37 years later, Charlotte is living alone in the family home in Louisiana, her only companion being her faithful ageing servant  Velma.  A total recluse, she is thought to be insane by her neighbours, who remain convinced that she was the one who killed her lover all those years ago.

With the highway commission threatening to pull down her mansion as part of a road development, Charlotte begs her cousin Myriam to come and lend her moral support.  Myriam was once a poor relation of the Hollis family, living in their home at the time of the brutal murder.  Now she is a wealthy and eligible spinster, a far more attractive creature than the withered neurotic hag that Charlotte has become over her long years of isolation.  At first, Myriam appears glad to be reunited with her older cousin and their mutual friend Dr Drew Bayliss, with whom she once had a romantic interest.  Velma begins to suspect that Myriam's motives are far from benign and does her best to frighten the interloper away, without success.  Meanwhile, an English insurance investigator named Mr Willis turns up at the house, ostensibly to shed some light on the mysterious killing of John Mayhew.

The dead man's widow Mrs Mayhew seems strangely reluctant to confide in Willis - she clearly knows far more than she pretends - and the investigator's attempt to gain Charlotte's confidence ends with an unceremonious expulsion from the house when she has one of her temper tantrums.  Velma's suspicions about Myriam prove to be well-founded, but before she can act to thwart her dastardly plan she falls to her death after a tussle with her enemy on the staircase.  With Drew's help, Myriam manages to dress this murder up as an unfortunate accident and she is able to proceed with her diabolical plan - to drive Charlotte insane so that she can steal her immense fortune, with a little help from her friend Dr Bayliss.  Regrettably for her, things do not work out quite as planned...