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Double Feature Movies

Creature Double Feature: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane / Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte

…”Sweet Charlotte” features just about every thing we white Yankees fear about the South — that it’s a place of decaying plantations, murder, hysteria and small-minded small-town-ers with bad accents…

When I was a kid, before the birth of syndicated talk shows, one of the local networks ran something called “The 4:00 Movie.” A movie could be hacked to bits, pumped full of commercials and still get over in time for “The News.” Periodically, there would be a whole week of giant monster movies (Gamera and Mothra were my favorites.) And this meant that you could get home from school — if you didn’t fiddle around TOO much in the playground — in time to watch the “whole” movie. Two movies it seems like they were ALWAYS showing on the 4:00 Movie were “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane” and “Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte.” My pre-teen estimation of them was “bo-o-oring.”

But I’ve just seen both of those movies again, uncut, as an adult, and I think they’d make a dandy “Creature Double Feature.”

“Sweet Charlotte” features just about every thing we white Yankees fear about the South — that it’s a place of decaying plantations, murder, hysteria and small-minded small-town-ers with bad accents. It was “A Rose for Emily” ground-up and mixed with a pastiche of Tennesee Williams. On top of that, I find the title virtually impossible to say out loud. But it’s delicious too. I cut Joseph Cotton so much slack not because he’s a great actor, which of course he was, but because he always looked so suave. He doesn’t even look like an ass while he’s lip-syncing the utterly vapid “theme song.” And it has a nice mood of decrepitude and a few good runs at, albeit slightly overwrought, suspense.

The ideal double feature for “Sweet Charlotte” is the far superior, “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” In addition to being in black and white, the obvious link between these movies is Bette Davis. I’m sure writers more observant than myself have remarked how intriguing the choices she made late in her career, when her beauty faded and allowed her acting abilities to come to the fore. It’s really gutsy to play parts where, well, where you KNOW folks are going to hate you. Forget the clunky prologue that really doesn’t explain much and the “surprise” ending; the meat of the movie is the tortured interplay between the two sisters, both of whom have had their time in the spotlight, a time long past. It’s a great set up full of nasty psychological torture and suspense, one that would even work as a stage play, I think, and Davis and Joan Crawford play it for all it’s worth.

Watch ’em together, perhaps while sipping a mint julep on the veranda.