Category: Double Feature

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.

In the town where I grew up there was a movie theatre – the Calvin on Michigan Avenue – that was the perfect high school date spot. For $1.25 you could see two movies – one was some film on its second run so the film was always a little battered and scratched, and the other film, well, trust me, you’d never even heard of the second film on the bill.  They were “straight to video” releases before anyone had videotape players.  Anyway, for not too much pocket money, you could bring a date and hold hands in the dark or heck, just get away from the parents for awhile. And sometimes the movies weren’t too bad.

When I went away to college, I discovered another kind of double feature, one where not only are both movies good but when they are shown together on the same night a neat sort of “discussion” starts between the films. The first one I saw was Casablanca played on the same bill as Woody Allen’s Play it Again Sam.  Though video pretty much killed the little film revue theatres, now we have the ability to make our own homerolled double features. And our double features don’t have to include snotty art house film; they can be horror movies.

The big idea for this column are suggestions for two films that might work really well together, either based on their theme, a common actor, a common situation…whatever.  And the films don’t necessarily have to be “good.” Putting one film in the right context sometimes makes different aspects noticeable, and often this means that a film that might initially be dismissed as mediocre might actually have something more profound going on.  Or for that matter, sometimes a film that’s passable on its own completely falls apart when shown beside another work. That’s the fun here.

We all get to play Dr Frankenstein.  What are fantastic “Creature Double Features” you’ve concocted? How’d they turn out?