BETTE DAVIS AN INTIMATE POTRAIT (5/6) 

Now BD is a Christian pastor say no more

The Old Maid was one of my favourites - and Mirrium Hopkins who was one of my favourite actresses being in it was the icing on the cake

I would not personally include THE NANNY.

WalterLiddy Not really, it's a grand achievement and a performance for the ages.

Henry Jackson not really. It's very entertaining in a gaudy and brash way but it's quite campy and hammy and it's hard to take it very seriously. The characterisation of baby Jane Hudson has been lampooned over decades by the gay community for a good reason. It's just very laughable. Those two women are absurd in their get ups and the situation they're in is just completely unrealistic and surreal. Its the worst kind of shlock possible. Yes we like it now. But we like it only because it's soooo bad and funny. Baby Jane was simply the style of the times and was essentially trying to mimick Hitchcock's style of film-making except Hitchcock would've directed baby Jane so much better. It would've been done in a more subtle way. The costuming for one would've been immaculate and more nuanced. Baby jane's make up for example is beyond ridiculous and clownish, and by today's standards just too much. Even characters like the Joker in Batman these days (similar to baby Jane in spirit as a deranged psycho) doesn't wear as much clownish make up anymore (because modern day audiences don't believe that kind of absurdity) and the performances are more nuanced. Baby Jane Hudson belonged more to a character out of Batman or a marvel comic book than it did to serious feature film making. And it also belonged to television in scale and style than it did to motion pictures. I think it would've made a great "movie of the week" (as they were labelled back in the 60s and 70s) and resembles the Batman tv series in tone, style and temperament. It reminds me of Cesar Romero playing the Joker or eartha Kitt playing catwoman. Former old film and theatre legends playing psychotic monsters is camp, it's fabulous, it's fun and it's funny. And we loved it because it's a "thing". But Oscar-worthy film making, it ain't! Unfortunately, Davis and Crawford were both exploited in this film and in the subsequent genre of "hag horror" films which followed over the next decade where we saw the likes of Crawford, Davis, De Havilland and even Elizabeth Taylor making laughably camp films which were rather embarrassing for them. But they couldn't get the right kind of work so they accepted these sorry roles through clenched teeth. Sure we love them now and we see them as cultish etc. But we mustn't forget that movies like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane were accepted by Davis out of desperation. Crawford was labelled "Box Office Poison" by LB Mayer himself and was Basically unemployable by that stage. And even Bette Davis was just getting by on all sorts of made-for-tv roles and failed pilots which were beneath her level and status in Hollywood. Women of that age were not seen as serious box office material in the 60s and could only play witches or deranged hags. Despite what the more militant feminists say, roles for women today have improved remarkably and the roles available to older women as evidenced by the kinds of fantastic and gutsy parts given these days to the likes of Streep, Mirren, Sarandon and Lange are so much more improved. Bette and Joan were just ahead of their time by several decades. Bette's best work was as follows: Now voyager, Jezebel, The Letter, Dark Victory and All About Eve. Those 5 films are where her true legacy lay. She said she liked her role of Elizabeth the first in Elizabeth and Essex but she implied the film and other actors weren't that great. But she liked her own performance and the character. For a film to be legendary though it can't just be a singular performance; it has to work as a whole and everything: script, plot, acting, direction, production values all have to work in harmony which those 5 films I mentioned did. For the most part, most of Bette's films which she admits herself were flops or "pips" (as she would've called them in her yankee way). Only those 5 stand the test of time and is why we remember her. Television reruns throughout the 1970s and 1980s helped to cement Davis's popularity (not the feature films themselves which would get chewed up by the next star-vehicle) and TV single-handedly shaped her legend through the "Re-run" via "golden years of Hollywood" type series or "Hollywood classics" all over the world where Davis-style films were played late at night or on Saturday afternoons. A whole generation of us became acquainted with this remarkable actress who was acting 30 years well before our time thanks to those television reruns. It's hard to understand the impact of free-to-air TV for generation "Netflix" because you have to remember that unlike the Netflix kids, we had no "choices." There was no competing media for us. No internet, no cable tv, no cell phones, no you tube, nothing. So we ate up those old films even though they were way before our time. It literally takes hundreds of motion pictures in an actor's career for them to be considered a legend! And even then, we remember only about 5, all up!!!!!! That's just how it works. Our collective memories are short and fractured. That's why the studio system was so good. Because it allowed actors like Bette to try various genres and styles and experiment with what worked and it allowed training and mastery of their craft. It's because of the studio system that Bette succeeded. Without it, we wouldn't have ever known who she was. Simply because hundreds of thousands of very forgettable films were made during those years via the motion picture "industry". Because no one, not even Bette Davis, was "always" a brilliant actor. Sometimes she was and sometimes she wasn't. No one, not even Garbo, was continuously good. We just "remember" the best films they made and then say they were "geniuses" or consistently amazing when they weren't.

Team Joan here

I dont think so Sunny Jim