⭐SUPER-BLOOPER: Bogart and Bette Davis ⭐

There is just something so blissfully beautiful about this - my two all-time-favorite Old Hollywood genius actors, together at last, in a truly off-the-cuff moment. Betty comes charging in at the wrong time, quickly realizes her mistake and darts off-camera again. Then she and Bogie come out to ask the director what they're supposed to be doing. It only lasts a minute, and I've slowed it down to make it last longer. . . but oh, is Bogie gorgeous in this, as is Bette the natural firebrand beauty, just so casually blazing. Charisma streams off these two, yet strangely enough, they do not cancel each other out. I don't think they ever starred as a romantic couple - I think this was Dark Victory, in which Bogart only played a minor role. But who cares? Having them in the same UNIVERSE together is magical, powerful and special. No one lives to equal them, but I am grateful that they "were" - and, even better than that, we have a record.

Miss Gladys Cooper

I was drawn to these sumptuous photos of early-20th-century actress Gladys Cooper because of her unconventional looks - not exactly pretty, not classically beautiful, and almost never smiling, but nonetheless captivating. Straddling the line between Edwardian primness and roaring '20s excess, she alternates between a buttoned-down formality and a certain smoky wildness, her long hair unexpectedly bursting out of its combs in a tumbling waterfall. The rest of the time she is just plain elegant, though her face is composed to the point of being unreadable. But where have I seen that face before? Where have I heard that name?

OF COURSE!

THIS Gladys Cooper, the one who played Bette Davis's domineering, repressive mother in one of my all-time favorite movies, Now, Voyager.

But there was so much more to her than that.

Dame Gladys Constance Cooper (18 December 1888 – 17 November 1971) was an English actress whose career spanned seven decades on stage, in films and on television.

Beginning as a teenager in Edwardian musical comedy and pantomime, she was starring in dramatic roles and silent films before the First World War. She also became a manager of the Playhouse Theatre from 1917 to 1933, where she played many roles. 

From the early 1920s, Cooper was winning praise in plays by W. Somerset Maugham and others. In the 1930s, she was starring steadily both in the West End and on Broadway. Moving to Hollywood in 1940, Cooper found success in a variety of character roles; she was nominated for three Academy Awards, the last one as Mrs. Higgins in My Fair Lady (1964). Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, she mixed her stage and film careers, continuing to star on stage until her last year. 

Early in her stage career, she was criticised for being too stiff. Aldous Huxley dismissed her performance in Home and Beauty, writing "she is too impassive, too statuesque, playing all the time as if she were Galatea, newly unpetrified and still unused to the ways of the living world." Evidently, her acting improved during this period, as Maugham praised her for "turning herself from an indifferent actress to an extremely competent one" through her common sense and industriousness. - Wikipedia

THE HAIR!

A woman's hair was particularly important to her appearance in that era. Even a relatively-plain face like Gladys's came to life when framed by a tumble of chestnut curls. The provocative nature of these photos reveals the drastic change between the demure and even repressive attitudes of the Edwardian era and the wild times to come. She lets her hair down here, quite literally, and the combination of the sensually rippling hair and the austere, almost jaded facial expression is quite compelling. During that dramatic transition from tightlaced maiden to fringed flapper, Gladys Cooper found her place on the stage, and in the world.

  

Why we love Baby Jane

We could have been friends

You ARE in the chair.

They just didn't love you enough

A harrowing scene from one of my favorite movies. Bette Davis is scary in this thing - at the height of her genius. Has anyone ever captured alcoholic self-pity better than this?

Cigarette psychology

There was a time (think Mad Men) when smoking was so entrenched in culture as to be expected, even required.  A non-smoker was a social pariah, an oddball who lived on wheat germ and drank only celery tonic. Maybe he belonged to the Oddfellows (whatever that is). Old movies abound with cigarette symbolism, usually sexual in nature. It's all part of the art of seduction. Think Bette Davis and Paul Henreid blowing smoke in each other's faces.

Nobody mentions coughing your lungs out in a cancer ward.

The following little slice of post-war wisdom came from one of those oddity sites, so I felt free to borrow it. No doubt they did, too. Let's zero in on it some more. . . 

Even without reading the text, we can already see that hand position is paramount, even if the meaning isn't crystal-clear. The middle position is kind of baffling to me. I've never in my life seen anyone hold a cigarette like that. It's positively weaponlike. Is it meant as a sort of ash catapult, or an enemy smoke-wafter?

All of these photos remind me of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, for some reason. He was constantly smoking in that one, just as EVERYONE was constantly smoking (and drinking). In every picture he made, the cigarette was his signature. But we all know how it ended. One might say that it cost him a lot.

Here the good doctor goes into detail about how smoking style reveals a man's personality. Man's. Not woman's:

OK then. So where do I start?  For one thing, that Dr. Neutra thing is suspicious to me. I think of Mr. Neutron in Monty Python. . .

. . .  and of course the words neutral and neuter. And a nutria, which is a kind of large beaverlike rodent made into coats (and other things).

But the reason women's smoking gestures aren't considered significant is obvious to Dr. Neutron (or whoever he is): "Women are so affected naturally in their regular posture that they're more often than not too conscious of how they hold a cigarette, and therefore useless as subjects for this experiment."

Useless? Affected? I can think of something to do with my cigarette. Dr. Neutron: sit on this and rotate!

But there's more of this shit to trudge through:

Note that the descriptions of women are devastating, even abusive, whereas he goes fairly easy on the men. If they put on airs, they're not "affected" but "sort of the Texas millionaire type". It's obvious the vast majority of the adjectives to describe men are positive (intellectual, brainy, contemplative, direct, straight-forward, hail fellow well-met, daring, calculating, dreamer, replete with business caution). As for women, any analysis is "just a guess" because they are so "affected": "insecure, afraid to lose that cigarette" (? They come in packs, don't they?). "She probably holds on to her man like glue." Greedy, graspy, possessive!  But the next one is worse: "Typical grasp of a female bored with her date. She has to concentrate on the tip to keep from yawning." One has to wonder if this Dr. Neutron has a filthy Freudian mind and sees prick-symbols everywhere he looks.

Is this whole thing a joke, a bit of satire to send up people's smoking habits? I think not! I believe it's drenched with misogyny and contempt for women, and trivializes everything about them.

So what is the conclusion? While you're busy rotting your lungs and throat with terminal cancer, boys, make sure you hold your cigarette in the proper way. Cultivate it for a good impression. Grasp it properly so that the tip is sticking straight up. And good luck in the heart-and-lung ward.

The Baby Jane Quiz (for pretentious film students only)

You might not think so, boys and girls, but you are, you ARE in film school, or you wouldn't be reading this, and you will be taking this quiz or I won't bring you your din-din.

Everyone has seen the Bette Davis/Joan Crawford classic, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? And if you haven’t, how can you call yourself a film student? This is the movie in which Bette Davis proves, once and for all, that she can mop the floor with Joan Crawford and act rings around her, rings that are every bit as dizzying as the donuts Blanche turns in her wheelchair when she discovers Jane has served her a large rodent for dinner.

(From the production notes: the rat is actually a capybara imported from Argentina.They'll work for scale, whereas rats charge an exorbitant amount to lie still for that many takes). 

This will by no means be a comprehensive exam, because that would mean too much work for me, I saw this film for probably the twelfth time last night and was struck once again by how it’s Jane who gets our sympathy. As in Gone With the Wind, in which we're supposed to love and admire Melanie for being so selfless and sweet, we just keep rooting for Scarlett. Want to know why? There are reasons, brutal ones, but true nonetheless - which you will discover as you wrap your enfeebled brain around this quiz.

1. Why do we feel so much sympathy for Baby Jane the screaming banshee/harridan/flaming bitch on wheels, who tears up the scenery, kills the maid with a hammer, and kicks her sister in the head, and so little for Blanche, the sweet, helpless paralyzed sister who sits upstairs in her room incessantly pressing a buzzer?

(a) Bette Davis gives a layered, nuanced performance incorporating vulnerability and heartbreak into even her most drunken, violent, abrasive behaviour.

(b) Joan Crawford is mainly good at bulging her eyes out.

(c) We’ll never forgive or forget TROG.

d) Crawford's reaction to the dead capybara is seriously "off", failing to touch a chord of sympathy. Nobody notices her reaction anyway because they're too busy groaning with delight as Baby Jane cackles her brains out.

e) With true generosity of spirit,  Jane wistfully states at the film's conclusion that the two sisters "could have been friends", if only Blanche had kept her foot off the accelerator. 

2. If the Baby Jane doll could talk, what would it say?

(a) "Really? Did she like it?"

(b) "I was cleaning the cage and it flew out the window."

(c) "Isn't that how I was conceived?"

(d) "Just a few questions, ma'am."

3. Describe Edwin's role as a gay icon, taking into account the socio-psycho-sexual mores of 1962 and the damaging effects of the illegality of certain sexual acts. Speculate on Jane Hudson's true feelings for Edwin as a potential partner: is he merely a boy-toy/"walker" who could escort her to premieres and other social events as she makes her second debut? Elaborate on the socio-psycho-whatever significance of the fact he still lives with his Mommy. Essay answers to be graded on word count only.

3. Why is it our business whether Edwin is gay or not? What possible bearing could it have on the movie’s plot? Why do you think it matters, given the fact that the REAL issue is his inability to tear himself away from his niggling, naggling, annoying, utterly irritating mother? Discuss in three words or less.

4. What are the chances of Baby Jane making a real comeback?

(a) Very low (her act is so completely out-of date);

(b) Very high          "            "            "                   ;

(d) Middling, if she aims for a middle-aged/middle-brow crowd;

(e) Dead-certain! Have you no knowledge of film history at all? She has already MADE an unforgettable comeback which will live in cinematic history forever!

5. Of the two sisters, who has the really rotten deal? 

(a) Blanche, who  gets to watch herself on TV and get flowers from the neighbors and all sorts of fan mail, get her meals brought to her on a tray, etc. etc., or

(b) Jane, who gets doodlysquat from anybody, has to forge signatures just to get her liquor, hauls her sister around to the bathroom, the bathtub and the bed, trundles her meals upstairs (though granted, those meals may be a little unusual), and receives no glory at all for her forgotten career, with which she supported the whole family for years and years and kept them all in ice cream.

"All this time, we could have been friends."

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Charisma to burn

I would have to call these two my favorites from Old Hollywood. They acted the stuffings out of a part while keeping it real. And they were gorgeous: the camera ate them up.

Both of them smoked too much, but Bogie fell far sooner, in an awful sort of way, consumed. He kept smoking even after contracting fatal throat cancer. Perhaps it was a "what the hell, it's coming anyway" thing. Somehow Bette was tougher, but cancer devoured her too, eventually, until she was an unrecognizable wraith.

Our heroes flare briefly. It's always brief, when you think about it. Each of us climbs only a tiny segment of the wall (just like Harold and his fake aerial sets in Safety Last). It's hard to put any of it together. I once had the thought that if you kept going back and back, and back and back and back, through the thousands and mega-thousands and millions and billions of ancestors that spread out exponentially behind you, you would eventually reach the first cell of life that winked on out of nothingness.

We all go back to the primordial ooze. There goes the  neighborhood.

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The ultimate horror film (or, why we love Baby Jane)

This is one of those movies that, when it comes on TV, you tell yourself: no way, I’m not watching this again, or if I do, I’ll bail after a few minutes.
And you come reeling out the other side, just as gobsmacked as you were the first time around – or maybe more, because you always notice new things every time you see it.

Turner Classics is responsible for most of this, because certain movies are always shown in rotation. Now, Voyager and Mildred Pierce and Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon seem to come around monthly, along with a lot of those noir-ish (and spell-check, STOP changing this to “nourish” NOW) ‘40s films from Warner Brothers, complete with lavish and somewhat overblown scores by Max Steiner.

In this case, well, yes, it was Bette Davis all right, but not the same Bette Davis who experienced such a melancholy metamorphosis in Now, Voyager (complete with Paul Henreid’s famous dual cigarettes). This one was – oh God, NO – What Ever Happened to Baby Jane!

I first saw this film while sleeping in the den on a pull-out bed when I was a kid. I wasn’t allowed to do this very often, so it was a treat. It meant I could stay up as long as I liked and watch TV, and maybe my older brother Arthur would come in at some point, a little drunk from a piss-up with his high school buddies, and provide a running commentary. I saw great films this way, the original Frankenstein and Dracula, the incomparable On the Waterfront (which I still believe is, Citizen Kane aside, the greatest movie ever made), and – even more macabre than any James Whale creepfest – the Baby Jane movie, which from the first frame provides more howls and shudders than anything else Davis ever did.

I say Davis, because in spite of the fact that Joan Crawford plays Blanche, the “sympathetic” sister in the wheelchair, crippled decades ago when Baby Jane rammed her with her car, Davis just walks off with it. With her ashen face layered with old face powder that has never been washed off, her hideous rotting child-star clothes, her foot-dragging shuffle, slovenly drunkenness and foul temper, it’s Davis we can’t take our eyes off of, can't get enough of.  And why? Reactions. Flickers of reactions like swiftly-moving storm fronts that seem to pass (for some reason) left to right, as if sweeping through her flesh and bones – this is HATE, folks, out-and-out hate for the sister who upstaged her pathetic little career as the mincing, shrieking vaudeville performer Baby Jane. Her role as resentful, foul-mouthed nursemaid is forced on her after the "accident", the event that snapped Blanche’s spinal cord at the same time that it ended her career. 

The point I’m trying to make here is: though we know we should, NOBODY likes Blanche. She is denigrated, harassed, even tortured (especially with her sister's unique luncheon plan of dead budgie and stiffened rat), ruthlessly kicked in a scene of real horror that might just reflect Davis’ true feelings about her, but still and all, we either hate Blanche or are just plain bored with her.

Nobody wants to be Blanche. Nobody wants to be the victim, no matter how virtuous she is (in fact, the more virtuous she is, the more bored we are). I suspect that this picture was proof, once and for all, that Davis’ acting chops so far outstripped Crawford’s that she lived in a separate universe. When someone does something seemingly simple and you think, with a slightly creepy feeling, “how in hell did they do that?”, then you know you are in the realm of genius.

But it’s more than that. She must be snagging something deep inside us somewhere, gleefully yanking it out and celebrating it, throwing it up in the air. This law of identification, if that’s what it is, doesn’t stop with this movie. Not by a long shot. Let me ask you: you’ve seen Gone with the Wind, haven’t you? Well, what’s the matter with you? (Go see it now.) Anyway, how many of us love and admire and identify with Melanie Wilkes, the sweet, brave, unselfish wife who patiently waits while her husband returns from fighting them damn Yankees in the Civil War? How many of us think to ourselves, oh dear, she’s having a baby in a wagon, how will she ever survive?

Piffle! All we care about is Scarlett, trying to manage a fractious horse while wearing a dirty dress and a corset, her alabaster brow furrowed as she faces the first of many mortal challenges in her bitchy, spoiled, overindulged life.

Yes, everyone loves Scarlett, and it’s not just because she’s so supernaturally beautiful, her eyes glittering with the first signs of the bipolar disorder that will eventually derail her life. Everyone loves her because she is duplicitous, greedy, conniving, and just plain bad. Melanie never seems to make a single mistake in her life (oh God, she even forgives that whore!) but is so poisonously good that we just don’t want to bother with her. When I first saw this movie at age thirteen, I was sort of hoping she would die in childbirth so Scarlett could get her claws on Ashley.
So what’s going on here besides superior acting skills and a much meatier part? We like bad people because deep inside ourselves, no matter how far down we push it, we are afraid we are bad: that someone will some day see our awful, unforgiveable secret.

But even worse, we WANT to be bad, bad enough to wield the kind of power these half-mad, scary women do. These harpies, these broom-riding supernatural scream-queens raining down a firestorm of gleeful destruction on all that lies around them.

There’s something a tad sociopathic about them – wait a minute, a tad? That budgie-killing, rat-serving, head-kicking, haranguing Jane (“But you AAAAAARE in the wheelchair, Blanche! You AAAARE!”) rivals Norman Bates in the realm of antisocial personality disorder. Though we fear them and are supposed to disapprove of them, we like sociopathic characters because they pull all the bad out of us and act out all the things we’re not supposed to do.

Though this was the sixth or seventh time I had seen it, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? creeped me out more this time than ever before. I had a new appreciation of Davis’ subtlety. Yes, subtlety – you can read her devious, duplicitous thoughts, her careful plotting and planning of the kind of medieval torture specifically designed to drive her sister to the brink of insanity. The crazed child’s laugh behind the door when Blanche lifts the dome on her ratatouille lunch – the ruthless yanking out of the phone cord – forging her signature, imitating her voice, withholding her fan mail and her food – all these devices are tailor-made for Blanche, ever-escalating until that scene on the beach where she lies so flat and lifeless she resembles a dessicated corpse.

Then, of course, we have the final turnabout confession: Blanche confesses that SHE ran Jane down and somehow snapped her own spine, and yet had the strength to crawl to the gate and – oh, never mind. We accept this absurdity because by then we don’t have much choice. We are held as captive as poor Blanche, manacled to the ceiling with electrical tape over her mouth.

Then comes one of the most incredible lines in film history, delivered in the dulcet tones of a Jane who has rocketed back in time to the charming brat who wowed them all on the vaudeville stage: “You mean. . . all this time we could have been friends!”

It’s only then we realize that not only are we enthralled by Jane – we actually feel compassion for her. We’re somehow on her side. Freaking Jesus, how the hell did THAT happen?

It’s a mystery, as all superb crafting is. Is it just the fact that these are better parts, and that better actresses land them? What if someone else had played Jane: say, Olivia de Havilland? What if Crawford had played her, as was originally planned? Wasn’t she pretty good at Mommy Dearest-style torture herself? But no. It had to be Hurricane Bette or no one. It’s the same dynamic as in the Wizard of Oz, when Margaret Hamilton chews up the scenery and fills the room with brimstone and green smoke as the Wicked Witch, but Billie Burke makes you half sick to your stomach as the quavering, sparkly-gowned Good Witch of Whatever. We must either want the bejeezus scared out of us (which I still don’t understand, because in “normal life” most of us try very hard to avoid anxiety and danger), or we want to be every bad thing, every shameful thing, every heartless hideous inhumanly insane thing we know we shouldn’t be. 

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It's going to be a bumpy night

"Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night."