olivia de havilland

Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)

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It’s no secret that, when it comes to director Robert Aldrich’s collaborations with Bette Davis, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is the film that everyone remembers and talks about, while Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte is normally regarded as a bit of an afterthought. After all, the former has Davis up against Joan Crawford, an onscreen tour de force that captures the energy of their offscreen antipathy, a rivalry with such a legacy that it’s been turned into entertainment several times itself. It’s a well-known piece of trivia that the role of cousin Miriam in Charlotte, which was ultimately played by Olivia de Havilland as a favor to Davis, was to have been Crawford’s. Although I love de Havilland in this role, I can’t help but think that the Davis/Crawford second feature would have reversed this, with Charlotte as the preeminent psychobiddy picture and Baby Jane as the footnote. 

At a roaring party at Big Sam Hollis (Victor Buono, who had also appeared in Baby Jane)’s plantation home in the 1920s, the man himself warns John Mayhew (Bruce Dern) that he is aware that John has been carrying on an affair with Sam’s daughter Charlotte (Davis) and intends to run off with her and abandon his wife Jewel (Mary Astor), and that he will not allow this to happen. John goes to the grounds’ gazebo to break things off, only to be murdered, with his head decapitated and one of his hands lopped off. We then cut to the present of 1964, which finds Charlotte now a shut-in living in a dilapidated mansion with only the company of sourpuss maid Velma Cruther (Agnes Moorhead) and the occasional visits from childhood friend Drew Bayliss (Joseph Cotten), a doctor. Charlotte’s house is set to be torn down by the highway commission, but her repeated deferral of the impending date comes to a head when she hot-temperedly pushes a large stone planter off of her balcony, coming close to killing the demolition foreman, and she’s been given ten days to vacate. Charlotte’s recluse status is reiterated by the fact that there’s a persistent urban legend that Charlotte killed John Mayhew and got away with it because she was rich, with children daring each other to go up to the nearly abandoned house as if an old witch lived there. For her part, Charlotte believes that her father killed John, but in spite of this she blames Jewel Mayhew for exposing the affair and causing everything to fall apart, and part of her stated aversion to moving away is because she doesn’t want Jewel Mayhew to “win,” since her house isn’t in the way of the highway. Despite Velma’s doubts, Charlotte’s attempts to get her businesswoman cousin Miriam (de Havilland) to come to the old house are successful, although Miriam knows that she’s there to get Charlotte out, not stop the bulldozers. Her arrival in town comes at the same time as a British insurance agent’s, who has a special interest in the Mayhew case. 

I programmed this movie for the third of five “spooky season” Friday screenings for Austin’s Double Trouble, a North Loop spot that I frequent and adore (the first two were Rosemary’s Baby and Ginger Snaps, with Paprika coming up on the 24th and Cherry Falls on Halloween night, both at 8 PM). In my ad copy for Charlotte, I described it as “Grey Gardens meets Gaslight,” and given that it had been a little while since I last saw it, I forgot just how much that latter film this one liberally cribs from. I’d go so far as to argue that, if the play and film Gaslight had never been produced, the psychological term that we take from it would instead be called “Sweet Charlotting” or “Hush Hushing.” Poor Charlotte Hollis really gets put through the wringer in this one, blaming her father for John Mayhew’s death for decades and hating Jewel Mayhew for exposing the affair, when neither of those things are really true, and that’s before she finds herself psychologically terrorized by phantoms of John and discovering evidence of a potential haunting. Davis is doing some of the most truly compelling work of her career here, and I’ve been haunted by this performance ever since my first viewing of this movie when I was a teenager. Maybe I’m biased and the Louisiana setting and the frequent mentions of Baton Rouge endear this one to me more than Baby Jane, but I really do find the Southern Gothic feel of this one makes it more special (even if the script occasionally flubs and mentions a “county commissioner,” as counties are something that Louisiana does not have). That having been said, I can’t pretend that Baby Jane isn’t a tighter film; although their individual runtimes are within minutes of one another (133 minutes for Charlotte and 134 for Baby Jane), Charlotte feels longer, as there’s a little too much denouement going on after the film’s villains are revealed. This allows for Davis to continue to act her ass off, but it’s not terribly exciting, even if it also gives some time for one or two more twists. 

Although the film is decades old, I’ll give the standard warning here that I’ve got to delve into spoilers to discuss it further. This gets a big enough recommendation from me that I used a platform I was given to show movies to the public to make this one more visible, so that’s all you really need at this juncture if you want to go in unspoiled. Ok? Ok. I love seeing Joseph Cotten and Olivia de Havilland really play against type in this one. I think I remember reading somewhere once that it was only in this film and Dark Mirror in which she portrayed a villain, and in that earlier role she was playing a set of good and evil twins, so that’s a net zero, really. She’s fantastic here, and even though some audience members may find themselves fatigued by the film’s long ending, I wouldn’t trade the opportunity to see de Havilland relish delivering Miriam’s backstory for a shorter run time (even if I would trade it to see Crawford tear into this monologue). Miriam reveals that her resentment toward Charlotte was born the day that she was first brought to the Hollis House to be raised by her uncle following her father’s death, and that old Sam Hollis’s perfunctory hospitality to his niece while he doted on his daughter drove her into a jealous rage. It was Miriam who exposed Charlotte and John Mayhew’s affair, and when Jewel Mayhew killed her husband in a jealous rage, it was Miriam who blackmailed Jewel about it for decades while allowing Charlotte to blame her father, destroying their once close relationship. Miriam’s envy took everything from Charlotte except her house, and now Miriam has come back for that, too (or at least whatever money Charlotte’s entitled to via eminent domain reimbursement), with Dr. Drew as her confidante. His motivation is merely money, which is less interesting, but it’s still nice to see the hero of Gaslight take on the role of accessory gaslighter in this film. 

I’ve barely mentioned her, but I also want to draw attention to the fantastic performance of Agnes Moorhead as Velma. The moment that something spooky seems to be happening, the audience’s initial suspicion must fall on Velma, as the person with the most access to the house and the one who seems most antagonistic toward Miriam, who has yet to be revealed as the villain and seems to truly desire to help. Velma is irascible and her ability to maintain the great old house alone is minimal at best, but she’s also a true and faithful companion for Charlotte despite the fact that she seems to be going feral (when her murdered body is left in her backyard, the authorities say of her place that “I’d hardly call it a home,” which makes it sound like she’s living in a shack). Moorhead really was one of the greats, and she’s just as fantastic here as Davis is. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Dark Mirror (1946)

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I was recently so impressed with The Spiral Staircase that I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole seeking out other films from director Robert Siodmak. Just a year after Staircase, he helmed another shockingly modern proto-slasher entitled The Dark Mirror. The film stars Olivia de Havilland in dual roles as twin sisters Ruth and Terry Collins, one of whom is concealing a dark secret. You see, Terry is a sweet girl working at a lobby newspaper stand and has fallen for the beguiling charms of one Dr. Frank Peralta, who has an office in the building. When she’s seen leaving his apartment the very night on which he was found stabbed to death, multiple eyewitnesses can account for her presence — except that her alibi is rock solid, as she was also seen at the exact same time in the park by her butcher and a patrolman. Befuddled police lieutenant Stevenson (Thomas Mitchell) can’t make heads or tails of it until he visits Terry one night and meets her twin sister, Ruth, learning that the two live together and even trade off the “Terry” identity in public so that they only have to have one job. When the district attorney admits that they can’t make a case against either woman as they’d each be covered by the proverbial shadow of a doubt, Stevenson enlists the help of Dr. Scott Elliott (Lew Ayres), who coincidentally has an office in the same building as the late Peralta and happens to be a specialist in the field of twin studies, to surreptitiously study the two and find out which of them is the killer. 

The duplication special effects in this one are fantastic, give or take a couple of dodgier scenes where the intercutting and blocking don’t quite measure up. As the title would suggest, there are numerous sequences in which mirrors are a focal point, including several in which both Ruth sits at a vanity mirror and has a conversation with Terry while the latter reclines in bed behind her, both of them visible in the reflection. It was a technical marvel, and I kept trying to figure out how it was done, getting a little lost in trying to tease out the details (I decided it must have been that the Terry segment was shot first and then projected on a screen behind de Havilland while she shot the Ruth portion). Regardless of how it was accomplished, it looks amazing, and when the two are in the same shot using split screen tech, it’s also very well done. Of course, all of that movie magic would be wasted were it not for de Havilland’s strong performances as each sister, as there’s never any real doubt about who’s who. The film often differentiates them through their monogrammed bathrobes, Ruth’s “R” brooch, and a pair of extremely tacky necklaces that bear their full first names, but de Havilland plays each woman so that these visual cues are largely unnecessary. Terry seems forthright and personable while also clearly being the steelier, stronger woman; Ruth appears to be extremely kind-hearted and verging on the naive, and clearly more troubled by the situation in which the twins find themselves than her sister. 

Contemporary reviews of the film were mixed, but one of the ones that stood out to me was from Variety, which stated that the film “runs the full gamut of themes currently in vogue at the box office — from psychiatry to romance back again to the double identity gimmick and murder mystery.” I was struck a bit by this reference to “psychiatry” as a common film topic, since I’ve not run across many films of this era in which this was a common element or theme. M certainly had an element of psychological detective work at play, and there was a series of films based on an earlier radio series that began with 1943’s Crime Doctor (all ten films in the series were released before 1949). If anything, I associate suspense thrillers of the 1960s with direct references to psychiatry: hitting the ground running in 1960 with Psycho devoting its closing moments to a psychologist explaining Norman’s particular maladies; the ongoing exploration of the psychological profiles of the dueling personalities at the center of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? in 1962; the journey to the heart of the mental health hospital system in 1963’s Shock Corridor. On further reflection, though, this one came very close on the heels of Gaslight in 1944 and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 feature Spellbound, the latter of which featured Ingrid Bergman as a psychoanalyst who falls for her amnesiac patient played by Gregory Peck (who wouldn’t?), so I suppose there is a possibility that this was, at the time, a gimmicky attempt to cash in on a recent craze (no pun intended). It even features a Rorschach test, although they refer to it only as an “inkblot test,” as perhaps the Swiss inventor’s name hit the post-war American ear as a little too Germanic. 

Where this one fell a little short of Staircase’s greatness was in its failure to live up to my expectations, which is hardly the film’s fault. I’m eighty years removed from when this was made, so it may be unfair of me to resent that the twists in this one didn’t go as far as I would have liked. I would have appreciated the film more had it spent some small amount of time on the possibility that neither sister was Peralta’s murderer, as it would have been fun to see de Havilland playing off of herself in scenes in which both sisters wonder if the other is a killer. I’ve also seen “Treehouse of Horror VII” (the one with Bart’s evil twin Hugo locked in the attic) more times than I could possibly recall, so there’s a part of my brain that kept waiting for the twist that the supposed “good” twin was the killer and that the “bad” twin was covering for them, or that one of the twins had some history of violence but not the one we think. Maybe the twins were both trolling Dr. Elliott all this time and occasionally impersonating one another in their sessions with him. Any one of those would have pushed my rating a little higher; instead, once Dr. Elliott establishes that one of the women is a one-in-a-kajillion sociopath, it’s clear which one is virtuous and which one is responsible for all their troubles, and it’s a little rote from there. What keeps it from falling off completely is that this revelation allows more insight into just how manipulative one sister is of the other, and the final scene is still a phenomenal showcase for de Havilland. This one has been slightly difficult to find at times, but is currently available on the Roku app. If you, like me, don’t have that, then maybe you can find it at your local library. I did!

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939)

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I feel like what I’m looking for in any Bette Davis movie is for the actor to let loose & open fire on her costars. I’m not sure if this is retroactively a result of her late career comeback in the famously combative (onscreen & off) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? or if it’s just a natural extension of a deliberately non-demure persona she carried throughout her career. I didn’t think to expect that loose cannon antagonism in the 1939 Technicolor costume drama The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, but Davis’s lead performance as Queen Elizabeth I delivered it by the truckload. Although it has the pedigree of an expensive Major Studio period piece, the film is essentially just Bette Davis wearing beautiful costumes, gobbling snacks, and hurling vicious insults for two solid hours. In other words, it’s fabulous.

Many actors have interpreted Elizabeth I onscreen over the decades, ranging as wide as Cate Blanchett & Quentin Crisp, but Bette Davis’s depiction feels entirely singular in its vicious, feral energy. Like with many pictures over her career, it’s rumored that she was not at all happy with her coworkers or the demands of the production. She was especially miffed that Elizabeth’s remarkably high hairline required her to shave her head, which put her in a persistently ornery mood. This made the film a chore to shoot, especially since Davis would act out in juvenile ways like slapping the piss out of her romantic co-lead, Errol Flynn, with all of her might instead of just making sure the scripted hit looked good for the camera. That anger translated well to the role, though, making Davis’s Elizabeth come across as a kind of furious demon in beautiful costumes. She’s visibly uncomfortable, constantly reaching for grapes or wine or invisible stress balls to calm her nerves as she inhales between each insult. The effect on the film is glorious, though, transporting Davis’s slack, unceremonious, Baby Jane Hudson-mode energy into a stuffy Studio Era drama where it doesn’t belong.

A 16th Century tale of real life war & romance endowed with the same Major Studio bloat of the 1960s Camelot musical, there isn’t much to The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex in a formal sense. As Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, Errol Flynn is propped up as a kind of love/hate romantic sparring partner meant to periodically threaten Davis’s power as the Queen of England. She steamrolls him with ease. Essex & Elizabeth both can’t get enough of each other in their lustful bouts of loneliness and can’t possibly share the same space & time, due to their individual thirsts for power & the throne. This sometimes leads to the Queen sending Essex off to war in the Irish Moors (which look an awful lot like a studio lot) without proper supplies to succeed, just to be temporarily rid of him. It also leads to literal, direct rebellion within the palace where the two square off head to head with their respective guards. Flynn’s Essex is never given a chance to really stand up to the Queen, however. Outside occasionally riding a horse, the athletic leading man isn’t even afforded a chance to do any of his signature swashbuckling. Elizabeth’s other foils, a dangerously horny Olivia de Havilland and a foppish knight played by a baby faced Vincent Price, don’t fare much better. As much as this film’s dialogue frets over Elizabeth’s duties as a Queen being hindered by her desires as a woman, there’s no question who’s in charge and who’s going to make it out on top. I’m not saying that because of the inevitability if its Wikipedia-verifiable history lesson, either. Davis’s fierceness demands her victory, with obligatory demise for each of her opponents, whether or not she wants to fuck them.

I’d be a liar if I said I cared at all about the plot of this film. Formally, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex is remarkable less for its narrative than it is for its gorgeous production & costume design. One Orry-Kelly-designed dress in particular, with shimmering green mermaid scales, a pale pink Elizabethan collar (naturally), and a neon green feathered hand fan had me gasping for air. Those luxurious design flourishes only serve to contrast Elizabeth’s demonic furor, however, as she complains about her old age, smashes mirrors, claws at a pile of snacks, and fires off long strands of insults: “lying villain,” “wicked devil,” “slimy toad,” “stupid cattle,” “snakes & rats,” etc. If, like me, your favorite Bette Davis performances find the actor in vicious attack mode, the formal mediocrity of this Studio Era period piece won’t matter to you one bit. The film is downright delicious for Davis’s inhuman bursts of Technicolor furor, especially considering the restrained pomp & propriety of the setting that contrasts it.

-Brandon Ledet