31 days of Halloween day 6: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (David Greene, 1991)

31 days of Halloween day 6: Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (David Greene, 1991)

I don’t have anything too deep to say about the 1991 made-for-tv remake of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?  starring Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave.   This is the type of film that’s tailor made for me- I love TV movies, and especially love TV movies with a good hook or camp element (or anything true-crime or “ripped from today’s headlines!”).

While the performances are excellent, the style of the movie is fairly low key, certainly compared to Robert Aldrich’s original.  Never a subtle filmmaker, Aldrich brought a certain mania to the original that this remake, directed by David Greene (one of the directors of the original Roots), avoids, perhaps wisely.  If you can’t replicate the successful elements of a great film, and you don’t want to parody them, then it’s probably best to forge your own path.  The result may not knock your socks off immediately, but the slow burn approach really pays off in the end, both when the delusional Jane (Lynn Redgrave) has her hope of a comeback destroyed when she discovers what she thought was her cabaret showcase is actually a campy drag show (possible metaphor for Joan Crawford and Bette Davis in the original film, and their later careers in general, there) and the final confrontation between the two sisters, on the beach, Jane completely out of her mind, constructing totems out of beach refuse on the sand covered body of Blanche (Vanessa Redgrave, of course), who is too tired and tortured to fight back at this point.

Though the ending is fairly spectacular, the somewhat draggy middle portion of the film is thankfully stolen by the great John Glover, playing a seedy manager who meets Jane while she’s trying to find her movies in the video store where he works (they’ve never been released on video- no interest) and sees an opportunity to exploit her delusions of grandeur to cash in on her celebrity, at least in part to pay off a pair of twins he seems to be involved in some underage porn scheme with- no joke.  It’s there’s a worthy heir to Victor Buono, who played the role in the original, it’s Glover, one of the great unsung character actors.  Nobody quite does seedy, sleazy and insincere as well as John Glover, and it’s kind of a shame he’s never really gotten the recognition he’s deserved (now would be a great time to revisit his Trump-esque mega mogul Daniel Clamp from Gremlins 2, though to be fair that character, despite his oiliness, is infinitely more likable than the real thing).  Perhaps he embodies unpleasant characters a bit too well- it’s not surprising, looking at his imdb page, that he’s played the devil at least twice.

Anyway, yeah, come for the reasonable remake of a classic that pays off emotionally in the end, stay for John Glover, playing somebody that would make any normal person uncomfortable, totally at home in the off-kilter world of fading Hollywood stardom in the film.