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Sisters, or The Balance of Madness. The Old Maid by way of Psycho, grand showbiz monsters wrangled by Robert Aldrich with whip and chair. The horrid vaudeville moppet and her plain sister switch places as Thirties movie stars, the switcheroo is a mysterious car crash that puts them "right back where they started" in the mausoleum. Upstairs lies the former leading lady (Joan Crawford) with wheelchair and buzzer, her deranged sis (Bette Davis) reigns below amidst grinning dolls and empty gin bottles. The spiral is brutal: Dead parakeets and rats for supper, hammer blows to the head, scabby close-ups of pancake makeup and moldy ringlets. "Is this some kind of emotional disturbance you're talking about?" The shattered figurine and the weeping jack-in-the-box, a comprehensive analysis of the Gothic aberrations Hollywood keeps in mothballs. (The joke extends to Victor Buono's put-on suavity as a bloated pianist locked in his own festering relationship with his gnomish mum.) Dueling divas like Lugosi and Karloff, a horror meeting set in the Aldrich circus nonpareil—claustrophobically framed, pitilessly lit, gloatingly magnified. Crawford endures it gallantly, Davis rolls with it gamely: Her Baby Jane is a roaring caricature, Miss Havisham on an expressionistic bender, a scabrous cakewalk halted before a mirror with a piercing shriek. (The actress' glee is shared by the director who cuts from her cackling to an overhead view of her terrorized rival spinning in her room.) The ample quotations from Sunset Blvd. lead to a place in the sun, the Kiss Me Deadly finale is remembered (sandcastles before apocalypses) and the Legend of Lylah Clare finale is predicted (dog food on the television screen). "You mean all this time we could've been friends?" Camp cultists can have "I've Written a Letter to Daddy," Bergman meanwhile responds with The Silence. With Maidie Norman, Anna Lee, Wesley Addy, and Bert Freed. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |