How What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? demonised older women

By Thomas HobbsFeatures correspondent

The Bette Davis/Joan Crawford film led to a sub-genre of "Hagsploitation" horror featuring seasoned female stars as villains – but did this benefit or demean them, asks Thomas Hobbs.

"I wouldn’t give you one dime for those two washed-up old..." barked Warner Bros' president Jack Warner at the director sitting on the other side of his marble desk. But Robert Aldrich persisted, eventually charming the studio shark into coughing up a meagre budget so he could direct What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?. 

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Aldrich's 1962 Hollywood adaptation of Henry Farrell's gothic novel would star Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, both then in their mid 50s, as quarrelling sisters, confined to the living tomb of a Los Angeles mansion that's filled with skeletons and a noxious resentment that lingers in the air. On paper it was an obvious risk for Warner, especially in an era where ageism and sexism led to most women in Hollywood being deemed fit for the scrapheap by the age of 45.

However, 1950's Sunset Boulevard, and Gloria Swanson's starring performance as Norma Desmond, had proved the story of a scorned, delusional older woman could be powerful. And in the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock's enormously successful Psycho (1960), Warner knew that low-budget horrors centered around reclusive eccentrics, who carried baneful secrets, could still shake up audiences. If you believe 2017's Feud – Ryan Murphy's television drama that explored Davis and Crawford's love-hate relationship – Warner (played by Stanley Tucci in this limited series) was just excited by the prospect of being able to watch the dailies over a morning coffee, howling with laughter as the friction from his two leads burned on to the projector.

Released on Halloween 60 years ago, What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? defied all of Warner's low expectations. Although it didn't necessarily resonate with critics immediately ("This isn't a movie, it's a caricature!" wrote the Chicago Tribune in a scathing review), it notched up five Oscar nominations, and drew in diverse audiences who were deeply compelled by the film's depiction of a toxic sibling rivalry and two women desperately fighting to escape self-imposed cages. Made for $900,000, it took in $9m at the box office (which – adjusted with inflation – would amount to $90m today). 

Davis plays former child star Baby Jane Hudson, who has gone from smugly tap dancing on sold-out stages and demanding ice cream as a screaming schoolgirl diva, to becoming a washed-up loner. Despite the passing of Father Time, Jane still garishly dresses like her nine-year-old self, complete with pigtails and a face full of white powder that struggles to hide the wrinkles. Davis perfectly tows the line between misplaced childhood innocence and scornful anarchy, her split personalities the result of a life that was once full of glamour, and is now desolate.

Crawford plays the less imposing sister, Blanche, who escapes Jane's oppressive shadow to become a successful (and much more graceful) Hollywood star in her own right, before a mysterious car accident destroys a once promising future. As a shivery has-been in a wheelchair, Crawford grounds the film, setting off Davis's high theatrics and providing a constant target for her character's unhinged jealousy. Whenever Crawford and Davis are together on screen it's explosive, emotional, and impossible to look away.

A lot of the enduring fascination with the film (which in 2021 was preserved by the US Library of Congress for being "historically significant") springs from the drama of these actresses' infamous off-screen rivalry. Reports at the time suggested that a scene where Jane viciously assaults Blanche with a series of devastating kicks wasn't really acting at all. Meanwhile according to Davis, Crawford, perhaps bitterly angry she had been overlooked for a best actress Oscar nomination in favour of her co-star for a film she had championed long before Davis was on board, allegedly used her Hollywood connections to ensure Davis lost out on the gong at the 1963 Oscars; that was a charge Crawford herself denied. "Joan did not want me to have that Oscar!" an elderly Davis exclaimed in an interview with Barbara Walters years after the dust had settled.

The Baby Jane-a-likes that followed

But beyond all this gossip and conjecture, the most significant legacy of What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? can be found in the films it spawned. In the years following its release, Hollywood started producing a string of so-called "Hagsploitation" movies, which like Baby Jane, provided veteran actresses including Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead, Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds with villainous, yet deliriously camp roles within horror that ensured their careers could keep on rolling. (This sub-genre has gone by other names including "psycho-biddy horror", "hag horror", and "Grande Dame Guignol", all of which similarly revel in the idea of women developing a lunacy sparked by old age.)

From the name onwards, it's a deeply troublesome sub-genre. "Hagsploitation is a misogynist and ageist term applied to fading female movie stars that were reinvented as these grotesque spectres" says Dr Christopher Pullen, a professor in media and inclusivity at Bournemouth University. "I appreciate these films were great opportunities [for older women] to find new roles, but in many ways, they were demeaning roles that conveyed problematic stereotypes about ageing female bodies and the life chances that may be proffered to older women."

In many respects, it's hard to disagree. The Hagsploitation genre tended to be built around the dubious idea of ageing women whose inability to keep a man or properly raise a child left them in a dishevelled state, where committing murder or screaming into the ether were among the only things from which they could still derive pleasure. Take 1964's Dead Ringer, where Bette Davis plays twin sisters, Margaret and Edith Phillips. The latter is rich and glamorous, the former weathered and penniless, running a bar that's an obvious dive. Edith makes the decision to murder her twin, assuming her identity and riches in a Machiavellian chess move. The film peddles the harmful stereotype that an ageing woman unable to gain the security of marriage is practically worthless, and she will subsequently harbour an uncontrollable rage that will go on to define her life.

Released the same year, Lady in a Cage pedals similar tropes, with its story focused on Olivia de Havilland's Mrs Hilyard, a soft-spoken single mother who has coddled the life out of her grown-up son, leading him to scarper and leave behind a letter that confirms he's feeling suicidal due to her domineering nature.

When de Havilland's character, suffering from a broken hip, becomes dangerously trapped inside the home elevator she has had installed, various miscreants decide to take advantage and ransack her home, treating her with complete indifference. Mrs Hilyard's desperate screams of "I'm a human being, a thinking, feeling creature!" are laughed at, and she gradually loses her mind, something that tended to be a formality within the Hagsploitation genre. In this film's cold, survival-of-the-fittest vision of society, de Havilland's character is deemed completely value-less, an obvious metaphor for how the US saw menopausal or post-menopausal women.

Another pivotal film that falls under the Hagsploitation umbrella is Hammer Horror's Die! Die! My Darling! from 1965. It stars Tallulah Bankhead as Mrs Trefoile, a joyless older woman incensed when her dead son's girlfriend dares to pay a visit. The snarling Mrs Trefoile describes red dresses as "satanic", and bans all condiments from the dinner table. She fully embodies some kind of misogynist idea that once a woman reaches a certain age, her existence must become dry and sexless, dedicated purely to God, motherhood, and reliving past glories.

"The notion of the hag at its essence speaks to how, in many cultures at least, older women are figures of disgust," explains Deborah Jermyn, a film studies researcher at the University of Roehampton, of these movies. "In a society where women's capital is most overtly tied to beauty and fertility, and beauty and fertility are the province of youth, older women thus cease to have a demonstrable function, and their presence becomes troublesome, repugnant and irksome. This is why older women featured heavily among those historically accused of being witches; Hagsploitation cinema crystallises all these ideas."

How the actors elevated the material

Yet even if these films were imagined purely by Hollywood executives as a way for audiences to laugh at ageing screen sirens, these stars' layered performances stand on their own merits. Take What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, where even when Jane's actions are outright demonic (such as a scene where Jane tries to feed Blanche a dead pet parakeet for dinner), there's a sadness in Davis's eyes that bores through the screen. Davis elevates the source material, and forces you to feel something for Jane, something that was likely at odds with the out-and-out caricature Warner Bros envisioned.

Davis does the same thing in 1965's The Nanny, about a murderous working-class childcarer, turning her character into an anti-hero who you just wish had been shown more love by the arrogant middle-class family she has long served. Meanwhile the astonishing pair of performances Shelley Winters gives in early queer filmmaker Curtis Harrington's criminally underrated 1972 Hagsploitation films, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? and What's The Matter With Helen?, are further proof that these roles could offer rich pickings. In the former film, Winters plays Rosie "Roo" Forest, a wealthy but isolated matriarch who loses her daughter under tragic circumstances.

Every year Roo invites the children from a local orphanage over for a Christmas treat and to try to fill the black void inside her heart. At points, Winters toys with these children like a cat torturing a pack of vulnerable baby mice, with one intrepid youngster Christopher (Mark Lester), explicitly comparing Roo to the Hansel and Gretel archetype of the wicked witch who eats children. In a truly hair-raising scene, you see Roo delicately put her daughter's skeletal, mummified corpse  to bed in a cot. It's a moment that makes the viewer feel both fear and empathy, tapping into our collective fear of being left alone. Winters' depiction of grief, and suffering through cycles of trauma, remains deeply effective.

Film critic Steph Green agrees that while the Hagsploitation genre has its fair share of misogyny and morally insensitive themes, it also has its virtues in providing "dementedly entertaining, out-there, complex characters for women who were no longer gifted with an interesting pick of roles". The reason these performances tend to get overlooked within cinematic history, according to Green, is because audiences have been trained to think of Hagsploitation films more as sensationalist thrill rides than human dramas. "I feel that [what people] fail to recognise, often, is the smarts and skill it takes to inhabit a caricature, and still extract empathy from the viewers who just spent the last two hours pitying you," she explains. "In the 1960s and 1970s, men were able to play genteel statesmen, heroes, detectives and lawyers way into their 70s; women had less of a choice."

An enduring legacy

Although the peak period for these films was the 1960s and early 70s, they continued to crop up throughout the decades that followed. Towards the end of the 1970s, Killer Nun contained a staggering performance by Anita Ekberg (previously the stunning beauty at the heart of Fellini's La Dolce Vita) as an ageing nun who injects heroin and abuses her patients. "In reviews she was dismissed by male reviewers as 'over-the-hill', exposing the kind of misogyny that ripens with such films," says Green, "But Killer Nun really bursts open the issues at the core of Hagsploitation: shades of internalised misogyny battling with what are often full-throatedly committed performances."

In 1980, Friday the 13th also breathed fresh life into the genre by daring to make its lead killer an ageing mother desperate to punish the cannabis-smoking, scantily clad councillors at Camp Crystal Lake, the place where her son Jason had previously drowned in their incompetent care. Betsy Palmer's Pamela Vorhees was possessed by a terrifying rage, whispering "kill her, Mommy" in Jason's voice under her breath. A year later, and Mommie Dearest, a biopic of Crawford herself that depicted her as a narcissistic tyrant played by Faye Dunaway, carried echoes of Hagsploitation, with scenes where the actress tortures her stepdaughter for daring to put clothes on wire hangers. Such scenes are both traumatic and cartoonish, a tonal combination that was key to the sub-genre's power.

The legacy of Hagsploitation was further consolidated with 1990's Misery, the adaptation of Stephen King's 1987 novel in which a famous novelist (James Caan) crashes his car in the snowy Colorado wilderness, only to be nursed back to health by his "number one fan" Annie Wilkes (a career-best performance by Kathy Bates). Annie is played as a frumpy, middle-aged, Midwestern Angel of Death, who crushes her beloved captive's ankles to stop him escaping even as she tweely admonishes him for being a "dirty birdy". Bates is the perfect blend of Davis as Baby Jane and Winters as Aunt Roo, with her subsequent Oscar win giving these types of performances a new lease of life. When it comes to more modern horror films, you could even make the argument that Ari Aster's 2018 horror Hereditary, with its central theme of rage-filled mothers struggling to influence their children, was indebted to Hagsploitation.

Looking to the future, academic Jermyn hopes audiences can start to look at Hagsploitation films, for all their problems, in a fresh light. Within them great Hollywood stars created iconic performances against the odds and fearlessly made ageing visible in a film industry mostly known for wanting to efface it. Among other things, Jermyn hopes we can start to look at their characters and performances's rage in a more sophisticated way. 

"While often motivated by financial necessity, the women who accepted these roles embodied a memorable rejection of the social constraints placed on older women," she concludes.

"In doing this, they actually turned a spotlight on those social constraints and their damning impact on women in the entertainment industry, exposing the shallowness and inequity of a society that ceases to value women as they age. In this respect, women stars playing furious "hags" in films about the film industry are arguably intriguingly self-referential and critical – they speak to a fury at the whole system."

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