What Happened To ‘Baby Jane’? She’s Turning 50

Baby Jane Hudson is now 50 years old — or at least the strange and brilliant movie in which she’s the main character is, just released as a beautifully remastered Blu-ray. Robert Aldrich’s grotesque gothic tragedy is a cross between Gypsy, with its antithetical show-biz kid sisters, and Sunset Boulevard, with its decayed Hollywood glamour.

Baby Jane is a blond, curly-haired child star, a Shirley Temple wannabe, like Baby June in Gypsy. She’s self-centered and more selfish than her plain sister, Blanche, who in the 1930s becomes a queen of Hollywood melodrama. Then it seems as if Jane, in a sudden fit of drunken jealousy, has rammed her car into her sister and crippled her for life. Years later, the sisters are still living together in a nightmare of mutually destructive co-dependency.

Director Aldrich is no stranger to movies about Hollywood or the grotesque. His best-known works — including Kiss Me Deadly, The Dirty Dozen and The Longest Yard — range from film noir and horror to biblical epic and archetypal action films. But the reason audiences crowded to see Baby Jane was probably not the director, but its two legendary stars: Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, in the first — and last — film they ever made together. There was evidently as little love lost between the actresses as between the sisters.