THE SHOW BEGAN ON THE SIDEWALK: TOP 20 Favorite Movie Posters

The Last Drive In

This essay is dedicated to Phil Gips and the late Stephen O. Frankfurt. Two legendary trailblazers in the field of motion picture advertising / marketing who collaborated on some of the most innovative and enduring campaigns and poster designs of all time.

I’ve loved movie posters and have been fascinated by the marketing side of the motion picture business for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest movie ad memories is of being about 8 or 9 years-old sitting in the back of the family station wagon and being thunderstruck as we drive by a naked man, three-stories-high and draped halfway around the side of a building.
What I saw as a wraparound billboard above a major movie theater advertising The Bible, John Huston's 1966 John Huston epic which prominently featured a nude Michael Parks (as Adam at the moment of creation, rising out of the dust of the earth with a strategically raised knee) in all its advertising.

This New York mega-billboard is similar to the one I recall gracing a movie palace in
 Denver, Colorado in 1966

When my sisters and I were small, my mother used to take us downtown with her when she went shopping on Saturdays. Back then, all the big department stores were along San Francisco’s Market Street, which was also the site of scores of those big, old-fashioned movie palaces. Grabbing the pedestrian's eye was the goal of these theaters, so a full day of shopping invariably turned into an impromptu art walk centered around some of the most arresting graphic design and illustration imaginable. I was forever lagging behind distractedly staring at one beckoning movie poster after another, begging for brief detours through the open outdoor theater lobbies, enthralled by the glass display cases overflowing with posters, stills, and lobby cards advertising current features and coming attractions.

My first job: usher at the Alhambra Theater on Polk Street in S.F.
Tuesdays were my favorite days because I got to change the marquees and put up the poster displays. 
Can't even tell you what a kick it was getting to see the publicity materials and pressbooks. 
Occasionally, the manager would gift me with a poster for a film I particularly liked (Night Moves)
or ones National Screen Service wouldn't miss (The Happy Hooker)

On Sunday mornings, when other more well-adjusted kids clamored for the expanded color comics in the newspaper, I hogged the San Francisco Chronicle’s entertainment pages (called DateBook, but due to the distinctive color of the paper, known to us locals as “the pink section”). I relished poring over the many movie ads, and even kept a clippings scrapbook of those of my favorites.

This was the late '60s, so pop-art poster stores (part head-shop, part record store) proliferated in the Haight-Ashbury district where we lived. Occasionally my older sister would allow me to tag along when she’d go to these teen hangouts where they sold t-shirts, candles, blacklight posters, and all manner of hippie-influenced, pop-culture novelties. This was at the start of the youth wave in nostalgia and camp, and a company known as Personality Posters Mfg Co. specialized in blow-up portraits of classic Hollywood stars. My sister's room was full of one-dollar posters of Bogart, Monroe, Fields, Harlow, and Gable. As a gift she bought me twin posters of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton in Taming of the Shrew, and with my own money I bought poster #30 from the chart below: Peter Fonda as Captain America astride his Easy Rider chopper- a BW image highlighted with yellow-tinted glasses and Old Glory gas tank and helmet. Too groovy for words!

Later, when we moved across the bay to Berkeley and I was old enough to walk to and from school alone; my after-school route was always a good half-hour longer and more serpentine than it needed to be, for it was my habit to stroll by and malinger in front of the many movie theaters peppering the UC Berkeley campus streets leading home.

In the days before 24-hour entertainment reporting and minute-by-minute behind-the-scenes production updates, movie posters were pretty much the means by which I first came to know of any of the films that would go on to become my favorites. Because this was when TV news was actually about the news (not the corporate subsidiary cross-promotion disguised as news we have today), I knew nothing about the movies beforehand and had to rely on these posters to give me an inkling of what was in store.
Sure, I looked at movie magazines (with names like Movie Mirror, Modern Screen, or my personal fave, Rona Barrett’s Hollywood), but they were primarily gossip rags. Movie posters had it all. They were glamorous, colorful, evocative...some were beautiful, and the best of them simultaneously caught my eye and fired up my imagination. Capturing the essence of a movie in a single image; revealing just enough, but not too much. They were part of the chain of anticipation that formed the whole moviegoing experience for me.

My profusely-postered bedroom of my first apartment
The Villa Elaine Apartments on Vine St in Hollywood -1980

It was during my freshman high school year that I made the “How long has this been going on?” discovery of there actually being stores (one store to be exact, a tiny shop tucked away in SF’s Castro/Mission District) which sell genuine, bonafide, National Screen Service movie posters to us lowly civilians. Who knew? Looking back, it surprises me to think how, during all my time spent newspaper scrapbooking and gazing longingly at theater display cases, I hadn’t allowed myself to even entertain the possibility of such a thing.
The first day I visited the store I easily spent more than an hour there - the veritable kid in a candy store - leaving with my very first authentic movie posture purchase: an original 1968 Barbarella one-sheet. This kicked off a near-lifelong collecting hobby which lasted until the mid-90s (when movie posters entered that dismal, artless stage of excessively airbrushed big celebrity heads).

I've since sold off or donated all but the most favored posters in my collection, the top tier examples I'll cite below. This list of favorite movie posters is limited to those which are still in my possession adhere to no particular criteria beyond my own personal tastes, aesthetics, and sentimental attachment. Omissions (of which there are bound to be many) don't signify a lack of quality, more than likely just a lower position on a much longer list.

(click on any image to see full size)

MY ALL-TIME FAVORITE MOVIE POSTERS

Rosemary's Baby- 1968 
One of the classiest poster's I've ever seen, as far as I'm concerned, the gold-standard in poster design. 

Stephen O. Frankfurt and Phil Gips are the New York admen responsible for the poster and ad campaign created for Rosemary’s Baby. A pivotal work not only in its artistic and commercial innovation but because it was also the first motion picture assignment for the two veteran advertising men who would go on to collaborate on more than 150 film campaigns over three decades of motion picture advertising.
Treating the film as they would any other account, they assembled a team of Madison Avenue ad artists, photographers (George Eliot-he photographed the baby carriage on one of the mounts in Central Park) and copy writers (Steve Gordon is widely credited with coming up with the tagline "Pray for Rosemary's Baby") to assist them in devising a suitable campaign. The image of Mia Farrow is credited to production still photographer Bob Willoughby.

I had the opportunity to interview these two industry giants back in 2005 (separately, they weren't on the best terms by then), both proud of what they achieved and aware of its influence on movie poster design.
In discussing  the idea behind Rosemary's Baby's initial concept, Gips explained, “What we were trying to do with Rosemary’s Baby was create a sophisticated ad.  A sophisticated ad conveys a mood or idea without providing too much information, while busy, or “schmear” ads, as they are sometimes referred to, appeal to the senses or emotions and often tell too much or try to show too much.  We set out to create an ad that appealed to the imagination.” 

The Day of the Locust - 1975
This advance poster hangs above my writing desk. The work of illustrator David Edward Byrd, this poster is drama with a capital "D." Totemic Hollywood symbols (palm trees, movie marquee with period lettering, klieg lights piercing the purple darkness) direct the eye to a super-sized, hyper-glam Karen Black, oblivious to the nightmarish chaos below her. It's an image that manages to capture the feel and thrust of the film in a single unforgettable image.

Barbarella - 1968

Artwork by Robert McGinnis, this Barbarella poster has always appealed to me because of its very period look and its evocation of a comic book. The heroic image of  a very leggy image of Fonda with her mane of hair flying in the space-wind is too cool for school. I love the space-age lettering font and most of all I love the tagline "See Barbarella Do Her Thing!"  which, after nearly 50 years, still brings a smile to my face. 

The Fox - 1967
The aesthetics of this poster and my fondness for it betrays my '60s-sympathetic sensibilities. The work of poster designer Bill Gold, This kind of sensuous, pseudo-psychdelic imagery was all the rage in the 60s, so the simple yet bold graphic got me from the start. As a kid I loved the clever way the figures of woman/man/woman/fox were so blended; today I really appreciate the visual economy.

Shampoo - 1975
If any one thing can be cited as to being the reason I fell so hard for this poster in '75, I'd say the reason was sexual effrontery. The aforementioned "big celebrity heads" wave in movie poster design was still a couple of decades off, so it wasn't particularly common to see such achingly gorgeous faces staring out at one from a movie poster. Indeed, the directness of the gazes (and warm brown tones of the photography) is brazenly sexy, hip, and stylish at the same time. This is a poster so sure of itself, it doesn't have to DO anything. Goldie Hawn never looked better, but I have to admit when the film first came out and I saw the poster, I didn't recognize Julie Christie at all. I actually thought they left Christie off and put Carrie Fisher front and center.

The Getaway - 1972
I'm not sure who designed this poster, but it with its use of a simple, dynamic image coupled with the mnemonic pairing of the last names of its stars, it feels like the work of Frankfurt/Gips. in any event, I loved the poster the moment I saw it. It's like someone asked for a single image that read "tough" and the designer miraculously complied.

Bonnie & Clyde - 1967
This iconic poster is another Bill Gold poster design. In my essay on this film, I related how this poster's graphic was quite unsettling for me as a child. Now it hangs above my bed. It still stands as a provocatively commanding image - violence and laughter juxtaposed - but these days I think I've come to better appreciate its gracefulness.

Just Tell Me What You Want - 1980
When I moved to Los Angeles, three of the strongest impressions the women here made on me were: berets, white wine, and slit skirts. The popularity of the latter comes to mind whenever I look at this smile-inducing poster featuring a exquisitely long-limbed Ali MacGraw pulling a Gladys Ormphby on comedian Alan King. Though this poster may look like your typical rom-com style ad, what gave it its kick in 1980 was how it played against Ali MacGraw's somewhat stiff image. She was more more animated in this still photo than she'd ever been onscreen.

Images -1972
The poster for this psychological thriller grabbed me with its simple directness (why is that camera pointed at ME, yet reflecting Susannah York in the lens?),  ambiguity (Why are there two Susannah Yorks in that lens?), and suggestion of violence. Kind of a perfect way to create curiosity and interest without revealing anything.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? - 1969
If capturing attention and keeping it is the goal of a movie poster, small wonder this striking yet agonized study in anguish still hangs on my walls. I think this might have been the third poster I ever purchased...right after Rosemary's Baby.

Reflections in a Golden Eye - 1967
If there's any kind of pattern to emerge in the kind of posters I gravitate toward, I guess I have to cop to being a sucker for its negative space when its used to draw your eye to a strong image. Here we come dangerously close to the "big celebrity head" thing, but that riding crop and the dissimilar countenances of the stars (stern/seductive) really makes this late acquisition (I purchased it in 1990) a hard-to-find fave.

Saturday Night Fever - 1977
This poster has the distinction of being the only one in my collection representing a film I largely despise. I really can't stand Saturday Night Fever for any number of reasons (although I do enjoy it when I can see only the dancing clips), but the poster is really something else. I have a sentimental attachment to it because it recalls my disco-crazy days (yes, I had a T-shirt with those exact words blazoned across it), and because I still can recall how excited I was by this now rather silly-looking poster when I first saw it.
There's a reason why so many things about this poster have become cliche and the stuff of parody, but I feel lucky to have my memories of that brief moment in time when everything you see here - from the white suit to the disco-lit floor) was part of a exhilarating wave of change.
Today, what has become the most striking aspect of this poster is its total lack of irony.

 These posters round out my Top 20 - Winners all! 

LEAST FAVORITE MOVIE POSTER 

What's The Matter With Helen? -1971
"I know...let's get people interested in our film by showing them how it ends!"

My problem with this poster has nothing to do with graphic design and all to do with it not giving a hoot about the film-goer's experience. Rather than invest the time and energy to find out how to sell a hagsploitation horror film with a period setting, the poster goes for the hard sell: it shows us a violent moment from the film that also just happens to be the movie's  "shock" twist ending. WTF?!
It was like the studio had no confidence in the film, and rather than take a chance on it being presumed to be a comedy or musical (given its cast) it just went the dumbded-down route and  laid it all out there. The worst!


If any of you out there have a particular favorite movie poster, have ever wanted to own or collect them, or been persuaded to see a film because of one, please share it with us.

No discussion of movie posters would be complete without at least a tip of the hat to Saul Bass
The great granddaddy of motion picture graphic design 

Copyright © Ken Anderson

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK 1975

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” Edgar Allen Poe  1849

I'm drawn to motion pictures for their storytelling, spectacle, entertainment, and escapism. But for as long as I can remember, their primary, fundamental appeal for me has always been their ability to capture the ethereal, ofttimes rapturous quality of dreams and fantasies.

When I think of the moments in movies that give me the sensation of reality and dreams merging, I think of those God’s-eye-view kaleidoscopic dance patterns of Busby Berkeley. I think of the feverish surrealism of Ken Russell. And my mind goes to the films of  Roman Polanski and his remarkable way of using the camera to replicate the imprecise flow of events and murky logic found in dreams. 

All of these moments—and moments like them—epitomize film’s miraculous capacity to both meet and exceed one’s fantasies while simultaneously inspiring new ones. Not every movie has to do this, but the fact that films possess the potential to render corporeal those very aspects of existence we ascribe to the ethereal is what made me fall in love with them.

I think it's perhaps for this reason that sports films, westerns, war movies, and action/adventures have never held a particularly strong interest for me. All that aggressive competition and combat—even when represented as heroic—just bring to mind the "nature vs. materialism" sentiments of Wordsworth’s The World is Too Much With Us. These films feel like products of the material (masculine) world, intent on exalting that which is singularly mortal, and therefore fundamentally minimal.
Movies that awaken me to what is beautiful and mysterious in the world—that inspire me to pay more attention, feel more deeply, recognize and appreciate the poetry in the unique and absurd...I like that. When I'm lucky enough to recall them, my dreams always feel like hyper-aware versions of reality. They seem to me to be, in their way, a truer vision of the magic and mystery in the world (and within myself) than my rational mind sometimes allows during what can be jokingly referred to as my "conscious" life. 

One of the more hypnotically exhilarating films to capture this sense of “movies as dreams/dreams as movies” (one I rate right up there with Robert Altman’s 3 Women) is Australian director Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Rachel Roberts as Mrs. Appleyard

Anne-Louise Lambert as Miranda St. Clare

Margaret Nelson as Sara Waybourne

Helen Morse as Mlle. Dianne de Poitiers

Dominic Guard as Michael Fitzhubert

John Jarratt as Albert Crundall

The enigmatic tale of Picnic at Hanging Rock, condensed on the teasing “based on a true story or not?” poster copy used to promote the film, concerns a fateful Valentine’s Day in 1900 when, during a school outing to Hanging Rock, a mystically foreboding rock formation in Victoria, Australia, two schoolgirls, and a teacher disappear, never to be seen again.

From this deceptively simple mystery plot is suspended a host of enticing themes—practical as well as metaphysical—from which can be drawn entirely different (yet peculiarly complementary) interpretations of not only the event itself, but the lingering, escalatingly tragic effect it has on all the individuals whose lives were irrevocably changed by it.

Vivean Gray as Miss Greta McCraw

Sensitively adapted for the screen by Cliff Green from the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, it was established long ago that Picnic at Hanging Rock was not based on an actual event. But the intentional obfuscation of this fact by Lindsay throughout her life ideally suits a story in which the attempt to arrive at logical explanations through pragmatic means proves, in this instance, a futile pursuit at best.

Flanked by French teacher Mille. de Portiers on the left and math instructor Miss McCraw on the right, the girls are formally briefed before they depart on their picnic by headmistress Mrs. Appleyard. A briefing which can be summed up as: enjoy yourselves but make sure you don't have a good time.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Establishing a mood of hazy paradox from the outset, Peter Weir ushers us into his film—which is, in effect, a waking dream—with the image of its most ethereal character, Miranda, waking up from a dream. It is Valentine’s Day at Appleyard College; a rigidly formal, upper-class English all-girls boarding school plopped smack in the middle of the Australian bush, and the girls are all caught up in a flurry of romantic preoccupation.

"Meet me love, when day is ending..."
The romantic valentines the girls share with one another express
a depth of emotion largely stifled by their surroundings

And just as the surrounding barren landscape contrasts with the school’s lush gardens, and Hanging Rock’s organic asymmetry silently defies the illusion of order presented by the stark traditionalism of the school’s architecture; the sensual stirrings within Mrs. Appleyard’s adolescent charges bristle against the stern repressiveness of Victorian-era British Colonialism.

These contrasts soon establish themselves as a motif in Picnic at Hanging Rock, the subtle discord between nature (encompassing both the supernatural and preternatural) and the desire to control it (as exemplified by the staunch dominance of school headmistress Mrs. Appleyard), are put to the test by the unexplained disappearance of the aforementioned students and teacher.

Little Girls Lost
The disappearance of Miranda (Lambert), Marion (Jane Vallis), and Irma (Karen Robson)
is depicted as an act of mystical somnambulism

Because the film begins with a title card already informing us of the girls’ disappearance, the early scenes, for all their soft-focus sensuality (make me wonder if Brian DePalma caught this film before he shot Carrie’s memorable slow-motion girls’ locker room scene) betray a sense of menace and foreboding.

Natural emotions and actions are thwarted at every turn. Miranda, the school free spirit, is the object of a girlhood crush by her lonely roommate, Sara. Sara’s overtures of love are accepted, yet frustrated by Miranda’s cryptic premonition: “You must learn to love someone else apart from me, Sara. I won’t be here much longer.”

In addition, after witnessing the girls binding themselves up with corsets (apparently a picnic doesn’t necessitate being comfortable), we’re given scene after scene in which teachers attempt to quiet and suppress the natural ebullience of girls anticipating an outing.

All this has the effect of creating an atmosphere redolent of an emotional pressure-cooker (a feeling enhanced by the strenuously non-romantic math instructor as she pragmatically demystifies the miracle of Hanging Rock by going on about its formation being the result of earthly eruptions).

(After posting the above screencap, my partner told me its painterly composition and use of light reminded him of George Seurat's pointillist masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte - completed in 1886.) Beautiful.

By the time the three more developmentally inquisitive girls traipse off to explore (the naïf Edith [Christine Schuler] tagging along), their eventual disappearance into the almost beckoning columns of the rock feels like a date with destiny.

Two local boys also on the rock that day—Michael, a high-born Englishman, and Albert, an Australian coachman—find their lives touched (profoundly) by the disappearances.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

If the first part of the film feels like a deceptively pastoral rumination on Victorian ethos imposed upon Australian culture (vis a vis British Colonialism); then the second part, structured as a crime mystery shrouded in a psychological melodrama, feels like a battle royale between nature’s enigmatic indomitability and man’s arrogant faith in all things being comprehensible and tractable.

Among the townsfolk, the urgency to discover the fate of the missing girls (compounded when one is found unharmed, yet lacking any recollection of what occurred) arises as much out of the fear of uncertainty as concern for their welfare. At the school, Mrs. Appleyard frets over how the heedlessness of the event will color public perception of her institution, her inefficacy in the matter fueling a need to exert her will over the staff and pupils. Particularly the rebellious but emotionally vulnerable Sara. Sara is an orphan, abandoned by her parents, her friend Miranda, her caretaker, and ultimately her absent, longed-for brother (the latter, another lovely metaphysical quirk in a story overflowing with them). 

Mrs. Appleyard, intent on breaking the stubborn will of the school's most defenseless and vulnerable student

The sum effect of all these emotional and psychological upheavals is that the disappearance of the schoolgirls comes to erode everything everyone has come to know and rely upon. This discord and disruption are dramatized in the contrasting images of Australia’s resilient-looking fauna juxtaposed against the fragile white swans introduced to Australia by British settlers (only black swans are indigenous). Similarly, the vaguely threatening sounds of nature on the film’s soundtrack feel like an angry outdoors response to the near-constant sound of the ticking of clocks indoors.

Picnic at Hanging Rock ends on a note of compound human tragedies. But true to the film's thematic responsiveness to the instinctual, sensual, and constant; nature seems to triumph and prevail. Hanging Rock remains as it has for millions of years: unchanged, unyielding, and the conclusive guardian of its mysteries.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
I find it somewhat remarkable to consider that outside of the mystical Australia vs. Colonialism angle I  described above (the particular thrust of the film that spoke to me most fervently), Picnic at Hanging Rock actually operates on about fifty other levels simultaneously. Whether the themes relate to spiritualism, sexual awakening, death and loss, existential mystery, the birth of the Edwardian era in Australia, romantic idealism, etc. There are just so many fascinating and diverse ways to look at this movie.

Hanging Rock -  Appleyard College / A precipice vs. an edifice
One exalts the natural spirit, the other seeks to suppress it

Visually it is as sumptuous as they come. The almost otherworldly cinematography by Russell Boyd (Starstruck) renders Australia a continent of the mind. The seductively lush, yet mystifyingly ominous exteriors are pointedly offset by the meticulous (and spectacularly fine) art direction (David Copping, Martin Sharp, and I'm sure many others) which fills Appleyard College and the home of Col. Fitzhubert with determined Victorian overkill. It's clear the Colonialists intend to combat the ruggedness of Australia by bringing every stitch of orderly Great Britain with them.

It's impossible to speak of Picnic at Hanging Rock without giving credit to the invaluable contribution made by its haunting musical score. Composer Bruce Smeaton and pan flutist Gheorghe Zamfir (with some additional assist from Beethoven) imbue each dreamily-evoked scene with just the right tone of languorous unease.

PERFORMANCES
Welsh actress Rachel Roberts--stepping in for the last-minute departure of originally cast Vivien Merchant (The Maids)--is the immovable object against which all the characters in Picnic at Hanging Rock must collide. Backing up her startling hairdo, severe manner, and clipped, precise diction with a forcefulness that knocks everyone else off the screen, Mrs. Appleyard is an even more memorable entity than the character of Miranda.
Peter Weir gets splendid performances out of the entirety of his cast. I have nothing but praise for the ensemble work in Picnic at Hanging Rock, with special kudos going to personal favorites Helen Morse (who I honestly thought was French), Anne-Louise Lambert, Margaret Nelson, and John Jarratt.

Tony Llewellyn-Jones and Jacki Weaver as Appleyard College's handyman and maid, are so very good as two grounded characters who, while lacking the dreaminess of the schoolgirls, instead possess a true gentleness of heart 

I saw Picnic at Hanging Rock for the first time in 1979. Then, unfamiliar with the plot or Peter Weir's trance-like, atmospheric style, it felt like the most elegant horror movie I'd ever seen. Very unsettling and disturbing in a compellingly subtle way. Since then, I've seen this movie more times than I can count. Each time finding more to marvel at and discover. However, the best thing about it is that it has ceased feeling like a dream remembered. Closer to the truth is that it feels like a remembered nightmare that no longer frightens, one whose unsettling memory now simply entertains.

A terrific scene of Polanski-level tension is when Irma, the only girl to be rescued of the
missing three, visits the gymnasium before departing for home

BONUS MATERIAL

Watch the two-hour "making of" documentary - Picnic at Hanging Rock: A Dream Within A Dream

No evening of TV watching in the early '80s was complete without at least one sighting of this record collection commercial for Zamfir: Master of the Pan Flute. Warning, if you're a fan of the delicate and stirring way Gheorghe Zamfir's music is used in Picnic at Hanging Rock, I strongly suggest you skip the commercial. Otherwise, it's available on YouTube HERE.

“Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place.”

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2016 - 2022

HUSH...HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE 1964

Warning: Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay not a review, therefore many crucial plot points are revealed for the purpose of discussion. 

In earlier posts on The Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s Baby, I wrote about how, as a youngster, I was drawn to horror films and scary movies; this in spite of everything in my personal and psychological makeup only reinforcing how ill-suited I was to the genre. A self-serious kid given to over-thinking everything, I was too literal-minded and took things far too much to heart to appreciate the cathartic benefits of what felt to me to be the casual sadism at the core of so many horror films and scary movies.

It’s not like I was immune to the escapist fun of being frightened by a movie—the rollercoaster thrill ride of jump cuts and shock effects—but that’s what B-movies were for. Cheaply made, poorly-acted programmers featuring creatures with visible zippers in their costumes were so artificial, their frights were reassuring. Once the genre started attracting Oscar-winning actresses and high production values, and the ghouls and monsters were replaced by cruel behavior and criminally dangerous people with mental illnesses…well, cathartic escapism gave way to inappropriate-for-the-genre empathy.

I grew up at a time when TV violence was full of bloodless bloodletting. Whether it be westerns, spy thrillers or sci-fi dramas, death on television was impersonal and at a remove. When people were killed, they simply fell: no visible wounds, eyes closed. The same held true of those B horror movies from the '40s and '50s screened on TV programs like “Creature Features”—death was just part of the drama and nothing to take seriously.

I don’t know when What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) first aired on TV, but I couldn’t have been more than eight or nine at the time. I remember watching it expecting to be scared out of my wits (in a fun way), but by the end, all I remember is trying to conceal from my sisters the fact that I was crying. Anything I might have been scared by in the earlier part of this Davis/Crawford horrorshow of grotesques came in second to how heartbreakingly sad it made me when Davis said to Crawford at the end, “You mean all this time we could have been friends?’’

And indeed, until I grew older and the film took on the mercifully distancing attributes of camp, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? has always been for me less a shocker than a very sad melodrama populated with pitiable characters. Some fun I was on scary movie nights. 

I had a similar reaction to Robert Aldrich’s follow-up film, Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Only with gore levels ratcheted up (as is the wont of horror films cashing in on a previous success), there was enough genuine fright to go around, too.

Bette Davis as Charlotte Hollis

Olivia de Havilland as Miriam Deering

Joseph Cotten as Drew Bayliss

Agnes Moorehead as Velma Cruther

Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte, in reuniting the director, production team, writers, and many of the actors from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, stops just a hair short (make that a big bouffant wig, short) of being an actual sequel to the Bette Davis/Joan Crawford starrer whose surprise success kicked off the whole Grand Dame Guignol horror film trend. Director Robert Aldrich had initially succeeded in convincing Crawford and Davis to appear together again as co-stars, but after roughly ten days of shooting, Crawford bailed and/or was fired (details below*) and was replaced by frequent Davis co-star Olivia de Havilland.

  

Substituting the Hollywood decay of Baby Jane for dilapidated southern-fried gothic, Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte tells the story of Charlotte Hollis (Davis) an eccentric, Delta Dawn-like southern belle (is there any other kind?) who has holed herself up inside her late father’s Louisiana plantation following a scandalous, horrific night in 1927 whose secret she must guard. An unsolved secret involving a daddy’s girl, an illicit affair, a married man, a domineering father (Victor Buono), and an unattended meat cleaver.

Mary Astor (in her last film role) as Jewel Mayhew

Jump ahead to 1963. The demure Charlotte has grown into a loudmouthed, hot-tempered, pistol-packin' plantation proprietress a few mint juleps shy of a full pitcher. With the home she shares with her slovenly housekeeper (Moorehead) now threatened with demolition by a highway commission, Charlotte enlists the aid of her level-headed cousin, Miriam (de Havilland). Unfortunately, Miriam’s arrival triggers all manner of past rivalries and resentments, not to mention elaborate psychotic episodes in Charlotte which the family doctor (Cotton) barely has time to tend to before the next one erupts. What's the secret Charlotte is guarding, and who is it she's trying to protect? Is Charlotte really off her southern rocker as everyone in town seems to think, or is she getting a little assist off the deep end from seeming well-wishers?

As thrillers go, Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte is certainly not one lacking for secrets, suspects, and suspicious characters; so there’s a great deal of creepy fun to be had in trying to figure out just who is doing what to whom, and why. And while it’s been many, many years since the first time I saw it, I recall that after I thought I’d figured everything out, I was blown away by how many more surprises the film had up its sleeve.

Victor Buono as Samuel Eugene Hollis ("Big Sam")
Only 26-years old and portraying 56-year-old Bette Davis' father  

The film benefitted from a larger budget (nearly $2.5 million to Baby Jane’s $980 thousand), a name cast, a Top Ten theme song (Patti Page’s version on vinyl, Al Martino sung it in the film), and Davis’ tireless promotion (she was an unbilled associate producer with profit points). Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (amazingly) garnered seven academy award nominations -- Best Supporting Actress [Moorehead], B&W cinematography, score, song, art direction, costume design, editing). Upon release, it was met with a largely favorable critical response and emerged a boxoffice hit. Although not quite as big a hit as What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Cecil Kellaway as Harry Willis

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM 

Ranking Baby Jane and Charlotte on the basis of entertainment value alone, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? comes out on top as the most original and conceptually daring of the two. There’s something audacious in both the premise and casting of a story about two washed-up movie actresses making their golden years hell for one another that makes Baby Jane feel like a lost chapter from The Day of the Locust. Horror credentials aside, Baby Jane succeeds in being an ingeniously grotesque Hollywood black comedy with a campy/bitchy bite.

Bruce Dern as John Mayhew

Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, on the other hand, has two ghosts hovering over it: John Mayhew and Joan Crawford. As good as Olivia de Havilland is, there’s no way I can watch the film without wondering what might have come from the re-teaming of Davis & Crawford. They were a dynamite pair in spite of—most likely, specifically due to—their shared animosity.  But in comparing Baby Jane  & Charlotte as they stand and on their own terms, I find Charlotte to be the better film overall: better written, better acted, more solidly structured, and less of a one-woman show. It’s a genuinely riveting melodrama that loses points only for its too-traditional gothic structure (the movie tests one’s tolerance for dark shadows, long staircases, and women in long, flowing nightgowns), and over-reliance on familiar haunted house/woman in peril tropes (Thunder! Lightning! Gale-force winds! Weather is never as unpredictable as it is in a horror film).

But being a longtime fan of the whole crazy-in-the-heat southern gothic tradition, what I enjoy most about Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte is how it feels like the explicit, pulp novel reworking of one of those dark, family-related secrets poetically alluded to or whispered about in the works of Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers.

Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte was adapted from the unpublished short story What Ever Happened to Cousin Charlotte? by What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? author Henry Farrell (who obviously had a thing for these kinds of titles: What’s The Matter With Helen?,  How Awful About Alan).

PERFORMANCES

Although I’m never quite sure what to make of everyone’s southern accents (I have no ear for their authenticity, only the giggles they sometimes inspire), I like all of the performances in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte a great deal. The very capable cast of classic Hollywood stars appear to be enjoying themselves in roles that capitalize on and play off of past performances (both Cotten and de Havilland are likable personalities with screen experience showing their darker side). None more so than the Oscar-nominated Agnes Moorehead, who pulls off the amazing feat of making an over-the-top, very funny characterization, if not necessarily believable, certainly sympathetic. No one kids themselves that they're appearing in Eugene O’Neill, but neither do they condescend to the material.

As de Havilland demonstrated in The Heiress (1949), few people can
play the flip side of  sweetness and light to such chilling effect

However, it’s Bette Davis as the titular Charlotte in need of hushing who serves as the film’s center and driving force. Make that tour de force. Playing another pitiable, mentally fragile woman haunted by the past, Davis achieves moments of surprising sensitivity and subtlety of emotion almost simultaneously with instances of full-blown, drag-queen-level histrionics. It’s precisely what the role calls for, and Davis, clearly giving it her all, must have been disappointed when she was overlooked for an Oscar nomination.

Cecil Kellaway plays an insurance investigator looking into the unsolved Mayhew murder case
Davis & Kellaway's scenes are my favorite 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Were my list of favorite movies a ledger, Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte would occupy a double-entry column marked “loss of innocence”: movies that have changed as I've grown older.  There, alongside such titles as The Birds, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Bad Seed, and Valley of the Dolls; Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte would represent yet another film that I took seriously in my youth, but now can only watch through the jaundiced eye of camp and unintentional humor. 

Looks like Charlotte could do with some hushing.

As with the aforementioned Baby Jane, I was a child when Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte had its broadcast TV premiere. A night that stands out as an evening of traumatic firsts: 1. It was my first exposure to gory bloodshed: the meat cleaver murder in the film’s prologue was bad enough, but the sight of blood splattering on the statue of a cherub fueled more childhood nightmares than I’d care to count; 2. It was the first time I ever saw anyone die with their eyes open. Yikes! 

Add to all this the fact that I had yet to see the influential French thriller Les Diaboliques (1955), so Charlotte’s borrowed denouement twist was nearly as terrifying for me as it was for poor, put-upon Bette Davis.

So while Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte did a superb job of scaring me to death, like its predecessor, it was also a movie my younger self found to be very sad. Honestly, I must be the biggest softie around, but even today Bette Davis' crestfallen demeanor and wounded eyes can fairly make my heart break. But as a child I was just worn out by all the film put her character through...and as it turns out, unnecessarily. So once again, as the credits rolled, I had to conceal from my sisters that I had been reduced to waterworks by the thought of her character's life spent in misery for nothing.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

These days, my memory of Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte as a scary film has fallen prey to too many years of Bette Davis impersonators, too much quotable dialog, a 2015 drag spoof titled Hush Up, Sweet Charlotte, and too many laugh-filled evenings with my partner cracking up at this, his favorite line (and line reading):

Truth be told, I would have given Bette Davis an Oscar for this bit alone.

Happily, none of this has lessened my affection for this film or for Davis' memorable (to say the least) performance. My appreciation for Bette Davis—the rabid scenery-chewer with the yo-yo-ing southern accent and forceful screen presence—is matched by my genuine admiration for Bette Davis the talented actress, and the nuances she brings to a role (at least in the film's quieter moments) written in such broad strokes.

Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte is a watchable, fun, atmospheric old-style escapist movie (still a little sad for me in parts, but in a nice way) featuring a cast of good actors giving solid performances. Agnes Moorehead is a scene-stealing hoot, but it's Olivia de Havilland who winds up being the film's Most Valuable Player. She has an easy naturalism that grounds the high-flung theatrics surrounding her. While no classic,  Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte is nevertheless a viewing pleasure too rarefied and full of surprises to ever be considered "guilty."

BONUS MATERIAL

Who needs Patti Page's willowy-soft vocals singing the Oscar-nominated song Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte when you can listen to Bette Davis' smoky rendition (and I mean that literally, as it sounds as though she just smoked an entire pack of cigarettes) HERE.  With a full orchestra, yet.

Olivia de Havilland & Agnes Moorehead (r) recreating a scene first filmed with Joan Crawford (l). Although nothing alike, de Havilland also wound up replacing Joan Crawford in
1964s Lady in a Cage as well as Airport '77

I intentionally steered clear of the whole Bette Davis/Joan Crawford feud as it relates to the making of Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte. These documentaries and "making of" featurettes cover the territory nicely:
AMC Backstory: The Making of Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte 

Wizard Work: a 1964 featurette narrated by Joseph Cotten 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2016