What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1961)

Sometimes it takes awhile to get around to the classics. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1961) was a first-time watch for me in 2025. With it being often referenced and parodied, I never felt like I needed to see it to know it, but I was wrong. The movie is much darker and sadder than I thought, and while there are campy moments, it’s far less camp than I expected. I should have watched this movie sooner—it turns out we could have been friends all this time.  

The movie opens in 1917, with a performance by Baby Jane, a bratty, entitled vaudeville star. Looking on backstage is her sister Blanche, who later becomes a movie star—the two sisters’ fortunes reversing. After Blanche is paralyzed in an intentional car crash, Jane must care for her. Jump to “Yesterday,” which is how the title card indicates the present day. To say the relationship between the two sisters is unhealthy is an understatement. During the course of the movie, we witness Jane become increasingly abusive toward Blanche, who is trapped in the upstairs of their house and in denial about how bad her treatment is until it is too late. 

What stands out most is Bette Davis’ unhinged performance as Jane, who appears in pancake makeup with a drawn-on heart-shaped mole (usually with a drink in hand). Joan Crawford, as Blanche, delivers a quieter performance, with her facial expressions doing a lot of the work to communicate the terror and hopelessness she feels as her attempts to get help are thwarted by Jane. The movie is a journey following what Jane is going to do next. Where will her resentment, cruelty, and delusions take her, and must we follow? Is she going to serve Blanche’s pet bird as dinner, dress a rat on a bed of tomatoes, sing a song, pretend to be her sister on the phone, forge checks, kick the shit out of Blanche, dress in recreations of her childhood costumes, kill the housekeeper, revise her show, go for a drive? Who knows?! 

This movie runs over two hours long, and there are moments when it feels like a slog—almost like torture porn minus the gore. Blanche declares, “You wouldn’t be able to do these awful things to me if I weren’t still in this chair,” and Jane gleefully responds, “But you are, Blanche, you are in that chair.” By the end of the movie, Blanche is a husk, dehydrated, starved, and left out in the sun. We know how she feels. A surprise revelation isn’t going to change anything now, but Jane gets her Norma Desmond moment as an audience surrounds her and she dances her way to the end of the movie. 4 out of 5 sacs-of-blood.  

—Gina Myers