Baby Jane Tonight on TCM!
Tonight at 8pm Eastern on TCM, that heartwarming family classic Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? The part of the film that seems to stick uppermost in our mind is the situation of two old sisters, the one (Bette Davis) terrorizing and abusing her invalid sister (Joan Crawford).
Ah but there is a vaudeville angle! For Davis’s character is the fictional former vaud child star Baby Jane Hudson, a cloying, irritating spoiled brat of a thing. If memory serves, the vaudeville scenes in the movie’s prologue are wildly inaccurate, neither the theatre itself, nor the nature of Baby Jane’s act nor the music played or the amount or type of merchandising of Baby Jane products in the lobby bear any relationship to reality. However, according to my personal experience, the scene where one sibling serves another a dead rat for luncheon was not only true to life, but tastefully realized for the screen.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a clip of that, but there’s always this horrifying scene:
To find out more about the variety arts past and present, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold. And don’t miss Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, to be released by Bear Manor Media in 2013.
