Hollywood by Hollywood by Cohan Steven;

Author:Cohan, Steven; [Cohan, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2018-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

The Hudson sisters’ story starts with them as children. A first pretitle prologue occurring in 1917 shows Baby Jane’s vaudeville act. This sequence reveals the child star adored by other little girls and doted on by her daddy; offstage Baby Jane is spoiled and mean-spirited. That the child star’s sweet demeanor onstage is a mask that she does not wear offstage predicts the older Jane’s deluded mental state as she tries to re-create that lost youthful persona in the present, getting more violent and more lost in time as the film progresses. A second prologue happening in 1935 reveals Jane to be an alcoholic and promiscuous woman without much talent who is flailing about in Hollywood films, some of which are so terrible they do not even get released in the States. “Boy, what a no-talent broad that Baby Jane is,” a projectionist complains after screening footage. “Why can’t she stay sober?” his co-worker asks, no doubt rhetorically. As Ben Golden (Burt Freed), a studio producer, complains to Marty (Wesley Addy), Blanche’s agent, even before that just-screened picture finished production Jane had already “guzzled her way through six cases of Scotch and slugged two studio cops, not to mention one or two other less savory items of publicity.” Jane is unruly but also intolerable because her films repeatedly cost the studio in bad publicity and delays as well as red ink.

The studio cannot fire Jane, however, because Blanche, who selflessly stood in the shadows of Baby Jane’s stardom in their vaudeville days, is now queen of the lot, “the biggest thing in movies today. She can write her own ticket. She’s got script approval.” Since her contract also requires the studio to make a picture with Jane for every one of hers, at first we may simply assume that Blanche acts as her dysfunctional sister’s caretaker. After all, catching sight of a sullen Blanche in the wings of the vaudeville theater, her mother had said, “Someday it’s going to be you that’s getting all the attention. And when that happens, I—I want you to try to be kinder to Jane and your father than they are to you now.” “I won’t forget,” young Blanche had vowed with a look of fierce determination. ( Figure 4.22)

Presumably that promise dictates the terms of Blanche’s studio contract, although why it does so is not made immediately clear. It could simply be her misguided effort to make Jane a star again, or so Golden assumes when wondering why Blanche cannot be persuaded to remove the clause. On the other hand, her agent explains to him that Blanche is simply “a fine person” and, remembering what her sister did for her in the old days, is now paying her back. Paying her back indeed! In the film’s big revelation we learn that Blanche had tried to run down her sister, causing the car accident that left herself paralyzed and dependent on Jane’s ministrations, while letting Jane, who was too drunk after the accident even to

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