One of the best examples of the "psychobiddy" genre is "Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte" (1964), filmed at Houmas House Plantation in Darrow, Louisiana.
It’s hard to imagine Judi Dench tearing around with a chainsaw, but if she’d been a couple of generations older, that might be the career stage she found herself in today. The dearth of parts for older actresses has become proverbial, but for a marvelous stretch of time in the ‘sixties, studio execs had an answer: they’d just cast them as lunatics. The resulting genre—alternately called “psycho-biddy,” “Grande Dame Guignol,” or “‘Wait, she’s in this?!’”—saw some truly concept-heavy flicks: Bette Davis as an agoraphobic ex-child star torturing her wheelchair-bound sister (Joan Crawford) in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?; Joan Crawford as an axe-toting femme fatale in Strait-Jacket; Shelley Winters as a mummy-hoarding deviant in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?—these actresses and others created a select sisterhood of performers of a certain age audiences wanted to see snap.
One of the best and best-known examples of this subgenre is 1964’s Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, a spiritual successor to Baby Jane and a classic of the Southern Gothic in its own right. The film was set to reprise the pairing of famed feud partners Crawford and Davis, but the “difficult” Crawford was replaced by Olivia de Havilland, the Japanese-born British beauty who’d earned her stars-and-bars stripes as Melanie Wilkes in Gone with the Wind and her psycho-biddy badge in Lady in a Cage. The cast was rounded out with a handsome young Bruce Dern (don’t get attached), a majestically condescending Mary Astor in her final film role, and the magnificent Agnes Moorehead, Bewitched’s Endora, playing against her established imperious dowager type as a fanatically loyal lower-class maid.
Not credited in the cast list are the accents, which have lives of their own, and Louisiana itself. Set explicitly in Ascension Parish, a detail confirmed by the patches on the sheriff’s uniforms and the planned elopement to that fabled Gomorrah on the Mississippi, Baton Rouge, the exterior scenes around Charlotte’s (Davis’) crumbling plantation house were filmed on location at Houmas House before its subsequent re-blossoming into the food and garden destination familiar today. (Dedicated film buffs can visit the property to see where Davis slept.) Another plantation is established through the use of an old-fashioned but excellently executed painted backdrop featuring a grand allée of live oaks that would rival Oak Alley if only it were real. The fateful party features a jazz band, which might still have been a bit novel for rural people in 1927 but locks in the Louisiana bona fides even harder. In an unrealistic touch given Louisiana’s demographics, the musicians are among the few African-Americans to show up in the film, joined by some cleaning women and a servant who casually leaves the (first) murder weapon lying around—a dramatic necessity, since what upper-class person in 1927 carried their own tools?
The dearth of parts for older actresses has become proverbial, but for a marvelous stretch of time in the ‘sixties, studio execs had an answer: they’d just cast them as lunatics.
The film opens with Charlotte’s father, Big Sam Hollis (Victor Buono, playing a Southern paterfamilias at the advanced age of 26) explaining to young John Mayhew (Bruce Dern) that Mayhew will not, in fact, be abandoning his wife to elope with Big Daddy’s daughter Charlotte, regardless of what he might have thought. As it turns out, Mayhew doesn’t have much time to think anything, as he’s dispatched with a meat cleaver the next night while the rest of the parish is at Big Sam’s for a ball. Charlotte staggers into the ballroom, dress bloody, and we fade out to the present. An older Charlotte is leaning over her balcony, firing a rifle at the workmen bulldozing her gazebo, the first stage of the plan to demolish her property to build a new bridge across the river. Charlotte’s maid Velma, touchingly, makes sure Charlotte gets dressed and has breakfast before the sheriff arrives. (Meanwhile, in the real world, Ascension Parish still doesn’t have that bridge.)
Charlotte’s plan to avoid eviction, such as it is, is to have her Yankee cousin Miriam come help. The women were raised together after Miriam’s father died, which inspired no real affection between the adult women but has led to a grudging obligation for Miriam to help move her deranged cousin out of her crumbling plantation, preferably to somewhere the local children won’t chant “chop, chop, sweet Charlotte.” Miriam, played by too-glamorous-to-sweat-even-in-this-heat de Havilland, immediately clashes with loopy Charlotte, cagy Velma, and grand Jewel Mayhew (Mary Astor), widow of Charlotte’s hacked-up paramour. The tension is amped up by an increasingly bizarre and terrifying series of events that begin to peel away Charlotte’s grip on reality, finger by finger. The plot only gets more Gothic from there.
The film requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. Fifty-six in 1964, when the movie was released, Davis spends most of the time she appears onscreen as a slip of a 19-year-old either masked by strategic shadows or sobbing into her hands. (She briefly gets a face double when a look of catatonic horror is absolutely necessary; this poor girl’s mouth matches Bette Davis’ voiceover about as well as the average Japanese bystander mimics the English in a Godzilla dub.) The bloody stumps that appear in the meat cleaver sequence and Charlotte’s subsequent hallucinations are about as convincing as you might expect for a mid-budget film in 1964, but their very presence shocks the viewer willing to play along. The story is far from iron-clad, and several aspects of the plot, some fairly key, don’t really stand up to scrutiny.
The tension is amped up by an increasingly bizarre and terrifying series of events that begin to peel away Charlotte’s grip on reality, finger by finger. The plot only gets more Gothic from there.
Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte has also been given perhaps the greatest honor a camp classic can receive: a drag remake. Hush Up, Sweet Charlotte, director Billy Clift’s 2015 homage to the original, follows his prior sendup of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, titled simply Baby Jane? (He hopes to go on to spoof Dead Ringer, in which Bette Davis plays sinister twins.) Clift describes Hush Up as more of a tribute than a parody, noting that he had more room to play with this film than in Baby Jane?: the original Baby Jane is more famous, and the looser, more ambiguous plot of the original Charlotte gave him openings for added fun. Most notable among Clift’s liberties is the addition of a twin for the Miriam character, a nod to de Havilland’s earlier portrayal of good-and-evil twins in The Dark Mirror, de Havilland’s rivalry with real-life sister actress Joan Fontaine, and the possibly true urban legend that a distant shot of Miriam in a car approaching the plantation is actually of Joan Crawford, giving the star a secret Easter-egg presence in the film she left.
The cast of Hush Up is made up mostly of drag queens, whom Clift said he cast with an eye toward real acting talent: “It isn’t a drag movie, really, it’s a spoof, with more of a Carol Burnett feel. These are all strong performers who are men in drag.” (New Orleans-based performer Varla Jean Merman plays the de Havilland role.) The most exciting casting for film buffs, however, comes with Mink Stole in the Agnes Moorehead role. The alumna of some of John Waters’ most famous films had been at the original screening of Baby Jane? and approached Clift to praise it afterward; when he asked if she’d be interested in the role when Hush Up was made, she pounced. “There are little touches, like crazy eyes, that are Mink, but really she lives in Agnes Moorhead’s performance and does really well,” said Clift, reminiscing about the fun the cast and crew had choreographing a fight the character is involved in mid-film.
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Roles for actresses of, or even beyond, a certain age have improved since the mid-‘60s. Maggie Smith’s acerbity kept Downton Abbey from falling into the “I don’t know what they’re doing, but look at the clothes” trap many costume dramas fall into; Diana Rigg’s curt feudal grande dame on Game of Thrones served as a welcome distraction from all those boring dragons; Jessica Walter saves both Archer and Arrested Development from turning wholly into the man-boy Olympics; and Judi Dench and Betty White are essentially their own genres at this point. Yes, all these women have achieved late-career fame by playing some version of an acid-tongued matriarch—but while the roles may not be wildly diverse, they showcase good writing that these seasoned actresses clearly enjoy delivering, and their characters (and careers) display agency. Mid-career actresses have seen a milder boom: think about the sinister soccer moms of Big Little Lies and Chloë Sevigny’s forthcoming performance as America’s foremost axe murderess, Lizzie Borden. God willing, someone will soon write a project in which Diana Rigg runs amok with a baling hook, and we can enjoy it all the more knowing she wanted to take it.
Chris Turner-Neal has two IMDB credits: Bar Patron in Noble Creatures and Gay Bar Patron in The Long Shadow.
