Virulent piece of sensationalist Crumbling Mansion/Visage-styled trash from the same connoisseurs of feminine hysteria who brought us What Ever Happened to Baby Jane('62), Hush… was supposed to pair Bette Davis with Joan Crawford once again for another fertile bout of feline clawing, but the latter proved so difficult and eventually became so sick that the role went to the still-gorgeous Olivia de Havilland. Taking over where Crawford was likely coating the set in toxic yellow spittle, de Havilland exudes a stern yet demure waspy-kinda cunning to perfectly play off Davis’ expectedly manic cake-face howl. If it’s a battle of cruel stench then the only thing Hotter ‘n’ Wetter than that thick Loooooziana air is these 2 nasty old broads’…
Me oh my! Seems someone chopped off head and hand of ol’ John (Bruce Dern) back in 1927, and dear Charlotte (Davis) looked to be the easiest suspect:
Immediately following a shock-o-rama murder to rival early H.G. Lewis or top shelf Hitchcock, a blood stained Charlotte emerges from the scene of the crime into a room full of hi-society revelers, looking about as guilty as Captain Sin at the wheel of the Sacrilege X-press. Well! Never convicted but never cleared of charges Charlotte’s been holed up in her dead daddy’s estate with naught but a crudely unrecognizable Agnes Moorhead for company all these many years. And family doc Drew Bayliss (Joseph Cotton).
Anyway, in the present day Charlotte calls on her ol’ pal Miriam (de Havilland) for moral support, as it seems the City’s about to take her property away to build a bridge on. Things start to get sticky, and there’s a foul game afoot when it’s all de Havilland and Doctor Drew can do to try and placate dear Charlotte’s more hallucinatory urges. But something doesn’t smell right to Ms. Moorhead and if I said anymore you wouldn’t have to see the movie, hmm?
Worth it alone by far for Davis' transcendent performance as a shrieking heap of boiled alabaster caught in the dellusional prison of her own putrid mind. De Havilland is the perfect sparring mate and plays restrained a tad less fiercely than I imagine Crawford would have.
But what really lets this film rise from piercing melodrama to cinematically rich High Camp is Aldrich's overly-embellished flair for visual intoxication. Drawing upon a monotonously repeated visual motif alluding to the above mentioned corpse’s specific manner of dispatchment, director Aldrich uses every available opportunity to dismember, dissect, and disembody his leads with as many severe shadows as he’s got. This trick is extra effective due to the bold contrast between darks and lights throughout the film. Characters spend most of the tale enveloped in a harsh white, near-interrogative glow, and it’s only when Aldrich’s bold thick diagonal shadows rip across their torsos that the ever-looming black and misty background begins to lay claim to their hacked-up forms.
If Aldrich’s battle of the broads does anything it goes to show how outrageously aligned is the monstrous and horrific with the ‘feminine.’ While most horror films work on the voyeuristic anxiety associated with dude-on-dame slicing and dicing, Hush…Hush proves without falter that there’s absolutely nothing as gruesome nor sheet-soaking as watching a couple ladies go teeth to vagina as it were over love & money. Hard as it is to chew, Aldrich’s sloppy sweaty soap opera is nearly as starkly gutsy as Blood Feast, gilded almost with the same high mark of arch-style as Welles’ Touch of Evil, and EVERY bit as knowingly nihilistic as Psycho. And a good glop more messy and far more scary than fucking Baby Jane. Highly and inexplicably underrated.
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