Agnes Moorehead

Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte

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Bette Davis screaming

Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte tries to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle that was What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. And fails. It’s not even a valiant fail, instead director Robert Aldrich and co mount a cynical re-run at the same basic idea – two vintage dames doing battle most foul – but this time around the recipe lacks one essential ingredient. Joan Crawford. Bette Davis is, though, the other half of the duelling duo who’d made Baby Jane‘s Grand Dame Guignol (as these things full of superannuated Hollywood monsters are known) so memorable. Crawford walked off the production of this follow-up claiming to be ill. Eventually the insurers demanded she be let go. Or that’s how … Read more

Dark Passage

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Vincent Parry with his hands up

“Completely preposterous,” is how the Chicago Tribune described Dark Passage in its 1947 review. No argument here. But did Delmer Daves, who wrote the screenplay and directed this bizarre noir, simply make a bad film, or was he saying something about the latent absurdities of the genre, in particular the way fate operates? Humphrey Bogart plays Vincent Parry, an innocent man doing time in San Quentin for murdering his wife, who we first meet breaking out by stowing away in a garbage truck. He’s soon been picked up by a man who quickly works out who he is. Ructions follow, but Parry wins out, and is then picked up by the very woman … Read more