Miss Davis plays with all the baroque technique at her command, which is unmatched by any other actress. Or so the premise runs, until the surprise conclusion. Miss Crawford’s career was terminated when she became hopelessly crippled in an “accident” engineered by her embittered and jealous sister. Miss Davis’ adult failure and her mad belief that her sister deliberately eclipsed her provides the basis for the corrosive relationship that ties them. Her sister, Joan Crawford, was a failure as a child but a great success as an adult movie star. Lukas Heller’s screenplay is based on a book by Henry Farrell and is concerned with two aged actresses immured in their Hollywood home. Stripped of unessentials, the focus would sharpen, the spell would be heightened, and the grim, relentless story - broken as it is already with bizarre humor - would be more totally successful. Baby Jane could be improved by cutting subplotting and exposition of minor characters, unimportant in the total framework and not diverting in themselves. Such a story, essentially a short story or mystery yarn rather than a narrative with the development and change of a novel, has to be told in almost breathless fashion, one incident piled upon another, flashing trickery that binds without unnecessary explanation. 'Star Wars: Return of the Jedi': THR's 1983 ReviewĪs it stands, Baby Jane does not always sustain its own powerful pace.
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