Film In Depth

Great Villains: Baby Jane Hudson

She wasn’t a mass murderer, a vicious gangster, or a supernatural sorceress, but Baby Jane Hudson still ranks as one of cinema’s most sinister villains, just for being herself: a sister, a child star, and an abuser. Played by Bette Davis in Robert Aldrich’s 1962 film, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Baby Jane was named one of AFI’s Top 50 Villains, and well deservedly so, as she’s one of the most insidious villains in movie history—even without a sky-high body count.

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Profiles

Gloria Swanson: After Sunset

When Patricia at Caftan Woman posed the idea of the Diamonds and Gold blogathon, my immediate thought was to cover Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, as it’s one of the meatiest roles ever for a woman “of a certain age” in classic film, and one of my favorite and most endlessly rewatched films. However, when I realized I couldn’t quite place anything Swanson had done after that film in my memory, and saw that there weren’t a ton of quantifiable entries in the all-knowing eyes of IMDb, I became a bit concerned that she had embodied her performance as the misanthropic Norma Desmond a little too fully, and that I’d have to write an epilogue about how she’d frittered away the rest of her life unhappily attempting to further pursue an acting career. A bit more research revealed, though, that that worrisome scenario was far from the actual case. Despite not appearing in many more films after Sunset, Swanson lived in an incredibly full life throughout her 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, and was a fascinatingly unique, well-rounded woman all the way up to the end.

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Profiles

Carmen Miranda

Carmen Miranda cuts a curious figure in film history. You know those actors and characters you just can’t really picture smiling? The Buster Keatons, the James Bonds, and so on. Part of what I love about Carmen Miranda is that she’s completely the opposite–I have such a hard time picturing her with a straight, emotionless …

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Lists

Upcoming Blogathon Posts

Well, oops–radio silence over here because I was panicking to prepare for the Funny Lady Blogathon over at Movies, Silently… somehow I’d gotten it in my head that was it was June 20th (tomorrow). It’s actually June 29-30, so prepare an ample and thorough examination of the comedy of Carmen Miranda over here on that …

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