Overrated

Admirable film.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

I hadn't seen this at all, until very recently on YouTube, and boy was I hooked! I found it a delicious black comedy in every sense of the word. Geraldine Page (a fine actress) very clearly enjoying herself here camping it up as the snooty and obnoxious Mrs Marrible. Geraldine was in good company with Ruth Gordon playing Mrs Dimmock. A very entertaining film, despite its dubious production values. I'd even go as far as to say that I was surprised to find out that this little gem was the supporting feature to the MAIN film, when theatrically released! See it, you will enjoy it!

What a riot! Geraldine Page plays a widow left destitute by her husband, who lives off the savings of maids she hires and then kills. Along comes Ruth Gordon, posing as a maid but actually investigating the disappearance of her lady "companion," and we, the audience, get to sit back and watch her salt-of-the-earth demeanor bounce off of Page's histrionic diva.Is it even possible to be bored by a Page performance? This script is far beneath her, she knows it, and decides to go for it, playing the role as about off-the-wall as you could get without descending into straight camp. She and Gordon are so talented, and so compulsively watchable, that you actually care what happens in this second-rate rip-off of other macabre crazy women films like "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" and "Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte." Robert Aldrich, the director of both of those films, serves as producer on this one, so maybe it's not exactly ripping off if you're stealing from yourself.And it's a got a groovy score by Gerald Fried (random trivia: he would be nominated for a Best Original Score Oscar in 1975 for the documentary "Birds Do It, Bees Do It') that makes one wonder what he was smoking when he composed it. It sounds like something from a movie about Spanish bullfighters.Grade: B+

This is a solid macabre film about the ultimate way to make a living by killing. Geraldine Page is creepy as the woman who is left poor by her husband's death but manages to get by by killing housekeepers and stealing their life savings. Ruth Gordon plays the housekeeper who gets wise as she is looking for a friend of hers who was the prior maid.While Gerald Fried did some good music, his original music in this one sometimes distracts from the movie, particularly some of the string sequences. Fried did good music on TV in Mannix, and Emergency. Speaking of Emergency, Robert Fuller plays Mike Darrah whose Aunt Alice (Ruth Gordon) is the current maid. Fuller was later a star on Emergency.There are some indications of abuse of a dog in the PRE-PETA era film.The film is clever but suffers when you compare it with some of the other films done in this genre. Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane are more powerful than this one. Still the film has some good points because of all the talent in the cast.Peter Bonerz is in support and he would later go on to The Bob Newhart Show and lots of other television shows. Rosemary Forsyth is in support too. This movie makes the police look like they are way behind until the end of the movie when they have finally put the plot together. The film is a mild diversion.

In 1962, director Robert Aldrich delivered, to an unprepared world, the amazing spectacle of aged Bette Davis and Joan Crawford going at each other and chewing up the scenery in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" Two years later, Aldrich followed up with "Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte," with Davis, Agnes Moorehead and Olivia de Havilland engaged in similar nasty hijinks. And in 1969, Aldrich handed the directing reins (producing only this time) to Lee H. Katzin, for what may be viewed as the third in a loose trilogy of films dealing with geriatric battleaxes (or aging gargoyles, as my buddy Rob prefers to call them) having at each other with no quarter given. In "What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?," Geraldine Page plays Claire Marrable, who moves to Tucson after her husband dies and leaves her penniless. What's a poor aging biddy to do...except knock off a succession of equally aged housekeeper-companions, steal their cash and plant their remains in the garden? But Claire may have met her match with her next job applicant, Alice Dimmock, played by the forever feisty Ruth Gordon.... As regards those killings, they are almost completely bloodless, and any comparisons that may have been made to 1944's "Arsenic and Old Lace" may be fair ones. But this is hardly a comedy (well, maybe a very black one), and it really is something to see Page and Gordon ripping into each other like two frenzied berserkers. The film makes excellent use of its desert locale, and Gerald Fried's bizarro score keeps the tension ratcheted fairly high throughout. The picture concludes rather realistically, albeit tamely, I feel; how much more satisfying would it have been to see Claire really go up against the vicious tramp dog, Chloe? No telling WHO would've prevailed in that bitch fight!