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This is a fun little black comedy from television director Lee Katzin. Playing off the title of "Whatver Happened to Baby Jane", it is not ruined by its television look and feel because of a particularly memorable performance by Geraldine Page.
Page plays an older women who has essentially been driven mad with rage after her husband dies and leaves her only his debts and .the contents of his briefcase. She moves to the desert and lives very comfortably by dispatching a series of live-in housekeepers who have turned over their life savings to her. Katzin tells the story mostly from the POV of Page's character so that after a while the audience is actually identifying with her.
Ruth Gordon is essentially wasted in a very straight role. Rosemary Forsyth and Robert Fuller make an appealing couple but are very minor to story.
Page is absolutely brilliant and plays the ironic twist at the end of the film beautifully (recently reprised in "The Upside of Anger"). At the same time that she is found out, she finds out that her husband actually made a provision for her to live comfortably after his death. She plays this final scene in such a way that we understand that discovering he actually loved her is far more important to her than getting away with murder.
score 7/10
aimless-46 26 June 2005
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1111732/ |
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21-2-2021 18:06:11