Scareer Girls

As an actress acquires more wrinkles, she generally gets fewer lines. But the rule does not apply to Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, who have dramatically turned age to advantage. In What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? these two redoubtable tootsies of yesteryear played a couple of hilarious old horrors out to do each other in, and in two movies just released they luridly continue their profitable new scareers.

Dead Ringer is predicated on the proposition that two Bette Davises are better than one. Bette plays a set of identical twins: one named Maggie, one named Edie, both at the hag end of middle age. Poor Edie hates rich Maggie because Maggie stole the man she had once wanted to marry. When Maggie's husband dies, Edie decides that his money rightfully belongs to her. So she puts a bullet in Maggie's head, a revolver in Maggie's hand and Edie's clothes on Maggie's back. Maggie is buried in Edie's grave and Edie goes tootling off in the Bentley to install herself in Maggie's mansion. But not for long. Turns out that in choosing Maggie's life, Edie has inadvertently chosen Maggie's death--at the hands of the law. Too late she discovers that it wasn't a heart attack killed Maggie's husband. It was arsenic.

Poetic justice is perhaps a bit oldfashioned, but it's fun. And so is practically everything else about this trite little thriller--especially Actress Davis. Exuberantly uncorseted, her torso looks like a gunnysack full of galoshes. Coarsely cosmeticked, her face looks like a U-2 photograph of Utah. And her acting, as always, isn't really acting; it's shameless showing-off. But just try to look away.

Strait-Jacket. Joan Crawford cuts loose in a sanguinary shudder-show that suffers from a split personality. It was written by Robert Bloch (Psycho), but screams for the sure hand of Hitchcock; it aspires to the Grand Guignol of Baby Jane, but falls short of being droll. Yet despite foolish dialogue, blunt direction, and a fustian plot, there are moments of breath-stopping terror as the heads roll, at times almost literally.

Joan plays Lucy Harbin, who, catching her husband abed with another woman, breaks up the affair with an ax. She is adjudged insane and committed to an asylum. After 20 years she comes out on probation to join Daughter Diane Baker, who has been raised on a ranch by an aunt and uncle. Diane takes Lucy out to see where they "butcher the chickens," then shows off the pigs. "We fatten them up for the slaughter." Oh oh, slip of the tongue. Sorry. Lucy looks away. Pretty soon, by golly, a person can't carve a roast for dinner without precipitating a household crisis. Someone scissors through the family album, decapitating old snapshots. Then Lucy gets a black wig, a flowered silk dress, and three pounds of bangles for her wrists. She looks the same as she did 20 years ago, and . . . Several ax murders later, the problem appears to be: how you gonna keep Momma down on the farm when she has such a penchant for pruning?

Creepy camera work and the conditioned reflex set off when those baubles start to jangle in the dark add starch to Strait-Jacket. It must also be the first horror film able to boast that one of its diehard victims (Mitchell Cox) is a real-life vice president of the Pepsi-Cola Co. As for Pepsi-Cola Board Member Crawford, she plainly plays her mad scenes For Those Who Think Jung.

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