![]() ![]() De Havilland is particulary scene-chewing in her role, but Aldrich spends too much time documenting some rather unnecessary scenes, belaboring points. Truthfully, Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte suffers for its bloated middle portion once Miriam is invited to Charlotte’s house to help stop the county commissioner from evicting her from the plantation. While Aldrich often gives the film a deliciously operatic tone – and jaunty music besides – the meat of the movie relies on a depressive, bleak situation. In this case, the entirety of the film is predicated on John’s murder in 1927, an admittedly gruesome event that leaves Charlotte publicly but not legally indicted she’s spent the past forty years mourning the loss of the man, somewhat crazed from grief, but also shunned by the community because of poor crime reporting and sensational tabloids. It’s clear from the start of Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte that Aldrich loves presenting audiences with horrible past events. As Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte picks up, Aldrich follows Charlotte after she invites her duplicitous cousin Miriam (Olivia de Havilland) to the residence, documenting Charlotte’s slow dissolution into insanity as she’s tortured by visions of her dead lover and duped into thinking that John’s wife Jewel (Mary Astor) has something to do with it. Her cowed nature is due to the death of her boyfriend John (Bruce Dern) back in 1927, a vicious murder involving a severing of his head and hand that has been pinned on Charlotte for over forty years despite no evidence. Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte follows the exploits of titular Charlotte (Davis), a hermit being evicted from her father’s plantation at the start of the film. ![]() Still, the film hits all of the same notes to make it a Gothic-tinged thriller, with solid acting from its main protagonists and villains and a lot of soapy drama. Aldrich found success in that previous film in 1962 thanks to the drama between Davis and Joan Crawford (both on- and off-screen), but Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte is forced to replicate those thematic ideas without Crawford and with a new Southern setting. Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte feels like a familiar film, as it should: it shares a lot of the same tenets as Robert Aldrich’s previous potboiler Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, including star Bette Davis as a disturbed woman haunted by the past, writer Lukas Heller adapting a screenplay from a Henry Farrell story, and even a similar running time. ![]()
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