Friday, May 4, 2012

What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?

I happened on What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? by accident early one Saturday morning, on TCM, after a night of beers and Mediterranean food (which ended with a twenty piece nuggets, apple pie and sundae, but that's another story). The mind is perhaps most receptive when it has been scrubbed clean of the residue of the working week, before or after the blooming of a hangover. And TCM never lets me down--I stumbled into Burnt Offerings, Incubus, and Saboteur in the same serendipitous fashion, just by being bored and not wanting to think about anything.

The similarity in titles between What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is no coincidence--both were produced by Robert Aldrich (who also headed the production of Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte), and both feature old women performing nasty acts of physical and emotional violence to one another. In this film, the violence is carried about by Mrs. Marrable against Ms. Tinsley--she beats her to death with a shovel before burying her under a growing tree--and later against Ms. Tinsley's longtime companion Ms. Dimmock (Aunt Alice), who enters into Mrs. Marrable's employ while seeking the whereabouts of her estranged lover. Ms. Dimmock is strangled with a telephone cord and then driven into a pond to drown, with Mrs. Marrable wearing her wig, no less.

The primary plot points are initiated after the death of Mrs. Marrable's husband, who has left his widow with a collection of stamps and dead butterflies. Mrs. Marrable feels cheated, her extravagant lifestyle endangered by inevitable poverty. Alone, Mrs. Marrable takes old women with no family on as maids (what she calls "companions") to ostensibly manage the chores and keep her company. Mrs. Marrable then cons the women out of their life savings with a false investment scheme--and when her hired help have the gall to inquire into the status of their investments, Mrs. Marrable kills them, making their decomposing corpses into plant food for her emerging desert garden. As the movie is set in Arizona, the viewer gets the sense that the soil is perhaps too arid, too loosely packed to cover up anything for long.

When Ms. Marrable offs Ms. Tinsley--a mousy, unhandsome woman who has no doubt played spinsters and teachers her entire career--Ms. Alice Dimmock (played by none other than Maude from Hal Ashby's classic) comes looking for her. Her plan is to get herself hired as Mrs. Marrable's companion so that, with the assistance of her nephew (hence the "Aunt Alice" bit, which confused me at first), she can investigate the true fate of her lover. Meanwhile, a young widow who looks like a Nordic Isabella Rosselini moves in next door, with a child I couldn't tell was her son or her younger brother; Mrs. Marrable's louse of a nephew and his socialite wife are going to the dogs because of a string of bad investments; Ms. Dimmock's nephew begins a love affair with the Nordic Isabella Rosselini. This last part hardly matters. The only reason for the nephew to be involved is to create a pasted together romance in the film.

Mrs. Marrable eventually discovers who Ms. Dimmock really is, in perhaps one of the most biting and beautifully acted exchanges (all their exchanges are great) I've ever seen in a film. Their monumental fight takes place throughout Mrs. Marrable's sprawling Arizona ranch home, and ends with Ms. Dimmock strangled to unconsciousness. Mrs. Marrable does away with her body via drowning (see above), all the while pretending that it was Ms. Dimmock who stole her car and skipped town (she was wearing Ms. Dimmock's wig, see?).

Mrs. Marrable is ultimately revealed as a demented serial killer after she drugs her next door neighbor and her son/brother, and attempts to burn them alive in their home. They escape, get a posse together (the nephew, the yard man, the other nephew, a police officer) and confront Mrs. Marrable in her yard. After the bodies planted in the garden are revealed and Mrs. Marrable has gone totally tits up, someone is moved to mention that the stamp collection Mrs. Marrable's husband had left her is in fact worth thousands (or millions) of dollars.

There are three things to love about this movie. First, as I referenced earlier, the acting. Granted, I'm hardly an authority on the craft--but I guess I tend to want, and to believe in, acting that is invisible, in which the person I see onscreen or onstage isn't transparently acting. However, in the cases when a particular thespian has the role of a psychopath, I'm impressed, and confused somewhat, at the ability of a well-paid narcissistic pretender to portray the character with any credibility, especially since the means of the portrayal rely on the most obvious of acting techniques. Think of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, Heath Ledger as the Joker--I don't expect to find the actors themselves to have a natural resonance with the characters they're playing, and thus I must appreciate the mastery of technique (acting in its purest state) in an abstract and aesthetic way when watching these characters. In these cases, it's only through the obviousness of acting that the authenticity of the intentions and actions of these characters emerges.

I would add Geraldine Page's portrayal of Mrs. Marrable to this male-dominated list of great psychos in the movies. Page's Marrable is haughty, superior, condescending, cruel and absolutely charming in the role of Mrs. Marrable. Despite her advanced age and infirmity (as well as he predisposition to want to kill people and their pets) I sort of fell in love with her. There is not one line of dialogue she delivers that is not ripping with subtext, and there is not one camera from in which her character appears that Page is not thinking, calculating, in the subtlest shift in tone, or variance in facial expression. Page as Marrable is simply the most compelling film villain I've seen in a long time. And aside from being entrancing, she is a total fucking bitch. Ruth Gordon also represents strongly as Ms. Dimmock--her interactions with Page are worth the movie itself--but unlike Page's Gordon's performance is much more straightforward.

The other things to love about What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?: 1) its music, which brings to mind a psychedelic marriage of Bernard Herrmann and Deerhoof, suspenseful electrified stringed instruments emerging at times out of nowhere; 2) the fact that Mrs. Marrable keeps winning weird sweepstakes and contests, and lords this over her companions; 2) the location (Tuscon, Arizona)--Alfred Hitchcock also knew how to squeeze the most horror out of the American Southwest, really the perfect canvas on which to carry out the savagery of a dried out, withered humankind; 3) the other little extras, the scenes that serve no purpose but to disorient the viewer--the chile smoking in the brush while his mother/sister makes out with her new paramour, or the same kid throwing darts violently against the wall while proclaiming oddly prescient truths, or the nephew at all, the social gatherings in palatial homes and country clubs and the sexual innuendo (or flat out sexuality) to suggest that the whole community is debased in some way. While these components contribute little to the story of a murderer and her buried help, they add a heady atmosphere of lust and amorality.

Yes, there are element of What Ever Happened to the Aunt Alice? that subvert the trajectory of it ever being considered a great film. But it works with what it has one perplexing and engrossing piece at a time.      

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