Psycho, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, and Feud;(Davis/Crawford in March)

I have good, vague memories of being a child in the 60's. They are very strong in 1964 and 1965(hence, my memory of the promotions of Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte and the re-release of Psycho about four months apart). They are less strong -- but definitely THERE -- for 1962.

And I remember the scary 1962 advertising for Baby Jane, the scary photos of Davis and Crawford and a shattered Baby Jane doll head. I remember this was a movie my parents would never take the family to. I remember this as part of a " forbidden cinema" that I feared in my childhood and yearned for as I grew older.

Over the years, it seemed that Baby Jane DID take on some sort of classic status. It must have been a "pop camp classic" because I don't recall the film making any Best Films lists . (Oh, maybe the AFI thriller list topped by Psycho, in 2001 or so, I'll have to check that.)

I would assume that Baby Jane is popular in gay movie-lover circles, if only for the presence of Joan Crawford and, (secondarily?) Davis. I always fear to tread in such areas, but I would guess there is some drag queen flash to how Davis and Crawford look in the film.

I expect the biggest strength of the film IS how it brought an aged Davis and Crawford back to the screen and gave visible life to a rumored feud. It was evidently a hit in 1962, and it got Davis a well-deserved Oscar nomination (under the great rule, "The nomination or win isn't for the acting; its for the character.)

Baby Jane joined Psycho in being a "modern Gothic horror film" but it created its ONN sixties sub-genre: "The Hag Movie"(a phrase nastily coined, not be me) in which any number of aged Golden Era actresses took on horror-type roles to survive on screen in older age. Davis and Crawford both took more of these roles(The Nanny for Davis; the William Castle/Robert Bloch Strait-Jacket, Berserk and Trog for Crawford.) But Olivia DeHavilland climbed on board for "Charlotte" and Tallulah Bankhead did "Die Die My Darling." Did I miss someone? Perhaps this wasn't THAT big a trend.

OF those movies, "Baby Jane" is the leader, the famous one, the "class act." Hell, it got Oscar nominations.

But I tell ya, Bette Davis is the main draw, with Crawford a fun foil. The storyline itself is poor, unstructured and largely event-free.

Weirdly(and he would do this with Charlotte, too), Aldrich spends FOREVER in opening flashback(two in the case of Baby Jane) to set up his story. It can't be this long, but it feels like a half hour before we even SEE Davis and Crawford on screen. First we have to get the "childhood" flashback(Baby Jane is the child star, Blanche the neglected sister); then we get the "adult star" flashback(Blanche is now a glamour star who requires that an aged Baby Jane get to make some movies too); then we get the "mysterious" flashback to the car accident that put Crawford in a wheelchair, and then finally we get the main movie(under the title "Yesterday").

Its an ungainly, overplotted start to a movie that then takes its sweet time going anywhere, except for establishing a sadistic/masochistic pattern, which, I guess, was pretty sexually out there for 1962: Davis' drunken, slatternly Baby Jane DOES "serve" her crippled sister, but torments her at the same time(servings of parakeet and, later, rat, as Blanches' meals seal the deal on Baby Jane's creeping madness.)

The classic exchange:

Crawford: You wouldn't be so mean to me if I wasn't in this chair!
Davis: (After a thoughtful, leering beat) But...you ARE in the chair, Blanche! You ARE in the chair!! (Which as read by Davis is delicious: "But yew AH in da chay, Blanche! Yew AH in day chay!")

A sympathic African-American maid is a strong link to sanity. She tries to help Blanche and dies trying(Baby Jane finally moves on from being funny-brutal to bein a true..psycho?) Victor Buono debuts. Two years earlier, he could have played Norman Bates if Bloch's novel was followed(with gray hair for age?) His character freaks out, but isn't killed (I think he WAS killed in the book from which this was written, and a murder scene was filmed and cut.)

I haven't made it to the final scene from the TCM tape of the other night, but I remember it. Its a twist ending, but it really has to "twist" to achieve its goal. And Baby Jane and Blanche finally get out of that creepy old house and down to Malibu, surrounded in their faded glory by the Beach Blanket Bingo set in a finale that rather brings together the Los Angeles of two different eras. I'll have to finish the film to fill in the blanks of memory.

(A LITTLE MORE)

After so-called monsters - vampires, werewolves, ambulatory mummies and so forth - had petered out by the end of the '40s, and with them the concurrent "old dark house" genre (in which the monsters were generally revealed to be merely monstrous humans), along came the super-monsters (giant ants, spiders, resurrected dinosaurs, etc) and their space-alien fellow travelers. By the close of the '50s, the trendiness of those creatures was slipping, and low-budget producers like Castle and Corman were re-scaling horror to once-again human size...and bringing it back into the home. And then Hitchcock made it chic.

While all this was happening, less youth-oriented films of the '50s were exploiting then-mature leading ladies - most often, Crawford and Stanwyck - in a series of what I call "woman on the edge" dramas, in which they were either menaced by unhinged killers or, driven by jealousy, betrayal, greed or some combination thereof, became unhinged killers themselves. It was perhaps inevitable that an enterprising producer-director like Aldrich, who had already done his own "woman on the edge" drama with Crawford (Autumn Leaves) six years earlier, would engage in some cross-pollination. If he hadn't, someone else likely would have.

In spite of Robin Wood's suffer-by-comparison evaluation of Baby Jane, there's some significance and even flattery in his choice to invoke Hitchcock at all. But although it may look and feel like Psycho in superficial ways, there's as much Rear Window as Psycho in Baby Jane, with some Shadow Of A Doubt mixed in: a wheelchair-bound and trapped innocent; growing awareness of personal jeopardy; ultimately life-threatening menace at the hands of a homicidal and desperate killer.

Yet, as you observe, there's also just as much Sunset Blvd underlayment: the "old Hollywood" milieu; a vintage palazzo and auto; pining over glories of lost careers; escalating madness resulting in both death and detachment from reality. There's really not much thematic ground between the dreamlike states of Norma Desmond "back in the studio making a picture again" and "Baby" Jane dancing on the beach for adoring admirers, is there?

I remember Mary Astor writing in her autobiography about her approach to the characters she played, likening it to cooking, with the repeated phrase of getting her "pot bubbling" serving as the metaphorical point at which she'd gotten a handle on each, and that metaphor could be extended to film making in general. There are only so many edible substances, but it's their selections, combinations and proportions that create new recipes with cups, teaspoons, pinches and dashes of this or that.

And it's the truly imaginative chefs like Hitchcock inspiring "who would have thought to combine these ingredients...it's like nothing I've ever tasted" reactions, rather than "it's good, but it reminds me of..." ones.

Feud - Episode 2
The cold open to this ep. was dynamite (esp. if you know how WEHTBJ? turned out): Crawford and Davis make common cause against Aldrich's casting of a too-vivacious-young-blonde as the next-door-neighbor. C&D not only crush the girl's dreams without a second thought, they show Aldrich and the crew who's boss and that they know who's boss.

All the best scenes that follow build from this cold open as C&D and A struggle for control and we see each of them treat their spouses or children almost as poorly as the original starlet-wannabe gal. This basic spine for the episode was very strong and reminded a lot of Mad Men (Kiernan Shipka is an explicit overlap, but Alfred Molina's Aldrich *feels* like a missing Mad Men character: he looks quite a lot like Harry Crane who became Stirling Cooper Draper Pryce's media guy - and spiritually Aldrich just is Harry Crane with a lot more talent who becomes the true in-house TV ad director that Harry Crane didn't become and that SCDP never had and who then skipped out to do movies.)

As with last week, I could do without the some of the padding with Kathy Bates as Joan Blondel looking back on the Joan and Bette phenomenon from the perspective of 1978, including some unconvincing reconstructions of 1940s films from both Davis and Crawford. And some of the Hedda Hooper stuff could and probably should have been left on the cutting room floor. One starts to suspect that there's a dynamite 4 part-series struggling to get out from within this baggy 8-parter.

The episode landed a big punch from Jack Warner, who was strangely lukewarm about the project in ep. 1, but who in this ep. after seeing dailies knows he's lucked into to something good (but would he have that much pull with Director Aldrich just as the distributor?): 'Let's face it, after Psycho, horror's the future and we got it.'

Sarandon's Davis got the one-liner of the week: [pestered by a reporter as she arrives at the set] "What's your name?" "Sylvia." "Fuck off, Sylvia."

Molina, Sarandon, Lange and Tucci as Warner are all great. This is an Oscar-bait movie level cast so that even with its slight bagginess Feud remains must-see TV, a real communal watching event I'd say. What did everyone else think?

You're welcome...and with "MissMargoChanning" as your byline, perhaps Feud will be right up your alley.

In the US: Feud will air at 10:00 pm on Sundays(starting March 5) on FX.

PS. I've read that the NEXT "Feud" series will be on Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

It's probably worth bearing in mind the title is Feud: Bette and Joan, rather than Feud: Whatever Happened To Baby Jane.

However they choose to use it, they've got two more years' worth of material to mine, presumably culminating with Crawford's ultimately abortive participation in Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte. In the meantime, they have the critical and box office reception of WHTBJ; plenty of potential drama surrounding the nominations; Crawford's crafty engineering of arranging to accept the Best Actress award for any nominee who might not be present which paid off with Bancroft's win (and which reportedly rankled Davis twice over for both the loss and Crawford's showboating); the effects WHTBJ had on their careers in the interim; their eventually putting business and career interests over personal ones in planning another film together; Crawford's bailing from HHSC after completing location work; post-HHSC epilogues.

It must be acknowledged that viewers tune into a series such as Feud for the dirt, whether factual, inferred or manufactured from whole cloth, and it's in this colorful direction the series indicated it would go from the very start. It's also a very "television" approach. As most are probably aware, the mechanics of film making entail laborious and really rather dull processes that don't ordinarily make for compelling drama, and the best feature films depicting the industry - both versions of A Star Is Born, The Bad and the Beautiful, The Barefoot Contessa, Day For Night, for example - concentrate the bulk of their drama on offscreen matters, limiting on-set processes largely to passing references. The necessarily brisker pace of a one-hour TV format (even in multiples of eight) demands higher concentrations of melodrama in response to the shorter and more easily-distracted-from attention spans of home viewers, and one interrupted by commercial breaks, as opposed to an HBO-type limited series, enforces an even stricter discipline, with each 10 to 15 minute "act" requiring its own dramatic arc of buildup, climax and denouement.

With these expectations, Feud has so far delivered as well as any, enhanced by the untypically high caliber of participants such as Sarandon, Molina, Tucci and Davis, but I can't say it's truly surpassed them. Rather than each entry improving on the last, I've observed a rapid slide into laziness after a somewhat promising opener. I was initially encouraged, for instance, by Sarandon's approach to portraying a personality as well-known as Davis's, feeling that she was capturing its essence without descending into a caricature of familiar mannerisms. But the two subsequent episodes have revealed just such a tendency, with the actress mimicking characteristic Davis physical gestures, or speech eccentricities like the pronunciation of the "d" at the end of a word like "good" as a "t."

Lange has a tougher row to hoe, as I'm not sure anyone really knew who Crawford was at her center. I recall reading some time back of one of her MGM cronies (I can't remember which one) remarking, "Joan tried to be all things to all people," encapsulating the importance of performance to every aspect of her life from the professional to the public to the private, as she cast herself into the role she felt most appropriate to each: tough-as-nails or dewy-eyed romantic; sweetness-and-light or strict disciplinarian. On a side note, it was disappointing to see the show falling back on more or less recreating an adoption agency scene from Mommie Dearest, right down to the staging. It may very well be that Frank Perry and Fay Dunaway set the tone 30-odd years ago for all possible future versions of Crawford.

Both Tucci and Davis began in over-the-top mode and have maintained that pitch, seemingly opting for generic portrayals of apoplectic exec and scheming, dishy gossip. What their performances - and the writing - are missing are Warner's corny joviality (by all accounts, he fancied himself quite the life-of-the-party jokester) and Hopper's deceptive folksiness or aggressive jingoism. But now I'm venturing into the realm of nitpicking, I guess.

As long as I've done so, I'll add that I'm always annoyed when current-day slang such as "buzz" finds its way into dialogue meant to have taken place a half-century ago.

In my view a sloppy episode.

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I take (and agree with) practically all your points below and yet -- I enjoyed it immensely and again had the same sensation at the end: it all seemed so fun and so fast that when it ended, I felt like I didn't want it to. Only three left, I believe. Probably one hour for the entire Oscar story; two hours to "wrap it up." Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte? Zeta-Jones as Olivia IN Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte? And I'm still placing bets on Joan meeting up with Stevie Spielberg on Night Gallery -- has he ever been portrayed in a biopic? (Actully, given his power today, they'd better be careful.

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It had details wrong, e.g., Crawford saying that she was called out as Box Offie Poison in 1937 when it was 1938. Pauline, Aldrich's assistant is initially puzzled by Crawford invoking 1937 and suggest that maybe she has Hitler taking Austria in mind form that year. But that's also wrong: the Anschluss with Austria was also in 1938. Do your research Ryan Murphy!

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I'm always intrigued when, in "getting it wrong," the writer is only off by one year. It suggests that somebody worked from memory rather than even looking it up(example: me, all the time, with these posts.) But when its a million-dollar broadcast product, it should be more accurate.

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And, chickens coming home to roost a bit, it's getting big things wrong.

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Here, I think we have fully entered "the biopic zone" where the "Hitchocck" filmmakers, as an example, had no compunction about getting so much of the "Psycho" production story wrong(if only to goose up its imagined story about Alma really directing the film -- so as to land Helen Mirren to play her -- and having an affair about 10 years after it supposedly really happened), and has, evidently been almost flamboyantly flaunted by biopic makers before or since. The idea being: "Look, we need a story that works as a story...so we're making up whatever we want to." The issue becomes: will we make the allowance for entertainment purposes? I think the answer is..."yes, if we don't know the real story." Maybe, if we do. No...well, don't watch?

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E.g. Jack Warner devaluing Aldrich's talent at every turn. Sure Aldrich needed a hit in 1960-1962 but Kiss Me Deadly and Autumn Leaves had both been masterful and not at all the work of a journeyman (and Attack! and The Big Knife weren't chopped liver either).

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The skill set that divides a Matthew Weiner from a Ryan Murphy manifested in this episode, i.e. writing up some scenes to get a heavy-handed point across without really thinking through the reality of it.

Robert Aldrich was a journeyman in some ways, but he made at least three giant hits: Vera Cruz, The Dirty Dozen, and The Longest Yard. That alone gets you respect in Hollywood and those (plus Baby Jane and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte) kept getting him work in between big hits. The Dirty Dozen was such a hit in 1967-1968 that Aldrich formed a "mini-studio" and made movies using it for several years before closing it down. (He even made a "Sunset Blvd meets Vertigo" movie called "The Legend of Lylah Clare" with Kim Novak during this period, and one of the first overt stories of lesbianism, The Killing of Sister George.)

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Aldrich's hits aside, he certainly developed a cult auteur reputation with Kiss Me Deadly(above all), Attack, and The Big Knife (and Autumn Leaves, I guess, I''m not so familiar with that one.)

So the whole Jack Warner attack rings false except for one aspect: Warner may not have cared at all about auteur criticism, wouldn't know about the above. And Aldrich DID make that Sinatra Western(more on that anon) and THAT's not the work of an auteur.

I wonder where Robert Aldrich ended up in Andrew Sarris' famous "Panethon of Directors" that had Hitchcock and Hawks in the top tier? And Billy Wilder down a few levels("Less than Meets the Eye".)

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Update: It occurs to me that within a single week we got Bates Motel's well-directed take on Psycho's shower scene *and* Feud's well-directed take on Crawford's Oscar Heist/The Point of No Return for the catfight of the century. That's peak-TV for ya!
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And in my case, I saw both of those on the same day...with a "Hitchcock bonus": I also saw North by Northwest on the big screen.

I guess you could call it a "peak TV/Hitchcock/50's-60's cusp day."

The day began with a screening of North by Northwest at 2:00 pm at a local theater. Great print, great sound, smallish crowd...but the movie held its own, brought back all the great memories for me. The small crowd applauded, too.

Then back to the telly to watch the episode of Bates Motel that I missed last week -- with the afore-mentioned shower scene(well, both of them, Marion's sparing and Sam's victimization.)

Then continuing on with the telly to finish the night with that great Feud episode.

Sometimes one just has a great movie day! Even with two out of three items being on TV...

Probably the key episode of the series is staged

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Probably so. I've lost track of how many are left -- two I think -- but it will be hard to beat the power of this one. Key to me about it was how a movie that had been rather a "life-saving miracle of career survival" for both Davis and Crawford suddenly became, with its success, a flamethrower of competition and rage between the two fading stars. Success can be worse for people than failure.

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- beautifully staged - as a caper/heist (at least after preliminary framing stories are out of the way). Joan's going to steal away Oscar night from Bette Davis, and yet it's also an act of assured self-destruction.

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Well stated. People do THAT, too.

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Joan knows that she'll be damning herself forever by doing this, that this stunt will loom over her whole career and memory. Murphy (who wrote and directed this one) rather clumsily and implausibly - on Oscar night it's too late to change anything - has George Cukor tell Joan what the score will be and has her admit that she knows that this is a self-destructive act too. But the heavy hand here is probably a price worth paying to ensure that all viewers are on the same page about what the stakes are.

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I think so. It was a good scene(with a once-young actor from my film-watching past named John Rubenstein, I think, playing old George Cukor) and intended to make sure we knew those stakes and Crawford's self-knowledge of the self-destruction.

Cukor: You're bigger than this.
Crawford: No, I'm not.

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Lange's Joan is like a battleship patrolling and parting the shark-infested waters backstage at the Oscars. One masterful long tracking shot - shades of Goodfellas' Copacabana club entry - has her walking right through the Men's Room!

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I caught the GoodFellas nod and loved the men's room bit. This scene is among many all through the episode that I bet DIDN'T happen in real life, but was a great invention...Crawford leading David Lean(of all auteurist giants) on and on and on to get to that press room. I believe it is much closer than that.

And a funny thing: I've always felt the GoodFellas shot is pretty easy to do with a walking Steadicam -- but it is still pretty impressive even today. All the actors and extras and props and lighting have to be "just so" for it to work.

And this: the other night I watched DePalma's famous misfire "The Bonfire of the Vanities", and it opens with a shot almost the equal of the GoodFellas shot , this one involving a drunken Bruce Willis being escorted from a limo into a hotel to speak on a stage. Funny thing: "Bonfire of the Vanities" is from 1990, just like GoodFellas. But Bonfire was a horrible notorious bomb(and having just seen it -- oh yes, it is!) Still, two 1990's films with one great shot.

Bette finds out late that Joan has commandeered the Green Room and knows instantly that something very bad for her is probably up. Sarandon only really got to react in this ep. but killed it from that moment on.

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Yes, things were all in Joan's corner for the setting up, and then we watched it all pay off AGAINST Davis -- with the side-bar of Olivia De Havilland being the pal(indeed, Olivia really DID fly in from Paris to support Bette._ ) I liked Olivia talking about "Your Joan and my Joan" -- each woman having their own lifelong feud to deal with. We all know who Olivia's Joan was, don't we?


(MORE)

Probably the key episode of the series is staged

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Probably so. I've lost track of how many are left -- two I think -- but it will be hard to beat the power of this one. Key to me about it was how a movie that had been rather a "life-saving miracle of career survival" for both Davis and Crawford suddenly became, with its success, a flamethrower of competition and rage between the two fading stars. Success can be worse for people than failure.

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- beautifully staged - as a caper/heist (at least after preliminary framing stories are out of the way). Joan's going to steal away Oscar night from Bette Davis, and yet it's also an act of assured self-destruction.

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Well stated. People do THAT, too.

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Joan knows that she'll be damning herself forever by doing this, that this stunt will loom over her whole career and memory. Murphy (who wrote and directed this one) rather clumsily and implausibly - on Oscar night it's too late to change anything - has George Cukor tell Joan what the score will be and has her admit that she knows that this is a self-destructive act too. But the heavy hand here is probably a price worth paying to ensure that all viewers are on the same page about what the stakes are.

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I think so. It was a good scene(with a once-young actor from my film-watching past named John Rubenstein, I think, playing old George Cukor) and intended to make sure we knew those stakes and Crawford's self-knowledge of the self-destruction.

Cukor: You're bigger than this.
Crawford: No, I'm not.

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Lange's Joan is like a battleship patrolling and parting the shark-infested waters backstage at the Oscars. One masterful long tracking shot - shades of Goodfellas' Copacabana club entry - has her walking right through the Men's Room!

--

I caught the GoodFellas nod and loved the men's room bit. This scene is among many all through the episode that I bet DIDN'T happen in real life, but was a great invention...Crawford leading David Lean(of all auteurist giants) on and on and on to get to that press room. I believe it is much closer than that.

And a funny thing: I've always felt the GoodFellas shot is pretty easy to do with a walking Steadicam -- but it is still pretty impressive even today. All the actors and extras and props and lighting have to be "just so" for it to work.

And this: the other night I watched DePalma's famous misfire "The Bonfire of the Vanities", and it opens with a shot almost the equal of the GoodFellas shot , this one involving a drunken Bruce Willis being escorted from a limo into a hotel to speak on a stage. Funny thing: "Bonfire of the Vanities" is from 1990, just like GoodFellas. But Bonfire was a horrible notorious bomb(and having just seen it -- oh yes, it is!) Still, two 1990's films with one great shot.

Bette finds out late that Joan has commandeered the Green Room and knows instantly that something very bad for her is probably up. Sarandon only really got to react in this ep. but killed it from that moment on.

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Yes, things were all in Joan's corner for the setting up, and then we watched it all pay off AGAINST Davis -- with the side-bar of Olivia De Havilland being the pal(indeed, Olivia really DID fly in from Paris to support Bette._ ) I liked Olivia talking about "Your Joan and my Joan" -- each woman having their own lifelong feud to deal with. We all know who Olivia's Joan was, don't we?


(MORE)

Joan's going to steal away Oscar night from Bette Davis, and yet it's also an act of assured self-destruction. Joan knows that she'll be damning herself forever by doing this, that this stunt will loom over her whole career and memory.

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True. Joan Crawford cut off BOTH their noses to spite Davis' face.

I think that this episode has been following a trend of being 'Crawford heavy', and I hope the next episode focuses on how Davis treated her so badly that she feigned illness...and got out of the picture. Which forced Aldrich to Sweden (I think) to convince DeHavilland to take the part.

Otherwise, it's turning into another bio pic of Crawford. I miss Davis (Sarandon) when she's not given equal time. But there's lots of material that CAN be covered about that. We'll see.

I also think that although John Waters bore absolutely no resemblance to William Castle, it was inspired, tongue-in-cheek casting. He definitely got the showmanship of manipulating audiences down correctly.

Actually, swanstep, I notice the alternating titles for Lange/Sarandon in the second episode. And that's because I was surprised Lange got first billing in the first episode. When I saw Sarandon get first billing next, I thought, 'Ah! This is a variation of the old staggered billing, ala 'The Towering Inferno'. But since there are eight episodes, they can get four each.

I knew all about Crawford feigning illness and checking herself into the hospital to stop production, but I didn't realize it was this involved. I always thought Crawford feigned illness to get out of her contract and the picture. This episode depicted that she thought she could cause the entire production to be cancelled.

I'd really like to know...is that really when Mamacita left Crawford?

I've been iffy on CZJ playing DeHavilland since the beginning. At times I've thought she really caught her essence, at other times I've thought 'That's Catherine Zeta-Jones playing Olivia DeHavilland'.

I've seen 'Lady in a Cage'. Numerous times. And this series has mostly done an excellent job reenacting the actress' films from the past. But CZJ, even in those few short clips, didn't capture DeHavilland's performance at all. And I like CZJ.

I never thought Davis and OdH actually got a deal endorsing Coke. I know Davis had one installed on the set, but I figured you could just buy/rent one.

Feud S01E08 Grand Finale
Two weeks ago I guessed that the show would end with the 1978 Oscars which Davis attended and where Crawford's In Memoriam would feature. That was essentially correct.
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Yes, a very good call -- though I was surprised at how comparatively little of the (extended 80 minute ) episode this sequence took up.

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The episode's one real misstep, however, was a final flashback to the first production day of Baby Jane, when the film represented a fresh start for Davis and Crawford. That struck me as an ending too far

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Here, swanstep, one of our infrequent and respectful disagreements. I felt this return to the Baby Jane set helped return the series to its "anchoring focus." This final episode was so overridingly sad(and moving) in the presentation of the final years of Crawford(especially) and Davis that to "go back to 1962" put things in a new perspective: Crawford and Davis may have been middle-aged and struggling in 1962, but the Old Hollywood system was still in place (with Jack Warner as father/opponent) and the two ladies DID get a big hit and newfound public adoration. For awhile. At the end of "Feud," Joan and Bette are about to feud in earnest, but the moment in their lives is good . I loved the final high angle shot of them moving to their respective "private dressing rooms"(no Trog VW van here), and closing their respective doors. The high angle shot was...Hitchcockian.

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as did Davis stiffing the Documentary people and having their dealing with that be even a momentary focus.
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I rather coupled Davis's tough talk to the documentarian with her (to me, now) infamous quote: "Joan Crawford is dead. Good." A certain respect for the reality of their feuding relationship. A certain self-knowledge that she and Joan had more in common than she thought. A certain professionalism ABOUT Joan Crawford("She was a professional.") Niftily contrasted, I might add to the unseen Faye Dunaway's WORSE behavior on the TV production.

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