For Robert Aldrich, as we saw last Fall in The Killing of Sister George, sisterhood is positively frightful. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is basically Sister George without the kitchen sink, also a macabre black comedy in which the confusion between movies and reality, movie-star and person drive a soul to distraction; set not in a fusty London flat but a musty Hollywood mansion overrun with time and memory. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford are the sisters, "Baby" Jane and Blanche Hudson, one-time Hollywood starlets now crippled by a lifetime of mutual rivalry. The disabled Blanche must rely on the kindness of someone who's becoming stranger and stranger: every time Jane looks in the mirror it's Grand Guignol all over again, dressed like the Baby Jane doll of her child-star youth, the make-up now sinking between the wrinkles. At every mealtime she serves up an image of herself to her sister: a dead bird on a bed of lettuce, perhaps? rat under glass? Victor Buono, as the would-be piano accompanist to Jane's comeback, seems to have crawled out of The Loved One and is himself a marvelous mass of insane contradictions, pride and self-hatred battling it out amidst the baby-fat. Aldrich traps them all, behind gratings, banisters, in a screen prison, but their escape to the beach at Santa Monica is the final trap, with the teeming crowds-the fans of yesteryear-slowly closing in. Aldrich's use of old Crawford and Davis footage is his cleverest conceit, for in some ways What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is the ultimate genre film, reflecting back on itself to the nth degree. This was both Crawford and Davis's great comeback: but to what?