What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is a macabre black comedy in which the confusion between movies and reality, movie-star and person drive a soul to distraction. In a musty Hollywood mansion overrun with time and memory live two sisters, "Baby" Jane and Blanche Hudson (Bette Davis and Joan Crawford), one-time starlets locked in a lifelong mutual rivalry. Blanche, disabled after a car accident, uses a wheelchair; trapped in the upstairs of the house, she must rely on the kindness of someone who is getting stranger and stranger. For every time Jane, dressed up as the Baby doll of her child-star youth, looks in the mirror, it's Grand Guignol all over again. At mealtimes, she serves up what is probably an image of herself to her hapless sister: a dead bird on a bed of lettuce, rat under glass. Of course Blanche is the prisoner in this classic of disabled-woman-as-victim-style Gothic ("My sister doesn't ever go out," Davis croaks, "she's not fit to receive visitors"); but elements of suspicion and disability-as-punishment are at play here as well. The film's end reveals a cunning use of the stereotype to mask a more complex relationship. And Aldrich traps them both, behind gratings, banisters, in a screen prison. Their climactic escape to the beach is the final trap, with the teeming crowds-the fans of yesteryear-slowly closing in. This was both Crawford's and Davis's great comeback, but, we can almost hear Aldrich chuckling, back to what?