2 Films | Monday, October 17th
Shelley Winters enjoyed a career that spanned over six decades. She originally broke into Hollywood films in the 1940s as the “blonde bombshell” type, rubbing shoulders and even living with Marilyn Monroe for a time. She achieved stardom with her breakout performance in George Cukor’s A Double Life (1947) and Universal signed her to a long-term contract. However, she grew tired of the character roles she became known for. It is rumored that she bravely ditched the glamour and washed off her makeup to audition for the role of Alice Tripp, the factory girl, in George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951). She landed the part – as well as a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Indeed, this shift in her onscreen persona was rewarded; she earned an Academy Award nomination for The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and won Academy Awards for her work in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and A Patch of Blue (1965). By the 1960s, Winters had established herself as versatile, committed actress and an offscreen fun-loving eccentric (who dated some of the most desirable men in Hollywood – Farley Granger, Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando and Sean Connery – and married four times).
In the 1970s, Winters took on eclectic roles in larger-than-life thrillers, horrors, heists and comedies. Notably she acted for Roman Polanski in The Tenant (1976). She played the title role in Roger Corman’s Bloody Mama (1970) and Mommy in Jack Starrett’s late blaxploitation classic, Cleopatra Jones (1973). TCM celebrates this moment in her career with a psycho-biddy double feature: Curtis Harrington’s What’s the Matter with Helen? (1971) and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1972).
What’s the Matter with Helen? came about in direct response to the success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Harrington and producer George Edwards approached Baby Jane writer Henry Ferrell hoping to get a screenplay. Farrell told them about a story he outlined tentatively titled “The Box Step” about a couple of young ladies who ran a dance studio. Harrington and Edwards shifted the plot and setting slightly. They developed a screenplay set in the 1930s, about two middle aged women, Adelle and Helen, whose sons have committed a horrible murder back in their Iowa hometown. After their sons are sent to jail, they move to Hollywood to start a new life and make a living through their dance school for little girls who hope to make it big like Shirley Temple. Adelle seems to move on easily and have it all: a rich Texas suitor named Linc (Dennis Weaver) who accepts her past and wants her to have the best of the high life. However, Helen starts to see ghosts from her past and descends into obsessive queer-horror madness, fixating on Adelle.
Debbie Reynolds took the role of Adelle – and because she had a contract with NBC to be an uncredited producer on a film, she chose What’s the Matter with Helen? and took no salary for her labors. Reynolds’ longtime friend Winters agreed to play the lead without even reading the script. Though, according to Reynolds: Winters’ psychiatrist advised her not to portray “a woman having a nervous breakdown because she was having a nervous breakdown.” “But nobody knew that” Reynolds said, “and so all through the film she drove all of us insane! She became the person in the film." According to a Los Angeles Times article published while the film was in production, Winters was so difficult on the set that the studio threatened to replace her with Geraldine Page.
Moreover, executives wanted Winters to tone down the latent lesbian aspect of her character. “They didn't want me to play [the lesbianism] too directly, but I did,” said Winters. Additional homophobia arose in post-production, when Winters had the idea that she should “let the lesbian thing come out for a moment” by kissing Reynolds on the lips. Harrington agreed and a scene was shot with this moment, but it was cut to keep the film from receiving an R-rating. Despite Roger Ebert describing it as “a menopausal metaphysical mystery movie,” the film remains a queer horror classic, with tropes that find their way into contemporary films: creepy telephone calls like Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) and rabbits, lots of unexplained rabbits, like in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019). Harrington was one of the few Hollywood directors that could direct avant-garde film like cult horror classic Night Tide (1961), heralded by the likes of Maya Deren. By the 1970s, he had mastered genre filmmaking, perfectly melding metacinematic irony with the hallmark melodrama of 1930s women’s films.
Right on the heels of What’s the Matter with Helen?, Winters took on Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? and recommended Harrington to the studio to direct. The film is a delightfully twisted pastiche folktale, based partly on the fairy tale, “Hansel and Gretel.” It focuses on an unhinged American widow, Rosie Forrest (Winters), living in her magician husband’s English manor. Known as Auntie Roo, Rosie becomes obsessed with a young orphan girl, Katy (Chloe Franks), who resembles her dead daughter. However, Katy’s big protective brother, Christopher (Mark Lester), is never far behind. When Aunt Roo kidnaps Katy, she is not prepared for Christopher to cook up his own plan for revenge.
The film was a co-production between the United States and the United Kingdom, written by David D. Osborn, Robert Blees, James Sangster and Gavin Lambert and shot at Shepperton Studios in London. It also features Sir Ralph Richardson as a drunk fake psychic and Michael Gothard as the butler (a decade before he played the villain in the 1981 James Bond film, For Your Eyes Only).
The film is certainly “hagsploitation” – a subgenre of horror that represents once glamourous women as monstrous hags in their older age, exemplified by films such as Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969). However, through Harrington’s lens and Winter’s acting, Aunt Roo is not only devilishly campy, but also devastating. Predating Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) by eight years, Winters, in her finale, desperately (and maniacally) uses a cleaver to chop her way out of a pantry in which she has been locked by Katy and Christopher.
In 2002, MGM released both films on DVD as part of their Midnight Movie Double Feature series. TCM follows suit, airing the pair of films on Monday October 17, 2022 starting at 8 pm ET.
