It's a cop out, ladies and gentleman. My brain is shot after putting out fires all day long at a talent show for grades 2-5. So, I'm stealing from my book for the entry.
Catalog Rec: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane
"One of the most significant yet ignored aspects of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane is the original score by Frank De Vol. The core essence of the music is Baby Jane's trademark song, "I've Written a Letter to Daddy." While the song itself appears in its original form more than once in the film, every aspect of the score is either a continuation or a variation of this number.Each character in the film has [their] own theme music that defines [their] personality. "Blanche, the former Hollywood star, is accompanied by rich orchestrations of strings and winds to create the highly emotional, evocative style of melodrama based on the basic key and arrangement of "Letter." As her situation becomes more desperate, the transitions become more erratic, the tempo increases, and the style matches the isolation she feels in her own home. "Baby Jane, slowly losing her grip on reality, is marked with highly percussive, heavy, sharp, repetitive patterns of demented vaudevillian vamping [that's a mouthful right there].Every time she mimics Blanche or inflects a new torture upon her sister, the music swells up to a chilling crescendo of mental distress. "Finally, playing off Victor Buono's sheer size and presence, De Vol creates a bumbling, bouncing comedic anthem tagging pianist Flagg with a natural naivety surrounding his involvement with the Hudson sisters."As the characters become more involved with each other, the score combines the three distinct themes and trademark song to create a disturbing, penetrating sense of unease. While traditional orchestral scoring is used to supplement onscreen events, De Vol composed music that truly helped create a psychologically disturbing film, with traces of the songs ingrained in the collective psyche of the viewers."
So there you have it. Watch the film.
Labels: Catalog rec