Cheap What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice (DVD) (Geraldine Page, Ruth Gordon) (Lee H. Katzin, Bernard Girard) Price

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Customer Reviews of What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice

Superlative campy thriller, brilliantly acted by its main protagonists. The fantastic Geraldine Page stars as a psychotic widow with a penchant for growing the very sturdiest and handsome of Pine trees - her secret is human fertiliser in the form of a series of butchered companions. Slowly suspicion rises and a friend of one of the deceased, now fertiliser fodder, begins to catch on to Page's dastardly deeds.

Geraldine Page delivers a tour de force performance as Claire Marrable - oozing a charming menace and evil with every breath. Yet there are severe undertones of humour and one senses that the actors involved would have a good cackle after every take. Page's performance rates with the most vintage camp EVER. She obviously relished and thoroughly enjoyed the role.

Ruth Gordon, best remembered from the wonderful Harold and Maude, delivers a typically feisty and spunky performance as the Aunt Alice of the title. It is vintage stuff and works equally successfully as a taut thriller but best of all as the blackest and most wicked of comedies. Please also appreciate the totally schizo music score that is so appropriate for the film. A gem from director Lee H. Katzin and producer Robert Aldrich who gave us another cult favourite, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.

Page and Gordon sparkle in witty, melodramatic thriller
In the early 1960s director Robert Aldrich teamed aging stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in a suspense thriller called "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" The movie was a smash hit. Two or three years later he brought the two actresses back for "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte". Crawford dropped out and was replaced by Olivia De Havilland. Again, Aldrich struck pay dirt. In 1969 his production company made yet another such movie, "Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice?", starring Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon. This was directed by Lee H. Katzin. I don't think it was as successful at the boxoffice, but the important thing is that Alice is almost as much fun as Jane and Charlotte.

Page plays Claire, a woman of sixty or so. In the opening scenes she finds out that her recently deceased husband left her with virtually nothing. Furious because her grand lifestyle has ended, Claire moves to the American Southwest, where she cooks up a scheme. She hires timid little old lady housekeepers and, over time, convinces them that she can make them a lot of money in the stock market. Once an unsuspecting employee turns over her life savings, Claire kills her and buries her in her garden, marking each grave with a new pine tree. Soon the yard is filled with trees. One day a new housekeeper named Alice [Ruth Gordon] shows up. Alice, however, has an ulterior motive. One of the women was her friend, and Alice suspects that Claire is responsible for her disappearance. Thus begins a grand game of cat and mouse.

Unlike Davis and Crawford, Page and Gordon were not movie stars fallen on hard times. They were great character actresses with extensive stage experience. Both had had an occasional starring role in films but had played mostly supporting roles over the years. They were older but hardly faded. If anything, they were at the height of their popularity when they made "Alice". They are the reason the movie, otherwise an outlandish melodrama, is still worth seeing. Gordon is outrageous fun as Alice, playing the part with true professionalism, yet barely able to conceal her glee and amusement at being in such a movie. But it is Page who dominates throughout. Her Claire is both hilarious and sad. Sometimes she stalks, sometimes she slithers through the movie, reminding one of a cross between a leopard and a cobra. She's obviously having a grand time.

Other Geraldine Page movies I particularly like are "Summer and Smoke", "The Trip to Bountiful" and "Sweet Bird of Youth". Great Ruth Gordon movies include "Harold and Maude", "Where's Poppa?" and, of course, "Rosemary's Baby".

Devilish fun!
Claire Marrable, a destitute widow, finds a way to keep herself living the good life by hiring a series of housekeepers whom she eventually murders, steals their life savings and buries them in her desert pine tree garden. An incredibly fun movie which derives pleasure from the lead actors. Geraldine Page (as Mrs. Marrable) and Ruth Gordon (as Alice Dimmock, the latest housekeeper who is actually trying to find out what happened to her friend who mysteriously vanished while working for Marrable) chew the scenery to the hilt and it is so much fun watching the interactions between the two. Watch Page's reaction when Gordon tells her the amount in her savings account - priceless! The film as a whole suffers somewhat from some dull supporting characters and a dreary romantic sub-plot involving Gordon's nephew and Page's neighbor. Still worth it for the acting dynamo of Page and Gordon and even Mildred Dunnock manages some nice moments in her few scenes. And you'll never forget the frenetic zither music score!

The quality of the dvd is very good. The picture is sharp and the colors are strong. The only extra feature is a trailer for the film which delivers the memorable tag-line - "Whatever happened to Aunt Alice is more terrifying than what happened to Baby Jane"!