I SAW WHAT YOU DID

...gives a hint of what CHARLOTTE might have been like had Joan not walked off of the picture due to "illness" (but really over conflicts with Bette Davis).

As most of you know, although they'd already done WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? together in 1962, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were slated to re-team for an even darker picture, HUSH... HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE in 1964. And numerous scenes with Joan were already filmed.

As legend has it, Bette and Joan couldn't get along. And because Bette believed that Joan had sabotaged her Oscar campaign for BABY JANE (and because director Bob Aldrich apparently agreed) little was done to rein in Bette during the filming of CHARLOTTE. So Joan left with a spontaneous case of pneumonia, in an attempt to shut the film down.

Olivia DeHavilland replaced Joan and did quite a good job, but Olivia struck a more breezy, duplicitous sense of contrast to Bette.

And while that worked well, one is left to wonder what CHARLOTTE might have been like had Joan stayed on. Yes, Bette & Joan had done BABY JANE together, but CHARLOTTE was to be the more haunting picture. And without being in a wheelchair and playing the victim, Crawford would have been able-bodied and overtly malevolent, eerily wandering the moors and halls of that Louisiana plantation at midnight in her beehive hairdo and those gargantuan necklaces.

The result might have been a picture almost too creepy in a back-of-the-dark-closet kind of way. (Observers said her face-off with Mary Astor was fabulous, even better than DeHavilland's).

Well, in it's own downmarket kind of way, I SAW WHAT YOU DID gives us a whiff of what CHARLOTTE might have been like had Crawford not bailed...

...at least, in the scenes with Joan.

Despite the B-movie elements of William Castle's direction and script, Crawford not only gives us her banshee beehive-and-giant-chokers physical presence (once intended for CHARLOTTE), but I SAW WHAT YOU DID was also shot by CHARLOTTE's same cinematographer, Joseph Biroc, a true artist with a black-and-white camera and someone who granted more dignity than was really warranted to more than one Castle picture.

The result? If you squint while watching I SAW WHAT YOU DID, absorb its macabre look and feel while pretending it's a more A-level picture than it is, and then add Baby Davis to the mix, we might get an inkling as to what CHARLOTTE, already a good, very dark film, might have been like.

Would that have been just too terrifyingly otherworldly?

Crawford with Agnes Moorehead in deleted scene from CHARLOTTE:
http://www.joancrawfordbest.com/64hush12nov4.jpg




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