Show + Tell with Paul Flynn
It’s Oscars at dawn for two grande dames of cinema with a rivalry as legendary as they are
IN 1961, ’30s Hollywood starlets Joan Crawford ( Jessica Lange) and Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon) are down on their uppers. Crawford is busy applying lemon juice to her elbows (‘ You know it keeps them supple’), covering her Bel Air furniture for resale and clutching a hip flask of 100-proof vodka. Davis is crawling through Broadway in a Tennessee Williams play. Her dynamic screen bile has not dimmed, unlike her career.
When Crawford picks up a paperback of Henry Farrell’s What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? she spies an opportunity for career resuscitation, a chance to work with the arch enemy she secretly reveres. ‘Feuds are not about hate,’ wisely notes fellow actress Olivia de Havilland (Catherine Zeta-jones). ‘Feuds are about pain.’
The work of Glee’s Ryan Murphy, Feud is an enormously enjoyable drama. Lange and Sarandon are flawless throughout. There are whopping, theatrical one-liners. Delivered straight, they work beautifully. Davis’s insistence on lending Baby Jane Hudson a haunting repulsion in wardrobe is the show-stopper of the pilot episode, a masterstroke of anti-glamour that floors the more brittle Crawford. These women are amazing because they have learned the obfuscation of raw emotion to please others, but the power of its revelation to unsettle us. They are broads, by any other name.
There is some nostalgia to Feud – how Hollywood once operated in a blunter era, when vengeance was as powerful a propulsion for work as love. It bears stark contrast with the saccharine flavour of a new picture like La La Land. No one will ever tell this story about Emma Stone. Feud is the opposite of Squad Goals. Ironically, they may tell it about Taylor Swift, one of today’s few stars arming herself for the downslide.
At the centre of it is both actresses’ conviction to service the work, for brilliance at all costs. The happy ending doesn’t depend upon whether Ms Crawford and Ms Davis make up. Who cares? It’s about whether they can be their most exceptional selves. And who doesn’t want that? Begins Saturday, 9pm, BBC Two