EVERY MOMENT
MARK HAMILL on WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? and WEST SIDE STORY
One of the most unusual moments I’ve had in a movie theatre was when I was 11 years old. I had a neighbour, a fellow that was a couple of years older than me, who I put on a pedestal because I thought he was really cool. And he had gone to the drive-in and seen What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? and was going on about it. It sounded like nothing I’d ever seen before. I loved horror films — I was by that time already a complete addict to the Universal horror films that were shown on television, and I was building all the model monster kits and reading Famous Monsters Of Filmland magazine and so forth. I’d heard of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, but I couldn’t recall ever seeing them in anything. And for some reason it struck me as something I wanted to see.
I knew my parents would never take me to see something like that. They were really cautious and worried about my obsession with the monsters. But there was a movie theatre that was within bike-riding distance of my house, which always showed double-bills of slightly older movies. So one weekend, when my parents were gone all day, I rode my bike to the theatre.
It was less than a dollar to get in for a double-bill. The only problem was I was going to have to sit through a musical — and I hated musicals. I’d seen snippets of them on TV and thought, “These just aren’t for me.”
Well, the first feature was West Side Story. And I was completely unprepared for that film. For how emotional I got when Riff was killed in a knife fight, which was pretty extreme and brutal for an 11-year-old to see. Then, of course, Tony being killed. I was beside myself, silently weeping. I was so emotionally devastated, and yet I remember the whole theatre was in the
same state as I was. The sound of stifled tears and gasps. I had cried when King Kong died when I saw it on television, and when they showed Bambi one Christmas. But that involved animals dying. I’d never seen anything like West Side Story.
When the lights came up, people were wiping their eyes. And I thought, “Well, I have a whole other movie to watch.” And What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? was so macabre and decadent, with the black-and-white photography and the overwhelming performance by Bette Davis as this grotesque character. Again, it was a lot to take in. When she feeds her sister and takes the cover off the plate and it’s a rat, there was a huge gasp from the audience, because at the time it was so shocking. Simpler times, eh? It was a horror film, but not the traditional kind I knew.
Each of those movies on their own would have impacted me very strongly. But the two together? Well, I somehow made my way home and my parents noticed I was in a state. I didn’t want to tell them what I had done, so I said, “Oh, I fell off my bike. But I’m fine.” What an odd double-bill, but it was unforgettable.