Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)

best movie i've ever seen.

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Atmosphere but little real tension. Maybe the horror has dated. Overlong for such a slim plot.

Revisited this film on a DVD recently. This film was director Robert Aldrich's follow-up to his previous hit What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. So of course the expectations were high. The film is about Charlotte (Bette Davis) who lives with her maid (Agnes Moorehead) in a decaying southern mansion, shunned by the townsfolk after the mysterious murder of her late lover some 37 years earlier. She is acquitted due to lack of evidence. When she is threatened that her house will b demolished, she is reluctant to vacate n calls her cousin for help. This is when the past starts haunting her. The direction and settings are perfect and the story features some terrific twists and turns. The atmosphere is brooding n tense n the acting is splendid by Bette Davis but it was Agnes Moorehead who was terrific. Her acting, specially her mannerisms were so perfect like that of a maid. Found the movie creepy n scary when i first saw this as a kid.

After Creating the Hag Horror Genre, or Sometimes Called Grande Dame Guignol, with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), Director Robert Aldrich decided to Add Another with this Equally Entertaining Film. He also Decided to go Over the Top with some Gore that wasn't Considered the Thing to Do in a Major Hollywood Feature.So He was Off and Running with this Bizarre, Baroque, Behemoth Clocking in at well Over Two Hours. If there is some Things to say about this from Detractors is it's Long Running Time that Allowed for some Confusion in the Plot as it Moves Along with a Gloomy, Downbeat Tone.It's all Atmospherics and Actors here doing Their Best to Entertain and for the Most Part it Exceeds with its Excess. There are Weird Camera Angles and Even Weirder Characters Highlighted by Agnes Moorehead's Devoted and Outspoken Servant. She gives Bette Davis and Olivia De Havilland the Distance Needed from Bette's Melodramatic Mania and Olivia's Softly Spoken Cousin with a Secret.Everything on Screen is there for the Eye and Ear to be Stimulated with Everything being Portrayed as Anything but Subtle. That makes for some Scintillating Stuff that Still has Audiences and Critics Buzzing to this Day.

Ever since I was a kid I identified this as "the scariest movie I've ever seen". And even today, despite the fact that as an adult one no longer possesses the same ability to be frightened by a film, CHARLOTTE still emerges as one of the of the purest of terror-films in that it hits so many of the back-of-the-dark-closet horror clichés dead-center (in a good way) as few ever quite have.Oh, sure, it won't compare to later slasher pics for blood (only one person gets sliced & diced, in fact) but the term "southern Gothic", to my mind, simply held no real meaning until THIS came out...Many people don't realize that CHARLOTTE received more Oscar nominations [7] than any other horror film up to that time, a record tied only by "Silence of the Lambs" (in 1991) and surpassed by "The Exorcist"s 10 nominations (in 1973)... CHARLOTTE won none, but the fact it lost the Best B&W Cinematography Oscar (for Joseph Biroc's drippingly dark work) is akin to grave-robbery! Grander and more haunting than BABY JANE (though from the same production team), CHARLOTTE is the more seductively macabre movie.Borne of an era when "real" thrillers were coming to a close, when PSYCHO-period shockers felt so supernatural and creepy (even when they may not have been, technically, supernatural in plot) at the Cold War peak of the early-'60s...Somehow, it all just feels more forlorn and sacred and sad than sadistic.It's also one of the most quotable of films --- the dinner scene is a classic in itself. And, if you watch closely, it's chock full of smatterings of various scenes from Bette Davis pictures re-executed.Yes, it might have been fun to re-team Davis with Joan Crawford (DeHavilland is a great replacement, creating a nice, breezy contrast with Bette) but with an able-bodied Joan, wandering the moors and the mansion at midnight in that beehive hairdo and those huge, choker necklaces, CHARLOTTE might have wound up just TOO unnervingly creepy.