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Publicity poster advertising WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH HELEN?
WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH HELEN was one of several films to emerge in the wake of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?, capitalizing on the profitable hagsploitation boom. It is also the only one to directly tackle the same material upon which BABY JANE was built: namely, Hollywood and its illusory charm. Other contemporary genre installments like THE NANNY and DIE! DIE! MY DARLING shift the brunt of their focus to specifically highlight the grotesque demise of the aging female, with everything else — including background — serving as an afterthought. HELEN marks a stark departure from this trend and instead builds upon the industry lore originally canonized by BABY JANE, and before that, SUNSET BOULEVARD. Yet, as much as it derives influence from such formative sources, it successfully branches off and transforms its setting into an active, self-reflexive lens through which it revisits the seminal pillars that composed its mammoth structure and their consequent unpleasant underlyings. In this way, it not only pays homage to grandiose Hollywood of the studio days, but transforms it into an active player that helps to facilitate the film’s trajectory. All while doing so, it continues to adhere to the conventions of hagsploitation while simultaneously managing to challenge and redefine its restrictive genre constraints through a continual array of playful, flirtatious provocations.
Director Curtis Harrington weaponizes nostalgia in a uniquely perverse angle that exploits drama and glamour, leaving them intact while also managing to explore their gritty and often overlooked underbelly. He achieves a subtlety that similar predecessors lacked: whereas BABY JANE depends upon squalid caricatures in order to establish, and consequently maintain its air of horror, HELEN instead opts for a more moderate approach, extorting the superficiality of Hollywood rather than its actual essence. While fame is the catalyst that sends both sisters into ruin in BABY JANE, it simply remains a background player in Harrington’s film. Rather, it is the concomitant ambiguity fogging the boundaries between reality and fantasy that, to an already unstable Helen, incite her demise. It thrusts identity, sexuality, superficiality, and their potential repercussions into question — making HELEN a cerebral, psychological study beneath all its gaudy spectacle. It is far more than a formulaic, uninspired rehash like many of the other films that followed in BABY JANE’s wake, but rather an inventive pastiche that weaves elements of distinct style to showcase the range and versatility possible in the Hagsploitation genre.
In order to emphasize the integral role that illusion lends to WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH HELEN?, Harrington purposefully juxtaposes his story with the bustling madness of Hollywood. Its unrelenting air of artificiality permeates and saturates what would otherwise be a nonchalant, commonplace story of mental ruin. By providing a constant air that perpetuates doubt and incredulity, Helen’s descent into madness takes on a tragic undertone. The strategic deployment of spectacle begins even before the credits roll, and the film opens with a montage of historical clips depicting sensational events that shaped the era, including the kidnapping of Lindbergh’s baby. Finally, the last headline appears, the only fictionalized one of the bunch: and the static shot of the newspaper article transitions to reveal the real-time frenzy surrounding our two main characters. It is here that we are first acquainted with Helen and Adelle. Their sons have just slain a local woman, inciting rage and unrest in the town. Writhing through bedlam, they subvert questioning and slip away into a car, visibly shaken. The controversy’s whiplash lends impetus to inspiration, and Adelle cooks up a plan to move westward to reinvent herself in order to teach dance to aspiring child starlets. The transformation is made complete by a platinum blonde dye job (a self-acknowledged tribute to Jean Harlow), as well as a new surname. By employing this device, Harrington not only pays reverence to the studio star transformation, but also introduces a tabula rasa which grants both women absolute agency in how they wish to reincarnate themselves, allowing for an idealized persona to be groomed and emerge with confidence.
Adelle (Reynolds) and Helen post their move to Hollywood, with Adelle’s Harlow homage on full display.
The artifice and gilded opulence of 1930s Hollywood constitutes the perfect backdrop for the story’s unfolding. An environment so contingent on the presentation of appearances is critical in its role of diluting and diminution. In a world where everybody is more-or-less taken at face value in light of superficial performance, Helen’s very real and valid concerns for her safety are disregarded with flighty carelessness. Her persistence is erroneously mistaken for madness, adhering to the dominant theme of irony that shapes the film’s unfortunate end. She is punished for her behavior because it is seen as extreme deviation as opposed to genuine, justifiable precariousness. The environment, then, is complicit in and conducive to Helen’s collapse, which in turn amplifies the tragic connotation of the inevitable consequences that are to follow. By taking an active role in Helen’s eventual decline, Hollywood itself becomes a supportive character that aids and abets the idea that Helen is an unreliable narrator, thus undermining any legitimacy she had left to her name.
Hollywood also works against Helen in its zealous repudiation of queer culture — and this, coupled with its devotion to superficial appearance works in tandem to unravel Helen’s fleeting and feeble equanimity. What better way to contextualize a study of lesbianism than through an era of history — and place — that heavily concerned itself with the manifestation of homosexuality? It certainly bestows a invaluable wealth of resources in contributing to, establishing, and expanding the queer subtext explored within the story’s framework. Its intolerance was such that if a queer performer wanted to maintain their career, they had to take to extreme measures in order to veil their proclivities. Acting was an escape for many, but when one isn’t wired for performance, how is coping achieved? The intersection of escapism, identity, and appearance all converge to present a harrowing dilemma for Helen.
Lobby card depicting the blossoming romance between Adelle (Reynolds) and Linc (Weaver)
Prior to moving westward, both Adelle and Helen are analogously disadvantaged, having been slandered irreparably by local tabloids — but that equal footing is quickly lost to the zeal of Los Angeles. Adelle takes off with soaring heights, unhampered and undeterred now that her only concern is behind her. Helen, on the other hand, while similarly free of anathema, remains in the dust on account of another skeleton in the closet: her sexuality. She is too preoccupied — whether subliminally, consciously, or both — with it and as a result, devotes the brunt of her energy to rectifying the issue. This is most prominently explored in the film’s latter half, when a desperate Helen turns to religious extremism as a means of last resort. Helen’s nature predicates her downfall, which in and of itself constitutes the ritualistic excommunication frequently leveraged against queer parties who tried to establish their identity within the studio chassis.
Adelle and Helen as they appear in the film’s beginning, having just eluded swarms of photographers and angry crowds for the murder their sons perpetrated.
Helen’s choice methodology of escapism reveals itself to be an inward phenomenon as opposed to the outward approach embraced by Adelle. Despite her purposeful attempts to cope internally, Helen displays growing irregularity in her behavior. Sadly, she remains ignorant to its manifestation, for she is too lost in the confines of her own fantasy to tangibly conceptualize how she appears to the outside world. This inevitably produces stagnation in her relationship with Adelle. While Helen remains entrenched in her old ways, Adelle has taken splendidly to her new environment. Unburdened by her past reputation, she pours all her energy into the studio, which in turn earns her a favorable reputation as well as a potential beau by the name of Linc. Her life is lurching forward with frenzied momentum while Helen’s remains static, and the increasing divide eventually causes the taut and fraying relationship to snap.
Adelle pictured during the midst of her solo performance at the successful kickoff recital for her dance studio. Meanwhile, Helen is backstage, insecure and cowering in fear.
Helen’s engagement with escapism unfortunately amplifies her psychosis.As she withdraws further inward she becomes encompassed by myopia, unable to objectively comprehend and contextualize the words and behaviors of other players. Because her fantasy exists as a distorted reality where everything orbits around her fervent desires, she unconsciously manipulates the actions of others to signify something else entirely, something that contributes constructively to her narrative. This is first evident when she takes Adelle’s friendly and unassuming invitation to move westward and in turn exaggerates its significance, mistakenly interpreting it as a new echelon of intimacy. Blinded by desire and belief (which is only reinforced by the instability and hostility of her real world, prompting her to seek refuge), Helen begins to lose sight of palpable boundaries — and when her newly adopted reality is rebuked roughly by Adelle’s own pursuits, her entire construct comes crumbling down in ruin. Though increasingly losing herself to madness, she is able to admit that “There is no saving me.”
Joan Crawford as Louise Howell in POSSESSED (1947); Shelley Winters as Helen Hill in WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH HELEN? (1971)
Harrington presents a sophisticated and tragic examination of psychosis, taking cues from the noir-tinged psychological thrillers of the late 1940s. Shelley Winters’ Helen is strikingly similar to Joan Crawford’s Louise Howell of POSSESSED, and the two share a mutual decline that is exacerbated by situational stimuli. At the end of POSSESSED, the psychiatrist treating Louise surmises that her schizophrenia remained dormant until provoked by a traumatic event — much akin to how a lit match can overwhelm and devastate once freed of restraint. Helen, like Louise, is introduced as being eccentric but competent. She remains blissfully unaware of her condition until her legitimate concerns for danger are dismissed as paranoid histrionics. The widow of the murdered woman has indeed tracked down both women in an attempt to enact revenge, but his actions only ever seem to be recognized by Helen — perhaps because she passes her time idly waiting for Adelle. The mysterious purported figure invokes several blackmailing schemes, including sending a revelatory news clipping to Adelle’s boyfriend that informs him of her secret past. Despite her reluctance, Adelle eventually cannot deny these habitual happenings, since they increasingly target her as well.
This acknowledgement proves fatal for Adelle on account of Helen’s wavering sanity. Helen, too far deluded to recognize that Adelle is only privy to the situation because she is also a target, instead misconstrues it as sympathetic validation borne of personal motivation. Harrington purposefully stages these episodes in ambiguity as a means to throw the viewer off course, contributing to the film’s encompassing convolution. However, despite this, continual hints arise that clue in the viewer that such scenarios are not contrivances of her imagination, which he finally substantiates with clarity as the film draws to an ominous close. What is already tragic in origination takes on a new cataclysmic resonance when examined with regard to Helen’s unanswered pleas for help, invoking the realization that such a horrid fate could have been easily avoided.
The miscommunication as well Helen’s frequent bouts of neurosis ultimately create an irreparable schism between the two women. Adelle demands that Helen vacate, increasingly frustrated by her growing attachment. It is during the midst of her move that Helen hears a mysterious man address her by her real name — which she has revealed to nobody but Adele. Rightfully scared by his effrontery, a paranoid Helen lapses into hysteria and pushes the figure down the stairwell, where he falls to his death. Irony and tragedy reveal the man later to be the blackmailing ex husband of the murder victim they fled back east, but by the time this is discovered it is far too late to save either woman from their grisly demise. Adelle returns to an emotionally incapacitated Helen, and the two women furtively dispose of the body in a nearby construction ditch to evade blame. Though this seemingly fosters the intimacy between both women that was temporarily compromised, the dynamic of their relationship never truly recovers from here on in.
Separated from Adele and guilt ridden over her manslaughter, Helen desperately seeks shelter in the confines of religion. Though characterized as conservative and modest from the film’s beginning, Helen doesn’t take to fanaticism until the encroaching realizations of her sexuality (and thus, the finite boundaries of her fantasy world in relation to Adelle) threaten to consume her entirely. Realizing she can delay no further, she vaults herself to the extreme and pleads for salvation. Any resolve she had in her faith is first shaken, and then ultimately lost: despite her frantic attempts, she is unable to obtain inner peace. This culminates in her disastrous, illusion-shattering encounter with radio personality Sister Alma (Agnes Moorehead). Helen’s histrionic outburst forces her to reckon with the reality that Alma is a false prophet, which creates just another crack in the crumbling foundation of her fantasy world. With her only tether to reality now severed, Helen is metaphorically sentenced to ruin.
The coalescence of religion, fame, and lesbianism erects a faithful snapshot of Hollywood’s incongruous infancy, a land where corruption and deceit ran amok as open secrets, but remained peculiarly invisible to the press. With limited means of distribution and dissemination, the public had no choice but to depend solely on reporters and gossip columnists for their information — and because these institutions were interlocked with the studioheads, scandal was cautiously cast aside in air tight compartments, safe from the public gaze. At the same time, this platform gave power and credence to other luminaries — most notably Aimee Semple McPherson, who espoused star-studded glamour and religion in order to appeal to disgruntled, conservative crowds who chastised the immoral sexuality emboldened by cinema before the implementation of the Hays Code. Alma is an indisputable allusion to Aimee, capitalizing on the tormented by feeding them with broad, discursive prevarication about God, salvation, and repentance. Helen’s pursuit of her essentially equates the nefariousness of murder with her sexuality, which is harrowingly resonant commentary on just how badly homosexuality was demonized in the industry.
Agnes Moorehead as Sister Alma —
The film’s final scenes adds gravity to overarching tragedy by examining the cruel capabilities of irony. Helen’s panicked outbursts and overt paranoia are finally validated when a detective stops by the residence, informing her that the man discovered dead in a ditch (whose death, though accidental, was her responsibility) had been in the area to harm her and Adelle, citing a lucky break. It would mark a happy ending had not, just moments earlier, Helen stabbed Adelle to death. Euphoric in her newfound freedom and thus absolved of any imaginary guilt, Helen excitedly runs to tell Adelle of the news: not only did the women succeed in evading blame for his death, but they now are also able to exist freely without threat — only to find her cold and lifeless. She pauses, and has one last perspicuous moment before lapsing forever into delusion. Her reality, the thing from which she’d been trying so hard to escape, is suddenly more inhabitable than it ever was even in its worst moments. Finding it impossible to cope with what she has done, she once again seeks shelter in her mind, willing herself to believe that Adelle’s death was a necessary means of preservation.
Harrington once again proves that he is a master of evocation in the way he meticulously stages the ending shot. A dismayed Linc bounds the stairs of Adele’s house, guided by the sinister pounding of “Goody Goody”on the piano. His gaze becomes unified with the viewer’s as he confronts the grisly fate of the two women, reducing him to a mere representative stand-in. Adelle listlessly hangs from a stage like a macabre marionette, whilst Helen, enveloped by insanity, continues to play. Every now and again she casts a deliriously affectionate glance toward Adelle’s corpse, seemingly unhinged. The camera pans slowly to center itself on her frightening countenance, and zooms ominously until the screen goes black and all sound abruptly ceases. The credits follow in total silence, which perpetuates the immersive and atmospheric horror achieved, adding considerable weight to its lingering apparition. Though Harrington has endeavored to take several detours from the strict confines of Hagsploitation, he returns to it in the film’s conclusion. The portrait of ruin presented and its jarring ambivalence calls back once more to the unforgettable finale of Baby Jane, where inevitably death and decay triumph over both women.
Adelle’s grisly fate, and Helen’s way of ensuring total ownership over her persona.
What Harrington accomplishes in WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH HELEN? is a testament to his love, ardor and appreciation for the roots of his industry. What emerges is an honest and critical extrication that embraces both the charm and corruption that contributed to Hollywood’s foundation. He doesn’t shy away from exploring unpleasantries, but executes this in such a way that they exist as only a facet of the complex, Hollywood spirit. In one fell swoop, he manages to both extol and critique the stances imbued by the Hagsploitation genre, romanticizing the glamour that BABY JANE and other genre staples so candidly disregard. In doing so, he gives the film an acute sense of self awareness that factors into the way it re-evaluates the historical consequences borne of the intersecting dimensions of sexuality, identity, and fame. The final product is a film that takes itself seriously, but at the same time engages in desultory detours in order to play with style and culture in a way that is ultimately advantageous to the film’s totality. WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH HELEN? Survives not only as a formidable entry in the Grand Guignol catalogue, but as a culturally conscious timepiece that examines escapism and how it relates performance to existence, and what can occur when its intentions fail.
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