What's the matter with Helen?

Curtis Harrington began his career as an underground film-maker. He dabbled with the occult and appears as Cesare the Somnambulist in Kenneth Anger's infamous "Inaugaration of the Pleasure Dome". Harrington was gay, a enthusiast of old horror movies, and a film conservationist -- he is responsible for the restoration of James Whale's bizarre black comedy, "The Old Dark House" (1932). He leased his formidable talents to television and made a half-dozen or so low-budget horror films, some of them made-for-TV. Harrington is difficult to evaluate because he applies a magisterial and highly idiosyncratic film style to trashy melodramatic material. Confined to Hollywood's nether reaches, Harrington made a virtue of necessity: he converts pedestrian material into highly polished and effective kitsch. His films exemplify one sort of gay sensibility: they are campy and outrageous, replete with innuendo and sly in-jokes, and, yet, also, observe the sufferings of their protagonists with a certain amount of sympathy and, even, compassion. Harrington proclaimed "What's the matter with Helen?" (1971) to be his favorite film and it is certainly a curious artifact -- a rip off of "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" starring Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds that is both extraordinarily beautiful in its design, camera-work, and editing as well as inexplicably odd. Two unmarried women attend the trial of their sons accused of "a mutilation slaying" in Iowa. Debbie Reynolds plays one of the mothers: she is kewpie-doll-pretty, fragile-looking, fun-loving and, possibly, a drunk. The role of the other mother is acted by Shelley Winters who looks elephantine in unflattering and dowdy costumes: she is a religious fanatic, a closeted lesbian (the film takes place in the 1930s), and, obviously, stark, staring mad. (The curious thing about the film is that the plot concerns the gradual revelation that Shelley Winters' character is a bloodthirsy, insane killer -- something signaled by the title and known to the audience within the first ten minutes of the movie; somehow, Debbie Reynolds can't figure this out, although she lives in a close, almost connubial, relationship with the other woman.) After their sons are convicted and sent to "the Big House", the two women move to Los Angeles where Reynold's character re-establishes her academy of dance, catering to battle-ax stage mothers hoping to transform their moppets into movie stars. Shelley Winters plays piano accompaniment to the dancing tykes and raises white rabbits, obsessively listening to Sister Alma, a local eveangelist modeled on Aimee Semple MacPherson and played by Agnes Moorehead. Dennis Weaver -- this film is his failed bid to become a romantic lead -- plays a Texas oilman who becomes enamoured with Reynold's pert, blonde heroine. Of course, the romance between Debbie Reynolds and the handsome Dennis Weaver triggers a crisis in the repressed and sexually confused Shelley Winters that results, predictably, enough in stabbings and general mayhem. The plot is wholly mundane and not very interesting, but Harrington's approach to this material is jaw-dropping: the film is shot in exquisite color with elaborate patterns of light and shadow (the great Lucien Ballard was the cameraman; rooms are crowded with weird decor: art deco statuettes, life-size mannequin-scaled cardboard posters, tapestries on rose-wood walls and the action is theatrically staged. The film often looks like Fassbinder at his most exotic -- odd camera angles, jarring and huge close-ups that are not flattering, mirrors everywhere and clock-faces,sinister dolls, and obsessive images of blades. The Spanish-mission home where the women live and teach their dance classes is visualized in incredible detail and that space, with its odd alcoves and baldachino-style ornamental columns, its stucco walls and arched doorways, becomes a character in the film every bit as important as the leading ladies. Harrington loads the movie up with bizarre minor characters: there is a flamboyantly gay former Thespian with dyed black hair plastered close to his pasty-white skull, a weird and frightening turn by Timothy Carey as a drunk, and a cameo by Agnes Moorehead whose narrow face and tight-lips presents one of the most horrifying images in the film. These roles, almost cameo parts, seem designed as "red herrings" -- that is, figures supposed to divert suspicion away from the clearly homicidal Shelley Winters -- but since we've known from the title that Winters plays the murderer, the function of these characters is peculiar. They are like the grotesque supporting cast in "The Old Dark House", basically a collection of sinister oddballs projected into the mise-en-scene on their own merits -- the pictorial equivalent of the tchotkes that litter the sets. (As in "The Old Dark House" directed by the gay James Whale, Harrington loads up his minor parts with homosexual, or reputedly homosexual actors.) The picture is laden with allusions and cross-references: the opening sequence comprised of a March of Time style documentary establishing the 1930's setting is a knock-off of "Citizen Kane" and there are references to Marion Davies, Hearst's girlfriend, and a variety of forgotten Hollywood stars from that time. Harrington re-stages scenes from Hitchcock films such as "Psycho". His characters pose like icons, statuesque against the elaborately decorated sets. As in Douglas Sirk's melodramas from the fifties, images contain strange, unmotivated zones of color, bands of red or purplish or bluish light -- Shelley Winters paces around in a hideous mauve kimono and there are gallons of syrupy red blood on display. It is all deliriously excessive -- the sets are too big, too complex, too intricately decorated for the story and we spend half of our time trying to figure out all the gewgaws and knickknacks cluttering the background of the images. In one scene, Dennis Weaver takes the lovely Debbie Reynolds to a gambling ship in the harbor -- the place is filmed like something from "Dr. Mabuse", sexually ambiguous couples, a tango playig, people in black tuxedos in steel-grey and blue shadows. Weaver hires a gigolo to dance the tango with his girlfriend, an alarming scene that means nothing to the plot but allows Lucien Ballard's camera to track the dancers in an ecstasy across the dance-floor. Later, we see a performance of Reynold's students, including a little girl with a big heap of curls on her head like Shirley Temple and another child who, with a padded bosom, performs a sexually charged Mae West number. The whole thing is inexpressibly bizarre and disturbing. And there is even a sinister lady midget. This picture is rarely shown. Recently, it has been re-discovered as a prototype to the New Queer Cinema. The movie is astounding -- awful but astounding.