Baby Jane Hudson characters, "Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte", also starring Davis as a mentally unstable recluse lost in her delusions. Jane and Blanche's story is parodied in an apocryphal comic strip in "" by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. In this film, director Robert Aldrich mined the careers of his two stars, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (who played Blanche), by using their early (circa 1930s) film clips when the story called for examples of their characters' work. The other characters react to clips of Bette Davis's early roles with dismay at her "bad acting", and when clips of Joan Crawford's old movies
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962 film) of "The Washington Post" also liked the film, writing that "Miss Davis has the showiest role and bites into it with all her admired force, looking a fright from head to foot. I doubt if she would regret some of the laughs she gets. She plays for them and psychologically, they are needed. If Miss Crawford has the passive role, that is not without rewards. Suffering is one of her particular gifts." "The Monthly Film Bulletin" wrote that numerous directorial techniques, including all the plunging shots down the staircase, made the film look "rather like an anthology of the oldest