Sudden Fear (1952)

It's not a patch on Hitchcock's Suspicion from 1941  - that movie tells the same story but with humour, a grisly connection to true crimes, as well as the electric pairing of Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine - but this lesser Sudden Fear is still a gripping noir with a young Jack Palance starring as Crawford's playwright's new murderous man.

★★★☆☆

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What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962)

The first of a series of three What Ever Happened...? horror-thrillers and the movie credited with giving rise to the dreadfully termed 'hagsploitation genre', this piece of grotesquery, like a Southern Gothic Sunset Boulevard with Hammer Film aesthetics, features Bette Davis and Joan Crawford as elderly sisters, one of whom (Baby Jane (Davis)) keeps the other (a wheelchair-bound Blanche (Crawford)) locked in an upstairs room while she plots doing away with her entirely, and the whole thing is like an exercise in bad taste.

★★★☆☆

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