The Nanny: Bette Davis’ hidden Hammer and Hag Horror Gem
“Female monster, or monstrous-feminine, wears many faces…” Barbara Creed (1993).
Sat in the balcony of The Hyde Park Picture House at 11pm on a Saturday night back in 2012, I first discovered the astonishing, latter careers of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) A naïve twenty-year-old film student, I didn’t know anything about the film, it’s legacy, or how it started a whole new genre of cinema. Yet I was instantly enraptured by the film’s ridiculousness, it’s treatment and depiction of the aging Hollywood legends, and the B-movie horror at its heart. The experience stayed with me long after the curtain fell. It wasn’t long until I was obsessing over Crawford and Davis’ supposed on and off set feud and discovering other films that followed in the cult classic’s footsteps. Meanwhile I was also working my way through my boyfriend’s Hammer Horror boxset; marvelling at Christopher Lee, chuckling at the absurdity of The Reptile (1966) and Rasputin: the Mad Monk (1966), whilst thoroughly enjoying the more respectable Monster movies the studio produced. Eventually, my love of both these cinematic worlds would collide when I first saw The Nanny.
In the early 1960s, Hammer Film Productions’ golden years as British horror cinema giants was well underway. Their winning trio of Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Director Terence Fischer first proved a success with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and immediately again in Horror of Dracula (1958) the following year. The three men (or a combination of) would go on to define the studio’s next fifteen years of gothic mastery. Meanwhile, the sun was well and truly set on the Hollywood careers of some of the great female actors of the century. As the star power of legends such as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Shirley Winters, Debbie Reynolds, Barbara Stanwyck and Tallulah Bankhead dwindled, the cruel movie machine chewed them up and spat them out, as their youthful looks faded. Whilst their male equivalents across the pond triumphed in their middle-age, professional and artistic opportunities for the products of the Hollywood star system dried up. As a result, the next decade saw icons such as Davis and Crawford stoop to making B-movie pictures. When the famously feuding duo co-starred in Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?(1962), they inadvertently gave birth to ‘Hagsploitation’.
Also known as Grande Dame Guignol, the genre takes its name from the merging of two things. The Grande Dame: described by Peter Shelley in his book on the genre as, “An older woman of great dignity and prestige. A cultural and literary archetype, she is usually portrayed as a flamboyant woman prone to extravagant and eccentric fashion … and expects all those around her to conform to her high standards of etiquette.” The Grand Guignol: a Parisian theatre which specialised in naturalistic horror. Coincidently, it closed the same year that What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?was made. Hagsploitation films centre around the downfall and delusions of distressed or deranged older woman, vilified and violent. The protagonist’s appearance reflecting her insanity, most obvious in the creepy regressive costumes of Davis’ aging Baby Jane. Their motivations are often senseless, driven by revenge, jealousy or a serious, undiagnosed mental health condition.
In retrospect, many of these psycho-biddy movies - centred around psychotic, monstrous older women - are celebrated as camp classics. Yet, it’s often overlooked just how degrading a jump to movies like these would have been for Oscar award-winning legends like Jane and Bette. Despite the film’s depiction of Baby Jane Hudson as a senile old woman, Davis was only fifty-four when she took on the role. (To this day we still don’t know the exact age of Joan Crawford, whose Wikipedia Year of Birth still reads as ‘190?’). In author Jonathan Pinner’s Horror Cinema, he describes the roles available for older women in the genre as “Hags, whose lost sexual appeal adds insult to the injury of their lost sexual lives,” a reflection of what Hollywood thought of the actresses themselves. But hagsploitation was not just about the monstrous older women, it also depended on the casting of Hollywood A-listers, their real-life fall from grace playing into the films’ violent stories. As Stacy Davies, writing for Taste of Cinema perfectly puts it, these films purposefully “capitalise on mature actresses who’d been put out to pastures by Hollywood – for the unthinkable crime of aging.” There’s so much fun to be had in these movies from Wiliam Castle’s Strait-Jacket (1964) to Aldrich’s Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), but it’s important to recognise the cruelty of the Exploitation as well as the camp entertainment of the Hag.
There was something quintessentially British about Hammer and something quintessentially Hollywood about Hag Horror. Whilst Hammer classics primarily focused on fantasy, the supernatural, and folklore, the deranged divas of Grand Dame Guignol resided exclusively in the real world. By the 1970s both genres would be drying up but, during their simultaneous reign, they would intertwine on a couple of occasions. The greatest merging of the prolific studio and the camp subgenre came in Seth Holt’s The Nanny (1965), starring Bette Davis. Three years after the success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and a year on from Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte, Davis collaborated with Hammer for her first of two outings. (She returned to Hammer in Roy Ward Baker’s The Anniversary (1968) as an eye-patch wearing, maniacal widow). The Nanny proved to be an uncharacteristically simplistic, quiet film compared to typical psycho-biddy and Hammer features. On its release in November 1965, The New York Times claimed that “With Bette Davis loose as “The Nanny,” children had better run for their little lives…it’s the quietest, tightest and most lifelike Davis film in a cavalcade of gory jamborees.” There are no creepy costumes, eyepatches, or wielding axes to be found here. Davis, for the most part is the film’s straight woman. An obedient and no nonsense nanny, whose insanity is hidden deep beneath the surface.
Despite having a much larger budget than the likes of Horror of Dracula and The Curse of Frankenstein, The Nanny is conservatively shot; filmed in black and white, set primarily in one location, and requiring little to no special effects. The emphasis is on character and story and the psychology of both. Its charm lies in its minimalism. This gives Davis room to play around with her performance, as critic Anne Billson writes, “She juggled pathos and nuttiness.” ‘Nanny’ is all we know her character as, referred to as such by everyone, not just the children she looks after. On the surface, Nanny is an obedient, patient assistant to the Fane Family: we first meet her strolling peacefully past a children’s play park, picking up flowers, and bringing them home with a cake for the family’s first born, Joey (William Dix). Mrs Virginia Fane (Wendy Craig) is hysterically preparing herself for the return of her ten-year-old son who has spent the last two years in a “home for disturbed children”. Nanny comforts Virginia, constantly busy in the background of the family’s lives, maintaining the house and preparing their meals. Joey, a mischievous and brattish boy, open with his hatred for Nanny, refuses to sit with her in the car, eat food she has prepared, or to be alone with her. It’s fascinating to watch as we try to unpick who is telling the truth. What follows is a slow and suspenseful game of cat and mouse between prince (Joey) and pauper (Nanny), leaving us unsure of who to trust. Yet, as is traditional for the genre, Nanny is eventually revealed as ‘out to get’ Joey, their backstory revealing that he was sent away for drowning his sister – something Nanny was responsible for. Davis’ wealth of acting experience is matched by William Dix’s natural young talent as the insufferable but ultimately innocent young boy. It was the first time a psycho-biddy went up against a child and the results were fresh and exciting. Joey’s confidence and precociousness perfectly contrasts Davis’ performance which heavily relies on facial expression and body language. Although the film eventually sinks into traditional exaggerated depictions of a deranged, bloodthirsty older woman, the movie’s earlier chapters, with its domestic mundanity and lack of non-diegetic music, are unusual for both Hammer Horror and Grande Dame Guignol. It’s slow in its pacing and doesn’t reveal much about Nanny’s true intentions until its final thirty minutes.
The film is not without its problems, some of which are typical of Hagsploitation. In an early scene Joey’s sister is interacting with her mother at her dressing table. The young girl discusses beauty and her ambitions to be the prettiest girl in the world, claiming her brother has teased her, calling her ugly. Her mother comforts her, confirming she’s pretty and Susy (Angharad Aubrey) is pleased to learn that the answer is yes when she asks, “Am I prettier than you, Mummy?” This early emphasis on the value of the superficial is unsettling to watch; though I suspect this scene was originally intended as a way for us to warm to Susy and her mother, with 2020 vision, it’s a bleak insight into just how early on girls feel the importance of and pressure to be physically beautiful and in competition with other girls. Meanwhile, Nanny is visibly plain. Davis’ natural beauty is dampened by a simple black dress and a lack of make-up, whilst her hairstyle is aging and unflattering. As a result, she is not married and works in a position of servitude. It’s no coincidence that the film is titled after her character’s profession. As a nanny, her abilities to care and mother the children is brought into question when she fails to notice that Susy is unconscious in the bath and runs the water, accidently drowning her, the turning point for the character, who now becomes the villain. Just prior to this, she has discovered her illegitimate child has died during an illegal abortion. This completely unexpected plot point is trying to shock us into a life lesson about the dangers of pre-marital sex and the tragedy that can come with being pro-choice. It’s problematic that at this point the film turns on Nanny – vilifying her and showing her as cold and calculating, with no previous exploration of her mental health. She almost instantly descends into madness, denial, and delusion. After the accidental drowning of Susy, Nanny proceeds to bath the dead body. On top of this, she then proceeds to kill Joey, with no explanation as to why. The film expects us to believe that a devoted Nanny who makes one devastating, fatal mistake would then instantly set out on a vengeful mission to take another life and destroy a family she has been devoted to for two generations. This feels like an oversimplification of complex issues such as abortion, neglect, and mental health. It’s uncomfortable but a fascinating study of 1960s ideas of women, vilified for human error and categorised as mad when experiencing mental trauma.
Davis’ character is ultimately a monster because of errors made in childcare; for having a child out of wedlock and for not conforming to the ideals of womanhood that the era demanded. Jonathan Pinner points out that, “While the Grand Dame Guignol had one foot firmly planted in old Hollywood, another subgenre stands shakily on the bloodied fields of women’s liberation and sexual revolution.” We see unconventional women punished in this way on screen long after psycho-biddy cinema died out. In blockbusters of the 1980s and beyond, including Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (1987) and Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992), portrayals of women were condemned for their sexual promiscuity. It’s only in recent years that we’ve seen mental health conditions better represented in the movies, with Hagsploitation doing nothing to help the stereotype of ‘the emotional woman’, or ‘woman driven to madness’. The Nanny is no exception. Even though Susy’s death was an accident, we’re supposed to believe that the death of her daughter was enough to drive her to bathe a dead, clothed child. Nanny’s crimes extend to her treatment of Mrs Fane, who she poisons and drives to full dependency upon her. She encourages Mrs Fane’s neurosis and debilitates her physically, a call back to the behaviour of Baby Jane Hudson three years prior. The hags of Hagsploitation seem to have a desperate need to be needed, often childless (never childfree) or grieving widows as they are. The genre ultimately displays the unfair scrutiny women face from society when their youth fades and they no longer serve as an object of desire. To this day, women are scorned at for ageing too quickly, not quickly enough and for ultimately not obtaining their unattainable younger years. Hagspolitation depicts this inevitable downfall women face as a result of society’s impossible, superficial expectations. The Nanny, with its focus on a subservient and typically female profession, the importance of conventional good looks, it’s themes of illegitimacy, motherhood and abortion, is maybe the subgenre’s greatest example of this.
Seth Holt captures the true mastery of Davis, whose performance ranges from magnificent to manic. The camera paused on her face many times, letting Davis’ famous wide eyes speak for Nanny and her internal struggle. She lingers in doorways, reflects back at Joey in mirrors and haunts the corners of the room. She’s not creepy from the offset, especially when compared to the unsettling way in which the family treats her. It’s frustrating to see Joey’s rudeness go unpunished and, due to the flippant disrespect she experiences at the hands of the middle class family she serves, you can’t help but root for Nanny in the climactic scenes of the film in which she attempts to act out her vengeance, but the film is tied up quickly in a neat bow as Nanny can’t follow through with drowning Joey, instead locked up in a home for disturbed hags. Meanwhile, Joey reconciles with his relieved mother. The Nanny is a welcomed break from Hammer tradition, with no sign of its typical blood red hues or iconic leading men. In fact, Joey’s father doesn’t reappear after the first third of The Nanny. For Grande Dame Guignol, it’s uncharacteristically smart and subtle whilst still maintaining the eccentricities and contradictions the genre is known for. There isn’t a great emphasis on violence or revenge. The film is much straighter, less camp and incredibly British compared to other classics of the genre. Bette Davis’ performance, like the film, is restrained and satisfyingly minimalist (for the most part) and The Nanny demonstrates her resilient and relentless star quality, despite having been pushed aside by the Hollywood studio system and its tyrants. Although The Nanny doesn’t hold cult status in the same way that What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966) do, it remains an underrated movie which captures everything that makes Hammer and Hagsploitation such delightful genres of 1960s cinema.
Hannah McHaffie is a horror-movie junkie, film exhibition marketer and freelance writer.
She's coordinator for Live Cinema UK and works on Birds' Eye View Films #ReclaimtheFrame campaign. Her background is in film festivals and documentary exhibition.
We've been going independently for years now, and so far have self-financed every single project. In order to do more work, and continue supporting amazing filmmakers in the genre space, we've launched a Patreon.
If you are able to support us and the work we do on Patreon, we'd truly and deeply appreciate it.