Independent Films, Film Profiles

Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte
by Robert Aldrich

Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (also known as What Ever Happened to Cousin Charlotte?) is a 1964 American horror film directed by Robert Aldrich, and starring Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotten, and Agnes Moorehead.Charlotte Hollis (Davis) is a middle-aged, wealthy spinster who lives in a big house on a rural Louisiana plantation in Ascension Parish that has been in her family for generations. The Louisiana Highway Commission intends to demolish her home and build a new highway through the property. This decision is met with opposition from Charlotte, who ignores the eviction notice and refuses to leave. She keeps the foreman (George Kennedy), his demolition crew, and the bulldozer away by shooting at them with a rifle. They finally give up and leave temporarily.Nearly forty years before, Charlotte's married lover was crudely murdered with a cleaver in the summerhouse. She and the married John Mayhew were going to leave together but he rejected her with the wishes of her father. Charlotte left for a minute but came back to see John Mayhew be murdered with his hand and head cut off with a clever. Charlotte returned to the party with blood running down her dress. (The film shows the hand cut off and his arm without a hand but doesn't show the decapitation.)Charlotte herself, believing that her father (Victor Buono) killed Mayhew, became a recluse, living with her housekeeper, Velma (Moorehead), in the deteriorating Hollis mansion. Now she seeks help in her fight against the Highway Commission from Miriam (de Havilland), a poor cousin who lived with the family as a girl. Upon returning, Miriam renews her relationship with Drew Bayliss (Cotten), the local doctor who jilted her after the murder.Charlotte's sanity deteriorates with Miriam's arrival, her nights haunted by a mysterious piano playing the song Mayhew wrote for her and by the appearance of Mayhew's disembodied hand and head. Velma, suspecting that Miriam and Drew are after Charlotte's money, seeks help from Mr. Willis (Cecil Kellaway), a Lloyd's of London insurance investigator who is still interested in the Mayhew case and who has visited Mayhew's ailing widow, Jewel (Mary Astor). Miriam kills Velma when the housekeeper tries to leave the mansion and take with her a drug that Drew had been injecting into Charlotte.Miriam and Drew trick Charlotte into shooting Drew with a gun loaded with blanks, and Miriam helps Charlotte dispose of the body in a swamp. Drew's reappearance later reduces Charlotte to whimpering insanity. Believing Charlotte completely mad and secure in her room, Miriam and Drew go into the garden to discuss their plan: to drive Charlotte insane in order to get her money.As Miriam embraces Drew, she looks up to see Charlotte, who has overheard them, push a huge stone urn from the balcony above, crushing them to death. Later, as Charlotte is taken away by the authorities, Willis hands her an envelope from the now-dead Jewel Mayhew; it contains Jewel's confession of the murder of her husband.Directed and produced by Robert Aldrich, it was adapted for the screen by Henry Farrell and Lukas Heller, from Farrell's short story What Ever Happened to Cousin Charlotte?.