Director – Curtis Harrington, Screenplay – Robert Blees & Jimmy Sangster, Story – David Osborn, Additional Dialogue – Gavin Lambert, Producers – Samuel Z. Arkoff & James H. Nicholson, Photography – Desmond Dickinson, Music – Kenneth V. Jones, Art Direction – George Provis. Production Company – American International Pictures (England) Ltd./Hemdale.
Cast
Shelley Winters (Rosie ‘Auntie Roo’ Forrest), Mark Lester (Christopher Coombs), Chloe Franks (Katy Coombs), Michael Gothard (Albie), Ralph Richardson (Mr Benton), Lionel Jeffries (Inspector Willoughby), Hugh Griffith (Mr Harrison), Rosalie Crutchley (Miss Henley), Judy Cornwell (Clarine), Marianne Stone (Miss Wilcox)
Plot
England in the 1920s. Christopher and Katy Coombs have been placed at the orphanage but are upset that they are not selected among the best-behaved children that get to go to a Christmas party. The party is put on each year at Forrest Grange by Rosie Forrest, Auntie Roo to the children, an American whose husband went missing some years ago. Roo is mourning the death of her own child Katherine and pays money to the fraudulent medium Benton who claims to be able to contact Katherine. Christopher and Katy sneak along to the party in the trunk of the car. They are found by Auntie Roo and welcomed inside. When Katy walks in to one of the séances, Auntie Roo is taken by the striking resemblance between her and Katherine. Meanwhile, Christopher discovers that Auntie Roo keeps the mummified corpse of Katherine in a hidden room upstairs. When the party ends, Katy cannot be found. Christopher is certain that she has been kidnapped by Auntie Roo and returns to the house determined to rescue her.
Curtis Harrington (1926-2007) was one of the great unrecognised genre directors. Harrington first made the independent low-budgeted mermaid film Night Tide (1961) and was then employed by Roger Corman to direct the English-language inserts for Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965), which was re-edited from a Russian sf film, followed by the alien vampire film Queen of Blood (1966), which also reuses Russian sf film footage. Harrington then hit his stride with the psycho-thriller Games (1967).
At this point, Harrington became one of the most regular directors within the Grand Dame Guignol fad. This began with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), which pitted aging stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford up against one another rattling the rafters in their performances while playing a series of sadistic psychological games with one another. The success of Baby Jane created a fad for similar such films. Both Davis and Crawford found renewed career boosts, while other aging stars lined up in similar roles. Harrington directed several of these Grand Old Dame films with How Awful About Allan (1970), What’s the Matter with Helen? (1971), Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? and The Killing Kind (1973).
Shelley Winters was another of these middle-aging actresses who found a career boost in the Grand Old Dames genre. She had had a reasonable career in the 1940s through to the early 60s, having won Academy Awards for The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and A Patch of Blue (1965). She turned to the Grand Old Dames genre with (arguably) The Mad Room (1969), followed by Harrington’s What’s the Matter with Helen? after which she persuaded him to return to direct her for Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? That said, the film does misleadingly try and sell itself as a Baby Jane-alike copy with a similar question mark title, although for all that Auntie Roo never gets killed, nor is there ever any question about her doing so.
Shelley Winters as Auntie Roo
American International Pictures had had success throughout the 1960s with assorted monster movies, the Vincent Price Edgar Allan Poe films and the Beach Party series. By the end of the decade they had set up a subsidiary in the UK with American International Pictures (England) Ltd where they made such films as Matthew Hopkins – Witchfinder General (1968), The Oblong Box (1969), Cry of the Banshee (1970), Scream and Scream Again (1970), The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971) and Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971), all of which sought to tap into the burgeoning popularity of the Anglo-Horror cycle that had been created by Hammer Films. Here they even employ Jimmy Sangster, one of the Hammer mainstays, on script (see below for Jimmy Sangster’s other films).
Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? was apparently not Curtis Harrington’s favourite among his films and he stated that he hated the script, even after having had it rewritten. That said, it holds up fairly well. Harrington generates an okay and decent thriller, especially during the latter scenes with Mark Lester trying to sneak the keys from the kitchen while Shelley Winters is not looking and rescue sister Chloe Franks from the house. The film also casts quite a respectable line-up of names from the British actors’ guild, including Ralph Richardson, Hugh Griffith and Lionel Jeffries.
There is another whole level where the film plays out as a modernised retelling of Hansel and Gretel, which is read by Mark Lester to Chloe Franks as a bedtime tale at one point – this could be Hansel and Gretel by way of the Grand Old Dames and Anglo-horror cycles. It is still a messy script in a number of ways with the film setting up elements like the mysteriously disappeared magician husband and the medium scam – that don’t full play out or get adequately explained.
Shelley Winters discovers a child’s body
On the minus side, the casting of Shelley Winters never quite ascends to the same heights that Bette Davis and Joan Crawford did in Baby Jane and the other films that followed. Winters is not too bad as the evil heiress but her performance tends to the broad. The images of her singing Tit Willow hold nothing against the deranged trashiness of Bette Davis’s recital of I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy in Baby Jane.
Curtis Harrington’s other genre films are:– the low-budget mermaid film Night Tide (1961); the re-edited Russian science-fiction film Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965), the alien vampire film Queen of Blood (1966); the psycho-thriller Games (1967); the Batty Old Dames psycho-thriller How Awful About Allan (tv movie, 1970); the Batty Old Dames psycho-thriller What’s the Matter with Helen? (1971); The Cat Creature (tv movie, 1973); the Batty Old Dames psycho-thriller The Killing Kind (1973); the voodoo/zombie film The Dead Don’t Die (tv movie, 1975); Killer Bees (tv movie, 1974); Ruby (1977) set in a haunted drive-in theatre; and Devil Dog: Hound of Hell (tv movie, 1978) about a Satanic dog.
