What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?

The title of this 1969 horror film evokes the 1962 modern Gothic hit What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, as does the casting of senior citizen actresses Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon. Page plays elderly widow Mrs. Marrable, left penniless by her husband, who finds a way to live comfortably in her old age by robbing her servants of their life savings, murdering them, burying their bodies in the desert garden of her Arizona bungalow, and planting fir trees over their unmarked graves. Gordon (under a curly red wig) is Mrs. Dimmock, who answers the ad for the latest newly-vacant position. The film is produced by Robert Aldrich, who directed Baby Jane and pretty much created the horror subgenre featuring aging actresses as mad killers (nicknamed "hagsploitation" in the industry), but he leaves the direction to TV veteran Lee H. Katzin, who lacks Aldrich’s visual style but brings out solid performances from both Page, who plays the role as a sly, cunning survivor with a barbed tongue, and Gordon, who is more outsized and flamboyant as the snooping servant trying to find out what happened to her predecessor (Mildred Dunnock), in between her household chores. The desert setting and sunny photography brings a different style to the genre, while the script (adapted from the 1962 novel The Forbidden Garden by Ursula Curtiss) provides a few clever twists. A minor but satisfying late-’60s thriller, extras include audio commentary by film historian Richard Harland Smith. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)