Screen titans Davis, Crawford: on the screen again

Above : Joan Crawford and Bette Davis star in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.” (Photo/Fathom Events)

Old movies never die. They just … well, they don’t even fade away anymore. Not when studios figure they can sell them again and again.

Which is what Turner Classic Movies does on a regular basis. The subscription service (part of a sports and entertainment package on Xfinity for $9.99 a month) shows a wealth of old movies.

But some of those same movies are offered in theaters, too, through Fathom Events. I list a number of them on a regular basis.

Case in point: The 60th Anniversary screening of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.” The 1962 film – directed by Robert Aldrich and starring two titans of 20th-century cinema, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford – will screen Sunday and Wednesday at the Regal Cinemas theaters at Northtown Mall and Coeur d’Alene’s Riverstone Stadium.

Sunday’s show will be at 1 pm., Wednesday’s at 7 p.m.

Aldrich’s film, which is based on the 1960 novel written by Henry Farrell , concerns two sisters, Jane (Davis) and Blanche (Crawford), who live together in a decaying Hollywood mansion. Former child star Jane, jealous of her more successful actress sister, begins to lose her mind – to the detriment of the bedridden Blanche.

A staff writer for The Hollywood Reporter called the film “a lurid melodrama of hate, revenge and murder, a high-class horror film, in the Hitchcock vein, with virtuoso performances from Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and moments both searing and poignant.”

What’s ever more interesting than the movie is the story behind the production, with the two stars apparently loathing each other – a feud dramatized by the 2017 miniseries “Feud.”

Sometimes that hurts a movie. In the case of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,” it clearly helped.