What's the Matter With Helen?

If Tod Slaughter, one of the stars of yesterday's selection Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror, got to go over the top and make the movies he was in fun as a result, another person who did the same later in her career was Shelley Winters. One of those performances can be found in What's the Matter With Helen?

The movie starts off with newsreels from early in the days of the Franklin Roosevelt administration. After stories about Franklin and Eleanor, we get a fictitious one about the notorious trial of two young men in Braddock, IA, who committed a particularly grisly murder. The two men were found guilty, and their mothers walk out of the courthouse and into a car waiting to whisk them away to the collective jeers of the people assembled outside.

The action then shifts to "real life", or at least real by the movie's universe, and out of the newsreel. The mothers are Adelle Bruckner (Debbie Reynolds), and Helen Hill (Shelley Winters), who seems a little more high strung. Adelle ran a school of dance for children in Braddock, with Helen a business partner providing accompaniment on the piano among other things. But they won't be able to keep a business running in a small town as the mothers of two notorious criminals. Worse, Helen reveals in the car that somebody stabbed her in the palm of her hand. Worse, she starts getting threatening phone calls from some guy who breathes like the obscene phone callers of 1970s jokes.

So Adelle gets the idea that she's going to change her name to Adelle Stuart and decamp to Hollywood, teaching there the children of stage parents who think their daughters might actually have some artistic talent. Helen, who generally puts more faith in the Lord, listening to radio evangelist Sister Alma (Agnes Moorehead) and not doing worldly things like going to the movies, has nothing else to do so she takes the name Helen Martin and goes out to Hollywood with Adelle.

Despite the fact that there's supposed to be a depression on, Adelle's school does moderately well. Well enough for Helen to keep rabbits in the yard out back, as well as for people to take an interest in the school. One is Hamilton Starr (Micheal Mac Lammoir), who just walks in to the house one day because Adelle keeps leaving the front door unlocked. This should be unnerving to anyone, but is especially so for Helen. You see, in addition to the phone call back in Iowa, she has this feeling someone is out there watching her. Worse, she starts having hallucinations in which she sees the dead body of the woman her and Adelle's sons killed. But Hamilton, it turns out, is a bit of a chancer who claims he can teach the dancing daughters elocution, something they'll need if they want to act.

And then a rich Texan also comes into the picture. That mank is Linc Palmer (Dennis Weaver), and he begins to fall in love with Adelle, which drives a bit more of a wedge between her and Helen, whose behavior is growing increasingly paranoid. Is one of these men out to get Helen and Adelle? Do they know about the women's past? Well, you'll have to watch the rest of the movie to find out.

By the time What's the Matter With Helen? was released, it had been almost a decade since What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? took two grand old stars of Hollywood and put them together in grand Gothic style. So in some ways you would think the genre had mostly been played out. And in some ways, that's true, because there's not much new going on here. However, the success of a movie like What's the Matter With Helen? depends as much on the performances of the stars. Winters does reasonably well, although not as well as some of the other actresses in the genre, or as well as she'd do the following year in The Poseiden Adventure. Reynolds also seems a bit too flat for the role.

Still, What's the Matter With Helen? is pretty darn entertaining in spite of its flaws, and is definitely worth watching.