Queering Cinema: Dame Camp and 'Dead Ringer'

The movie star most associated with "camp" is Bette Davis. She is so identified with the term that queer writer Ethan Mordden nicknamed her Dame Camp. It just took a cigarette clutched in an upright hand, a grimaced face, and one of Davis' famous lines to impersonate her. Many did with great success, most notably Charles Pierce, who built his career around impersonating her. But not to Davis' satisfaction: Having snuck in to see his show in 1972, she wasn't impressed, refusing to meet him afterward and saying, "There is only one female impersonator who does me right, and his name is Arthur Blake."

It was Davis' crisp, no-nonsense style that made her the Cate Blanchett of the 1940s, but by the 1960s she had entered the final, and some could say grimmer, phase of her career brought on by her Grand Guignol turn in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane." That movie is the stuff of Hollywood legend, and the subject of the first season of Ryan Murphy's "Feud" that chronicled her battle with co-star Joan Crawford while filming.

What might have solidified Davis' place as camp's avatar was in 1962 when Edward Albee opened "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" with Martha mimicking Davis with the line, "What a dump!" It came from what is considered Davis' worst performance in 1949's "Beyond the Forest," and with those three words a Davis caricature was solidified in popular culture. Two years later Susan Sontag wrote her essay, "Notes on Camp," in which she famously defined the term. "Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style – but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the 'off' of things being what they are not." 

The same year as Sontag published her essay, Davis starred in a film that had Davis' particular kind of style in full display: "Dead Ringer."

Audiences got a double-dose of Davis as she played twin sisters: one bad, the other worse – in this a B-movie, noirish melodrama, directed by Davis' co-star from "Now, Voyager" Paul Henreid. (Itself a camp reference – it is in that film he famously lit two cigarettes before handing one over to Davis.)

At the start of "Dead Ringer," Edith Phillips, one of the twins, is seen getting off a Los Angeles city bus – a visual clue that acts as a sure sign of her hard times. She is attending the burial of her wealthy sister Margaret DeLorca's husband, with whom Edith had a relationship before the sisters parted badly 18 years before. Edith runs a dive bar – Edie's – and is romantically involved with a cop, Jim, played by Karl Malden; but coming in contact with her sister sets up the melodrama that follows, which includes a faked pregnancy, murder, impersonation, self-mutilation, and a grisly death at the hands of an angry Great Dane.

Playing the sisters, Davis attempts to suggest some nuance between them, though her over-the-top delivery of both sisters' lines blunts what shading there is. "Dead Ringer" is not to be appreciated for Davis' range and control, but rather for how she had hardened into a caricature with her line readings and physical mannerisms. The scenes between Edith and Margaret have a wonderful verisimilitude thanks to cinematographer Ernest Haller, who had created a similar effect in 1946 with "A Stolen Life," an earlier melodrama where Davis played twins and impersonated one after one dies. It was that scenario that is lifted for "Dead Ringer," but with a crucial twist. With Davis eating up a screen and a smartly-written script, the film holds up as an effective B-movie thriller; but it also definitely camp. What else can be said about the scene where Edith angrily confronts Margaret and pushes her into a chair? Or the moment when Edith mutilates herself by grabbing a hot poker? Or what may be the film's biggest laugh that has Margaret's louche boyfriend, played by Peter Lawford, mauled to death by a Great Dane while Davis watches, cigarette in hand?

Is it fair to say that by this point in her career Davis had become a caricature of herself. She would later appear on the NBC parody show "Laugh In" confronting a drag queen impersonating her, as well as on late night television where she regaled America with her brusque manner while telling stories of Old Hollywood. She finally succumbed to playing a caricature of her nefarious post-1960s persona with "Wicked Stepmother," a 1989 supernatural black comedy in which she plays a latter-day witch out to destroy a suburban family. With tongue firmly in cheek, Davis appears to relish her evil ways; but things were not happy on the set and the star was said to have left the film before concluding filming due to disagreements with director/writer Larry Cohen. (He had filmed enough of Davis to piece together his film.) That this was her final role makes an ironic footnote to her great career.

Playwright and drag artist Charles Busch saw the camp possibilities of "Dead Ringer" when he took its central idea of rival twin sisters and reworked it for "Die, Mommy, Die!", his 2003 film parody that he later brought off-Broadway. In it, he plays Andrea Arden, a popular singer whose career has taken a turn for the worst since the death of her twin, Barbara. The dead Barbara proves crucial to a plot that involves adultery, murder, and deception. Since the 1980s, Busch has made his career with these affectionate homages to old Hollywood movies and the great female stars who were in them. In reviewing the film for the New York Times, critic Stephen Holden wrote: "''Die, Mommie, Die!'' is really Mr. Busch's show. Within the cramped limitations of drag, he exudes a genuine screen charisma. That star quality as much anything should earn the film a niche in camp heaven." If so, he would be found sitting at the right hand of Bette Davis.