Contemporary assessments are more uniformly appreciative. As of available records, Rotten Tomatoes reports a ninety-one percent positive rating from fifty-three reviews, and Metacritic scores it at seventy-five out of a hundred. The film was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2021. It is now understood as a foundational text of what critics call “psycho-biddy,” “hagsploitation,” or “Grande Dame Guignol”—the subgenre of films that cast aging female stars in horror or Gothic thriller roles. Whether that framing honors or diminishes what Davis and Crawford actually created on screen depends on how you value the genre, but the film’s influence on subsequent Hollywood horror is not in serious dispute.
Davis’s performance is the one that has received the most sustained critical attention. As Baby Jane Hudson—costumed in a grotesquely preserved version of her child-star wardrobe, face painted in a mask of delusional youth—Davis did something that sits in a different register from her earlier work. The performance is simultaneously comic and terrifying, simultaneously an act of demolition applied to her own screen image and an extension of the fierce theatrical intelligence that had characterized her work since *Of Human Bondage*. Critics who found the film itself excessive often noted that Davis’s work in it was not.
Crawford’s performance is quieter and, by the nature of her role, more reactive. Blanche Hudson spends most of the film confined to the house, to her wheelchair, to the bed, responding to what Jane does rather than driving the action. This is a structural feature of the narrative, not a comment on Crawford’s abilities, but it has affected how the two performances have been compared in the years since—Davis’s role gives her more to work with at the extremes, and the extremes are what critics and audiences tend to remember.