Review of The Killing of Sister George

This review gets away from the Lesbian content, and mentions a little more about the director Robert Aldrich. There are famous commentators on the cinema that make claims on his decline towards the end of his career. The Killing of Sister George is put into the same category as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. This I do not agree with (discounting Baby Jane and its own self-contained effectively Gothic world) as I believe Aldrich returns in Sister George to the same emotional depths of pain and endurance as films like Autumn Leaves and above all The Big Knife (perhaps his greatest masterpiece). In The Big Knife, an actor is burnt out of the media system in a similar way; Coral Browne as Rod Steiger. Even the howl of utter anguish at the end is similar if not the same as the cry of horror that Ida Lupino gives in The Big Knife. And the physical abuse that lovers inflict on each other: the cigar butt eating scene in Sister George mirrors the crashing of the typewriter on Joan Crawford's hands in Autumn Leaves. The Aldrich vision is stark and seemingly cold; but it is the burning coldness of fire. This is rightly a bold film on Lesbianism. It is an Aldrich view of it, as mental illness was in Autumn Leaves, and the picture of both are of their time. What is timeless is the consistency of vision and the contemplation of a flawed humanity