Released 55 years ago today (30 June 1971): What’s the Matter with Helen? File this bizarre, flawed but interesting hagsploitation shocker – directed by durable maverick Curtis Harrington - alongside the likes of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) and What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (1969). In fact, Helen’s screenplay is by author Henry Farrell – who wrote the original source novel for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Interestingly, Harrington also made a made-for-TV psychological horror movie – with another screenplay by Farrell - entitled How Awful About Allan (1970) with Anthony Perkins, which fits here too). Anyway, What’s the Matter with Helen? pulsates with religious fundamentalism, paranoia and repressed lesbianism: approach it as a hybrid of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust meets Busby Berkeley musical meets the infamous 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case. Debbie Reynolds (in a role originally offered to Rita Hayworth) and Shelley Winters (pictured) (in a role originally offered to Estelle Parsons) star as two middle-aged women hiding a shameful secret past who flee smalltown Iowa to reinvent themselves in Hollywood by opening a talent school for children. (Reynolds teaches dance classes to Shirley Temple wannabes while Winters pounds “Goody Goody” on the piano as accompaniment). If the reliably scenery-chewing Winters seems particularly convincing as the tortured, mentally fragile titular character Helen, Reynolds has recalled that Winters was actually undergoing a nervous breakdown offscreen during production! In his 1997 book High Camp: A Gay Guide to Camp and Cult Films, volume 2 Paul Roen dismisses Helen as “quite evidently a conglomeration of gay camp elements” – how can you resist? Note that Winters and Harrington re-teamed later the same year for another hagsploitation horror (Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, which I screened as a “Christmas selection” at my Lobotomy Room cinema club in December 2025). Watch for Agnes Moorehead’s vivid cameo appearance as Sister Alma, an Aimee Semple McPherson-style evangelist. What’s the Matter with Helen? is easily found on YouTube.
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