What's the Matter with Helen?

So, what is the matter with Helen? She may or may not have murdered her husband; her teenaged son is a convicted killer; she has a latent homosexual crush on her best friend and an irrational fear of men; she's prone to paranoid delusions; she's a follower of a greedy evangelist; and she has a thing for bunny rabbits. Oh yeah, and did I mention she's off her rocker?

In 1971, underappreciated horror indie director Curtis Harrington (NIGHT TIDE, RUBY, HOW AWFUL ABOUT ALLEN) finally got to shoot the movie he'd been wanting to make for years, with a screenplay by Henry Farrell (BABY JANE, SWEET CHARLOTTE) and filmed under the title THE BEST OF FRIENDS. He wrangled two renowned stars into taking the leading roles (Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds), stuffed the film full of 1930s atmosphere and fought to keep his vision intact as much as possible (including some pretty blatant lesbian subtext). Despite the title change to WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH HELEN? and a few minor edits that were made, the movie remained pretty much intact... but he was in England shooting his next film when it was released, the miniscule promotion was misleading and gave away the ending, and Harrington later referred to first seeing the film's poster as "one of the worst moments of my career." Despite the fact that the movie wasn't very successful, it remained Harrington's favorite of all of his films until the end of his life.