We’re off on a juicily foreboding note when Lange, at the deathbed of her rich sister (Geraldine Chaplin), promises to fulfill the last wish of the vain woman who has forever treated Bette with thoughtless disdain – that she take care of her family. With a setting of lips and a curdlingly controlled tone not heard since Faye Dunaway scratched the ice of Joan Crawford, Lange purrs: “I’ll take care of them all.” Her long-fused revenge is then tweaked yet again when her brother-in-law offers her the job of housekeeper instead of a proposal of marriage which she had expected.

Lange does a fine job of tracing the emotionally threadbare fabric of Bette’s lonely existence as a talented seamstress in the theatre district. The woman has pride, strength, and a measure of dignity despite the callousness with which life has treated her. And she has no illusions until, heartbreakingly, she takes up an impoverished Polish sculptor (Aden Young) who lives in the next garret and whom she perceives as a sort of last possibility for real human connection. At first, she tries to believe she is nurturing him for reasons of art and the spirit, but Lange – with her superb capacity for portraying people who are risking a final gamble out on the margins, and her sinewy physicality and vocal technique – reveals that this tightly coiled, undeluded observer of the worst of human nature, is exposed, out, quite humanly, for love. When this last chance is whisked out from under her by her spoiled niece, the long-banked fires roar into a conflagration of revenge.