(In French, On Cable TV, February 2020) Even though I’m moderately knowledgeable about movies, I’m still often surprised by the stories that I unlock in researching movies prior to these capsule reviews. Obviously, I knew of Joan Crawford, and her relatively small modern profile (especially when compared to Bette Davis, with whom she legendarily feuded), and the tarnishing of the Golden Age of Hollywood idols, and Faye Dunaway’s decline as an actress throughout the 1980s. But prior to watching and reading about Mommie Dearest, I was certainly missing on a piece of the puzzle that linked all of these things together. To put it simply: Mommie Dearest is an adaptation of a biography by Crawford’s adopted daughter, in which she revealed that her “mommie dearest” was a cold-hearted parent, a child abuser, and an overall wreck. In film history, Mommie Dearest was the first landmark in a series of books by children of Classic Hollywood stars that unbolted their saintlike public image. Many followed, but Mommie Dearest had a bigger impact than most in that much of it was corroborated, and it led to a movie whose execution, to put it charitably, maximized the tragic arc of the story. Faye Dunaway here plays Crawford as a quasi-caricatural monster, and the first half-hour of the film is the depiction of one episode of child abuse after another, as the mom terrifies her daughter in ways that are actively unpleasant to watch. (The famous “Wire Hanger” scene is one for the history books even in its French dubbed version: my cat, who can normally tolerate the worst horror movies with supreme feline detachment, had her ears pointed sideways in alarm at the screaming in the sequence… and I wasn’t necessarily any more detached.) I’m told that the film earned an unplanned reputation as an over-the-top camp classic of unintentional hilarity, but I’m not subscribing to that viewpoint. While some sequences do attain a certain comic level of scenery-chewing, there’s only so much outright child abuse that anyone can tolerate, and despite Dunaway’s unhinged performance, the character she plays is an out-and-out harridan who clearly should not have any kids. It’s that character portrait that still makes Mommie Dearest ghastly intriguing to watch today: the raw mother/daughter feud, and how it fed into the falsity of their public appearances at the time. It’s hard to say whether the book or the movie had a bigger impact on Crawford’s reputation, but I note with some interest that Crawford’s star was considerably dimmed compared to some better-behaved contemporaries. Everyone has taken sides for Bette Davis in the Davis/Crawford feud, and Crawford is now seldom mentioned without sideways glances at her personal life. I suppose that Crawford’s lesser body of work may have something to do with it (She’s distinctive in her Oscar-winning performance in Mildred Pierce and not much else), but comparing the way she’s discussed to that of comparable stars of the same period is instructive. There’s an argument to be made that Faye Dunaway’s performance here was too good for her own good: While she was a superstar in the 1970s, her filmography dimmed significantly in the 1980s following the acid reception of this film. That’s quite a lot of material for a film to touch upon, but only a few other films so clearly attack the reputation of a former Hollywood icon as savagely as this one. (Have a look at The Lives and Deaths of Peter Sellers and The Girl for further examples.)
