BY JERRY ROBERTS

May 12, 2002

It is funny how you remember things. I remember a lot of firsts in my movie loving life. My first movie was The Rescuers, I can live with that. The first movie that I saw by myself in a theater was The Last Emperor and I can also live with that. The first movie that I saw on video was The Cannonball Run and . . . well there’s kind of gray area there. But I am ashamed to admit that the first movie that I ever saw on cable was Mommie Dearest. Yes, ten-thousand movies and my first exposure to cable is a piece of claptrap about a psycho movie star beating her kid with a wire hanger. Oy, where did I go wrong?!

Much to my amazement I forced my away through the movie again in preparation for this review but as I watched Mommie Dearest this time I had a thought. This movie would make an interesting graphic novel because it contains the same overactive hypo-drama as any illustrated work, overplaying, over dramatizing with a curious voyeuristic quality. True, it’s voyeurism owes more to a daytime talk show than the works of Daniel Clowes or Alex Ross but the movie treats it’s characters in the same over-cooked style as any of their writings.

I think the reason has to do with the fact that human beings do not act the same as the characters in this movie without being hauled off in straight-jackets to ride the therapeutic lightening. It appears to take place in a Twilight Zone/Bizarro World where nightmare become realities. The Joan Crawford played by Faye Dunaway in this movie doesn’t resemble the great actress and based on her overactive temper and quick and violent actions she seems to resemble one of those creatures from a 50s sci-fi movie that take over the body of a human but is growing more and more paranoid that someone is on to them. Maybe Dunaway’s character should have been credited as “Joan Crawford”. The movie looks (to me) as an alien civilization might view us if their only exposure to human beings were repeated viewing of “Jerry Springer” or “Jackass”. I was imagining a title for the graphic novel like “The Terror of Joan” or “The Creeping Crawford” or “Careful, She Might Shear You”

The movie is detached from real life and as such, this is how I viewed it. It is a biopic (more pic than bio) based on her scathing memoir of the years that Christina Crawford supposedly endured as the adopted child of “Joan Crawford”, a hateful, vile disciplinarian who beat the child verbally and physically whether she deserved it or not (In every instance, according to this movie, she didn’t). But for the movie Christina is not the only target of “Joan Crawford”. Almost everyone in the movie gets a taste of “Joan Crawford” and the movie has a lot to throw around. In the course of 90 minutes she manages to 1.) Verbally berate everyone such as the maid for not scrubbing the floor well enough. 2.) Cuts down her prize rose garden in the middle of the night after a feud with Christina. 3.) Makes Christina eat a raw steak . . . THREE TIMES! 4.) Chops down a tree in a fit of rage. 5.) Chops off Christina’s hair in the fit of rage. 6.) Demolishes her daughter’s closet because of the infamous wire hangers. 7.) Drags the child into the bathroom where she beats the child with a can of Ajax and the aforementioned wire hanger. 8.) Body tackles the adult Christina across the table and tries to choke her to death. 9.) Develops what seems to be a short bout of Turrets Syndrome by throwing the F-word around when she meets with a rep from Pepsi (they aren't amused). and 10.) Ruins Christina’s job on a soap opera when she breaks onto the set drunk and starts a slurring rant. Needless to say, the folks at Disney passed up their chance to distribute this film.

I haven’t even gotten to the wire hangers yet.

The most amazing scene in the movie takes place in the middle of the night when “Joan Crawford” wakes up Christina because she has hung a new dress on a wire hanger. Now putting aside the hanger, the dress looks designed for a child who is just at the age to be potty trained and Christina looks to be just this side of double-digits in age. Anyway she wakes her up, demolishes the room, beats the child senseless and flies into the rant heard ‘round the world:

“No wire hangers! What's wire hangers doing in this closet when I told you no wire hangers?! EVER!!!! I work till I'm half dead and I hear people say she's getting old! What do I get ? A daughter who cares as much about a beautiful dress I give her as she cares about me. What's wire hangers doing in this closet?! Answer me! I buy you beautiful dresses and you treat 'em like some dishrag! You threw a 300 dollar dress on a wire hanger! We'll see how many you got hidden in here, we'll see! All of this is coming out! Out! Out! Out! Out! We're gonna see how many wire hangers you got in your closet! Wire hangers. Why? Why? Christina, get out of that bed! Get out of that bed! You live in the most beautiful house in Brentwood and you don’t care about crease marks from wire hangers, and your room looks like some two dollar unfurnished room in some two- bit backstreet town in Oklahoma! Get up! Clean up this mess! Did you scrub the bathroom floor today? Did you?”

Charming, eh?

More evidence of the hidden terror of “Joan Crawford” comes from the way she tries to disguise herself in godawful dresses with squared shoulders (probably hiding large tentacles), large and exaggerated eyebrows (probably the slits where the alien can see out) and the high, double dutch hairstyle (probably the creature, covering it’s exposed brain). Then there is the regeneration process when “Joan Crawford” puts on a 40 pound facial pack and shock-of-red lipstick (it looks as scary as it sounds).

As you can see, I view Mommie Dearest in the negative, more as a version of the type of B-pictures that the real Crawford made late in her career. Mommie was a favorite at the 2nd annual Razzie Awards and the first film to make a clean sweep. It received a critical scalding and is widely regarded as having demolished Fay Dunaway’s career (In her interview on “Inside the Actor’s Studio” she expressed regret for having ever done it in the first place). But what I was surprised to find from my reading is how positive people have reacted to this film. The movie became such a cult favorite that the studio released as a trash-movie classic with the tagline “The Biggest Mother of All Time”. It became an odd midnight movie favorite like Rocky Horror with fans dressed as “Joan Crawford” with Groucho-sized eyebrows and wearing square-shouldered dresses and waving wire hangers at the screen. I’ve always questioned public taste and now you know why.