Mommie Dearest [VHS]
by Frank Perry
![Mommie Dearest [VHS]](/images/Mommie-Dearest-VHS-6300213919-L.jpg)
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Product details
Actor: Diana Scarwid, Faye Dunaway, Howard Da Silva, Mara Hobel, Steve ForrestDirector: Frank Perry
Writer: Frank Perry
Producer: David Koontz
Producer: Frank Yablans
Writer: Frank Yablans
Writer: Christina Crawford
Writer: Robert Getchell
Writer: Tracy Hotchner
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Unknown)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
Running Time: 129 minutes
Release Date: 1998-01-01
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Publisher: Paramount
Studio: Paramount
VHS Movie Reviews of Mommie Dearest [VHS]
Movie Review: Clean up this MEEEEEESSSSSS!!!!!!
Summary: 2 Stars
Perhaps the most unfortunate thing about "Mommie Dearest" is that it so easily could have been an excellent movie. Its production values are excellent, its scenes are infrequently riveting and its subject matter is compelling. Unfortunately - or not, depending on your penchant for camp - the film we get is a tepid "good parts" version of Christina Crawford's taut, tough memoir: a disjointed series of vignettes showing a dreary battle of wills an overbearing harridan wages with a petulant daughter and a chauvanistic boss. At best, the film is the grand guignol of over-the-top melodrama. At worst, it's the great-grandmother of after-school specials."Mommie Dearest" has become such a staple of the popular lexicon that it's impossible to begin viewing the film without some sense of anticipation. Christina Crawford's shocking novel about the abuse she and her siblings allegedly suffered at the hands of Hollywood legend Joan Crawford, their adoptive mother, opened the floodgates to grave-robbing Hollywood tell-alls. As soon as the opening credits roll, we expect feathers to fly.
It's unfortunate that this is the case, because early on, "Mommie Dearest" hints at an intriguing story of a strong-willed woman trying to hold her own in a smothering, male-dominated career.
It's a story that bears telling, and Joan Crawford would be a tantalizing focal point. Crawford was an adequate if unspectacular actress who nonetheless enjoyed a stunningly durable career, from the silent era through the early 1970s. Her 50-year run was singular: Only the likes of Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Olivia DeHavilland, Greer Garson and Rosalind Russell have ever matched her. Crawford's career peaked time and again when so many of her more talented contemporaries faded to Hollywood footnotes. By most accounts, Crawford accomplished this through iron determination and no short measure of business acumen: She had a keen sense of what the public wanted, and she gave it to them - from Adrian-bedecked goddess to suffering soap queen. She was a shrewd publicist who, if she worked on the other side of the camera, could probably have made a mint for any studio as part of a promotion department.
The image of Crawford as a keen publicity user is one of the legs on which "Mommie Dearest" props itself: Her career floundering, Crawford adopts a baby to get her name in the papers and enjoys a gush of fawning attention. It's a claim that Christina Crawford makes even today, that her mother regarded her as but a pawn in a concerted, shameless publicity drive. Whether or not this is the case, publicity shots of the day support the fact that MGM had no qualms about exploiting Crawford's adopted sense of domestic bliss.
Christina's alleged plight begins when the novelty around her adoption wears off. Joan's career spirals despite her desperate attempts to keep her glamorous persona alive. According to the book, as her star burns itself out, Crawford succumbs to alcoholism and subjects her children to sadistic, abusive, vengeful discipline that lasts throughout the rest of her life - and beyond, when she inexplicably cuts daughter Christina and son Christopher out of her will.
It's a story that has been passionately disavowed by Crawford's other two daughters (who are mentioned in the book but not the movie). But, family disputes about veracity aside, Christina Crawford's novel had the makings for an excellent drama about a determined, desperate, lonely woman who comes precariously close to destroying herself and her loved ones. Great performances have been built on less, and Faye Dunaway's no-holds-barred turn as the demonized Crawford is fairly operatic in its intensity. If the direction had been consistent, the screenplay less disjointed and the editing more fluid, "Mommie Dearest" could easily have been the controversial masterpiece its creators wanted it to be, and Dunaway would have been rightfully lauded for a performance which instead stunted her stellar career.
The movie can't decide whether it's a domestic soap opera or a driven, man-against-the-machine potboiler. Instead, it dances on the edges of both without giving either premise the depth it needs. One minute we're viewing a scene intimating Joan's conflicts with motherhood, the following minute we're watching a scene that blushes at her behind-the-scenes battles with an autocratic studio head. At one point, we're watching Joan marry a soft-drink CEO. Next, the next we're watching a newly widowed Joan exact a corporate takeover of Pepsi Cola. Scene One: Joan wins an Oscar. Scene Two: Joan in Kabuki-esque makeup lays waste to her daughter, her daughters bathroom and some unfortunate wire hangers.
Sheesh.
The result is that, whether the movie concerns itself with Joan and Christina or Joan vs. the studio, we're left wanting. The movie doesn't delve deeply enough into any facet to draw a visceral response. One of the more unfortunate results is that we don't get a true sense of the torments that plague Crawford - torments that could cause an intelligent, driven woman to throttle her daughter or trash her own home in piques of rage.
The uridly violent scenes, laughable dialog, pretentious aspirations and gorgeous costumes have made "Mommie Dearest" a favorite on the gay film circuit, and in truth, viewing the film as a camp treat is a mild guilty pleasure - if you don't allow yourself to wonder what might have been.
Summary of Mommie Dearest [VHS]
The movie that made "No wire hangers!" a household phrase, Mommie Dearest is the very model of a modern "camp classic," so crazily outlandish that it's fascinating. Based on the scathing and scandalous tell-all bestseller by Christina Crawford, the adopted daughter of histrionic Hollywood movie queen Joan Crawford, Mommie Dearest was billed in advance as a serious dramatic motion-picture biography. But it turned out to be something much, much weirder--a genuine Hollywood oddity that serves up a bizarre mixture of melodramatic trash and outrageous tragi-comedy. Joan Crawford won an Oscar for playing the role of the self-sacrificing mother, the woman who would do anything for her daughter, in Mildred Pierce. As depicted by Faye Dunaway (playing the hell out of the role as if she's determined to win another Oscar of her own, damn it!), her role as offscreen parent puts her in a league with big-time scary screen mommies such as Mrs. Bates in Psycho, and Angela Lansbury's über-mom in The Manchurian Candidate. Dunaway's Crawford torments and terrorizes her adopted children in myriad ways--making them give away their own birthday gifts and rousting them from their beds for frantic after-midnight bathroom-scrubbing attacks. And when, after the death of her Pepsico chairman husband, Crawford tells the board of directors, "Don't f--- with me, fellas!" one is very much inclined to heed her warning. --Jim EmersonMovies most talked about in Video Genres
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