Whatever you were inclined to say about Perry’s film, you wouldn’t call it boring.
Mommy dearest 1981 film movie#
I was not the only critic to bemoan the fact that Diana would never be a midnight movie in the style of Mommie Dearest. Nor will any accidentally bad film about any real person do the trick. The stars just have to align themselves in the right pattern. Come to think of of it, it’s probably near-impossible to deliberately create a masterpiece of ironic camp. We are not, of course, entirely sure that this is what Perry intended. Mayer) but aside from her mid-career comeback/triumph in Mildred Pierce (which, of course, was about a loving Mom and a monster daughter) this skimps on much of the life and career (a whole marriage is missed out) in order to concentrate on the art deco house of horrors where Joan plays at being. So, Crawford was ripe for camp reinvention with Mommie Dearest. It was something to do with her strength, her oddness and that slight hint of the androgynous. Somewhere along the way - to an even greater extent than Davis - she became a mighty gay icon. Born as Lucille Fay LeSueur in San Antonio in 1904, she had a very healthy career in silent pictures before suffering a slump and then a resurgence with “women’s pictures” such as Mildred Pierce, Humoresque and, well, The Women. Find trailers, reviews, synopsis, awards and cast information for Mommie Dearest (1981) - Frank Perry on AllMovie - When her adoptive mother Joan Crawford. Let’s not forget what a personality she was. It may also have made it impossible for anyone to play Crawford as a real person again. But it made it nearly impossible for Davis and Crawford to ever play real people again. That’s to say the roles were constructed from caricatured notions of the people they had played rather than from any external reality. Twenty years previously, in Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, both Crawford and her old rival Bette Davis had allowed themselves to be the victim of extreme heightening. In some ways that campness is just a little too obvious.
But, no, You do need to view the picture in Campovision to appreciate it to the full. Faye Dunaway gives what might be the most unhinged performance in the history of the medium as a version of Joan that - if Christina Crawford’s much-disputed book is to be believed - made her daughter’s life a living hell. Moreover, you can’t fault the commitment of the players in Mommie Dearest. Last Summer remains a fascinating, groovy coming-of-age story.
Before being booted off the project, he shot large sections of the extraordinary 1968 satire The Swimmer. Well, some people do now argue that Frank Perry’s study of Joan Crawford in middle age is quite genuinely a good film. Why else, in a year that also gave us Reds, Raiders of the Last Arc, Chariots of Fire, Das Boot, Man of Iron and An American Werewolf in London, would we be selecting the picture that won the Razzie. As you will have already gathered, the time has come, in our travels through the last half-century, to consider the question of camp.