When I told you to call me that, I wanted you to mean it.
It's most appropriate that a month that started with a visit from the incomparable John Waters to the IU Cinema is ending with Mommie Dearest, a film so near and dear to his black heart that he volunteered to record a commentary for it. Hailed as an over-the-top camp classic upon its release in 1981 and immediately accorded cult status (Danny Peary wrote it up in Cult Movies 2, published in 1983), Mommie Dearest is an exhaustive -- and exhausting -- distillation of Christina Crawford's tell-all account of growing up the daughter of Hollywood royalty.
All the iconic scenes and lines are present and accounted for: "I'm not mad at you, I'm mad at the dirt." "If she doesn't like you, she can make you disappear." "Tina! Bring me the axe!" The saga of the rare steak. The night of the wire hangers. Being packed off to boarding school and then convent school. "Don't fuck with me, fellas." The problem is it's all too much, just as Faye Dunaway's uncanny performance as Joan Crawford gets to be too much. It's as if director Frank Perry (one of four credited screenwriters) felt duty-bound to include every sordid blow-up from Christina's book, even if it meant repeating himself. After Joan walks in on Christina (played by Mara Hobel as a child) imitating her in front of a mirror and vindictively cuts the sobbing girl's hair, do we really need the scene where Joan catches Christina reprimanding her dolls for interrupting her beauty sleep? (I'm sure both events happened, but compared to the impromptu haircut, having one's dolls confiscated doesn't seem nearly so traumatic.)
While Dunaway gets the diva's share of the attention (for obvious reasons), a few of her co-stars get their moments to stand out as well. Since I mainly know Steve Forrest from his straight-faced comedic roles in Spies Like Us and Amazon Women on the Moon, his turn as Greg Savitt, the Hollywood lawyer who greases the wheels to get Joan the babies she can't have herself, continues to be a revelation to me (although it must be said that he matches Dunaway's histrionics during his departure from the film). Meanwhile, Howard Da Silva acts like he's in serious film, which is entirely appropriate since Louis B. Mayer's scenes with Joan are played for genuine drama. Also, it's great to see Harry Goz (the voice of Captain Murphy on Adult Swim's Sealab 2021 two decades later) in the flesh as Pepsi-Cola king Alfred Steele, Joan's fourth and final husband. Then, of course, there's Diana Scarwid, who takes over as the adult Christina about halfway through and does her best work in the scene where, laid up in a hospital bed, she looks on aghast as her mother subs for her, poorly, on her soap opera. Echoing George C. Scott in Hardcore two years earlier, it's hard to blame her for wanting her visitor to "turn it off."