At no point is Dunaway’s gorgon-esque Crawford winking at the audience at she shrilly beats, chokes and hacks the hair off her daughter, and neither does the film separately smirk at her performance. Which is to say it plays on screen as excessive, as absurd, but not as a joke. The great achievement - and initial downfall - of Perry’s adaptation is that it takes Christina at her word, filming the abuse as written. Joan Crawford can’t have done that, can she? That would be absurd. In writing about years of alleged abuse at the hands of her movie-star mother, Christina Crawford described cruelty of such excess that sceptics accused her of exaggeration, or even fabrication. Mommie Dearest is, after all, one of the most despairing parent-child relationship stories ever filmed, adapted from a memoir that, however fiercely disputed by certain parties, was written in pain and rancour. Way back in 1981, this is the kind of reaction the film-makers were hoping for. I hadn’t laughed at it because I didn’t, for the most part, find it all that hilarious I was unmoved by my fellow viewers’ arch euphoria because I was, to my surprise, rather moved by the film itself. What was I missing?Ī few years later, I saw Mommie Dearest again, alone, on a fairly ropey DVD, and everything about the film – and my own response to it – clicked into place. And yet I didn’t find the surrounding film as riotously funny as everyone around me seemed to. Its most iconic, culturally entrenched moments delivered all the ramped-up kitsch that had been promised, plus an additional, frightening jolt of in-context shock that they never had as isolated clips.
I felt I hadn’t watched Frank Perry’s film so much as I’d watched other people watching it, and while there was both pleasure and fascination in that spectatorship, the film felt a little lost in the mix. A generation of viewers had already rehabilitated Mommie Dearest from its initial critical infamy, and determined how it should thereon be enjoyed. I left the screening having had a good time, while also feeling slightly left out of the joke.
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