Amazon.com video review:
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 Emerson
