“I think you are overreacting, Miss Crawford,” scolds schoolmistress Mrs Chadwick. “Well I think you are underreacting, Mrs Chadwick!” the silver screen goddess bellows back. If one were to remove the prefix re- from this exchange, they would be left with the perfect summary of Mommie Dearest. It is as if every other actor in the movie saw what Faye Dunaway was bringing to the project and decided they needed to match it. The leading lady’s hysterical performance — both on and off the screen — is the stuff of film legend. In fact, the tale of Mommie Dearest is so incredible that the movie needs to be seen at least once to truly appreciate why what was intended to be a prestige project maintains campy cult status over forty years later.

Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford Is Casting Perfection

Joan Crawford was a huge film star, defined by her striking good looks and razor-sharp work ethic. She was a fighter, who did whatever it took to carry on working in Hollywood and maintain a respectable public profile. However, shortly after her death in 1977, her adopted daughter Christina Crawford published a memoir titled Mommie Dearest, detailing her abuse at the hands of her mother. The fact that this came shortly after learning she had been cut from her mother's will did not go unnoticed, and some were outraged. Not only did it tarnish the legacy of a well-respected actor, it transformed her into a posthumous caricature, and blurred the lines between the real Joan Crawford and the idea of her.

Faye Dunaway was a brilliant choice for the lead role. She is an immensely talented actor, and takes her work very seriously, and as many method actors have been known to do, she threw herself into this role to the point that she began to lose herself. It wasn’t a case of painting on the eyebrows and getting to set: Dunaway truly studied and honed the persona she considered to be Joan Crawford, even training her facial muscles to hold the way Crawford held her own famous face. If anybody was serious about it, she was. But just as every great author needs a great editor, actors need great directors, and evidently she didn’t find this in Frank Perry. She seems to have gone in with the idea of throwing everything at the wall; problem is there was nobody there checking what stuck.

Over the decades of her career, Dunaway has cultivated a reputation for being very talented, but very difficult. Bette Davis once famously declared her “totally impossible” and claimed she would never work with her again. Her steely facade and lack of joviality have made her unapproachable at the best of times, a sentiment apparently shared by some of those she has worked with. Understandably, Perry was completely overwhelmed by Dunaway’s imposing presence, but evidently he failed in his duty as a director to rein it all in and make sure her performance fit his vision. But as memorable as Dunaway’s performance is, it is far from the movie’s only problem. Acting aside, it is a sloppily written and horribly paced film that manages to avoid any sort of momentum or gravity.

'Mommie Dearest's Pacing Is One of Its Disasterous Downfalls

Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford posing with her daughter Christina in Mommie Dearest
Image via Paramount Pictures

Mommie Dearest is not really structured like a real movie, but in a style that all too frequently permeates the biopic, rushes to condense decades of a notable person’s life into two hours. It is arranged like a children’s book, with an overabundance of three-page chapters that give the impression that content has been consumed. Don’t look for a through-line, or any sort of linearity. In one scene, Joan is proving to a dismissive adoption agency just how wrong they are about calling her an unsuitable parent by being verbally and physically aggressive; no more than one minute later, some doctor is dropping a new baby off at her house like he’s a pizza delivery boy. In one scene, Christina is sent to a convent school, and in the very next scene, she is leaving said school, with years having passed. No idea what happened in-between, and if the book is anything to go by, there were plenty of torments that occurred in those intervening years that would have been relevant to the narrative.

There seems to be no real point being made; it’s just a case of this-happened-then-that-happened. It’s just day-in-the-life stuff that actively overshadows the real meat of the story. A more respectable adaptation of the book would have given much more attention to the character of Christina, and her perspective on things. But Christina is not the main character here, it is Joan, and this leads her to becoming nothing more than a caricature of a very famous and complex woman. Moreover, Christina is a footnote in her own story, dipping in and out of her mother’s life as and when the matriarch’s fickle nature allows. She is nowhere near developed enough to carry this heavy story, and the eccentric stylings of Dunaway have the effect of leaf-blowing everything else to the wings.

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'Mommie Dearest' Shouldn't Be Funny, But It Is

The very thing that was supposed to define Mommie Dearest is what can make it challenging to enjoy fully. Where Christina’s book is a long slog of misery, from starvation and night-raids to abandonment and public humiliation, the movie really functions as a cabaret show of hysterical vignettes, jarringly punctuated with scenes of abuse. The infamous wire hangers scene is not only Dunaway’s money shot, but the most upsetting in terms of its depiction of child abuse. A surprisingly strong performance from a very young actor stops any sense of camp in its tracks, breaking through the wild theatrics and laying bare the pain of a child in danger. Realistically, this should have been the bulk of the movie, with Christina’s trauma being fully explored so that the audience can appreciate who she becomes as a person. Granted, this would make it a difficult watch, more along the lines of The Color Purple or Precious, and the movie would likely never have experienced the longevity it has had it gone in that direction. But this was Christina’s aim with the project, so much so that she wrote a treatment that the studio swiftly rejected.

It is much to director Perry’s discredit that scenes that depict very serious topics are genuinely laughable. An early scene between Joan and a boyfriend sees them fight and break up. It should be a serious moment, but it’s not. A later fist-fight between Joan and Christina is an absolute centerpiece of lunacy - all that’s missing is the cartoon dust cloud around them. The fact that all of this is instigated by the mother just minutes after telling her daughter not to embarrass her in front of the journalist in their house makes it just ludicrous.

'Mommie Dearest's Unexpected Reception

Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford and Diana Scarwid as Christina Crawford in Mommie Dearest
Image via Paramount Pictures

The build-up to the release was considerable. Christina’s book was already a massively divisive talking point; critic Roger Ebert toured the set; everybody was eagerly waiting to see one notorious diva become another. But upon release, the reception was not pleasant. Ebert himself dismissed it as a depressing and shallow portrait of child abuse that gave Crawford herself no exploration, “not even the kind of bargain basement Freudianism that Hollywood usually throws in for free”. Those who already considered Christina’s book profitable slander were even more incensed, those who believed Christina found it dull and upsetting. But a new kind of audience was emerging, one that not only enjoyed Mommie Dearest, but found great hilarity in it. It was, as Dunaway herself would later admit, like a kabuki performance, and in this way, the movie opened up to a legion of fans, from bad movie lovers to gay and drag crowds.

When Paramount realized just how audiences were reacting to their picture, they made a very smart move and embraced the reception. Much to the uproar of some involved, the movie was remarketed with such taglines as “the biggest mother of all”. The studio decided that if it had any chance of recouping their investment and making some sort of impact, they would lean into the midnight movie crowd, à la Rocky Horror Picture Show, and it worked. Not only did it bring in some good box office numbers, it made it OK for the movie to be enjoyed in a different way than it was intended. Audiences brought props like wire hangers, they shouted out lines, giving way to such classic quotes as “Barbara, please!” and “Don’t f*ck with me, fellas!” It was a sensation, an overnight cult hit, and one that would endure for decades.

What Went Wrong With 'Mommie Dearest'?

Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest
Image via Paramount Pictures

It doesn’t seem to have been a deliberate misfire on Perry’s part. In fact, everybody involved was going for a serious movie. Producer Frank Yablans sued Paramount for the rebranding job turning his movie into a joke. Truly, nobody seems to have seen it coming. Much of the cast and crew have been open about their struggles on the movie at the hands of Faye Dunaway, whose presence was terrifying and her power even more so. Nobody dared to tell her no, and it seems her approach to the job formed the immense nucleus of the movie, with everybody around her simply feeling its radiation and scrambling to act accordingly. The supporting cast all have their own moments of utter awfulness. It’s genuinely astounding to see such bad acting put to the final cut of a film, but oh boy, does it make for an entertaining watch.

It is all about the not-so-subtle details of Dunaway’s performance: the head-turns so violent that they must have required balletic warm-up routines, the painfully long silences as she musters her wittiest insult, the way she holds her hand in place for seconds after slapping somebody. It embodies the saying “playing for the back rows”. As much as Dunaway tries, her performance keeps stumbling over the line of melodrama, making a mockery not only of the film, but of Crawford herself, and the underlying trauma she faced that truly deserved a proper look. Ryan Murphy’s Feud tried to lend a more sympathetic perspective of Crawford, but perhaps tumbled a bit too far in the other direction, with the wonderful Jessica Lange playing Joan the same as any of her roles in American Horror Story, with teary eyes, a bottle of vodka, and a long dramatic soliloquy ready to go at a moment’s notice. Mommie Dearest robs Joan of nuance and portrays her as a two-dimensional villain with no motives or struggles or reason for doing what she does. Her character is reduced to strutting around in gorgeous outfits and screaming at people.

Astoundingly, the most competent performance in the whole movie comes from nine-year-old Mara Hobel as young Christina, and she was nominated for twice as many Razzies as any of her colleagues. In fact, if the movie was setting out for awards-circuit attention, then it succeeded in the form of the Golden Raspberry, securing nine ‘worst’ nominations and winning six. Much like how Joan Crawford went from the glittering heights of Mildred Pierce to the B-movie pits of Trog, Mommie Dearest went from shameless Oscar bait to Razzie legend. It’s not exactly the prestigious reception that everybody was hoping for, but it is arguably better. Over forty years later, people still talk about it; the cast still asked about it; Faye Dunaway has even let her guard down just enough to allow the odd question about it, decades after it was speculated that the role ruined her career. The movie has transcended itself to a place of reverence, where it inspires artists and entertains fans, and in Hollywood, who could ask for more?