Mommie Dearest

It is rumoured that Joan Crawfords kids first words were 'ouch'!!!- & here it is a dark portrail behind the glitz & glam of the hollywood beauty queen Fasinating story, good film but TBH a bit dated

The best! It all makes sense. Mommy Dearest is very very sad, and in real life you get a lot of Joan Craffords. Being adopted is like not really being a real child to Joan. All Joan wanted from Christina was to obey her, and if Christina made a mistake, she had to pay for it dearly. The last blow was to disown both adopted children.

This film for me was one of the most saddest that I have ever watched, very good acting by Faye Dunaway and Diana Scarwid, to be honest I felt very sorry for both of the characters but each in a different way. Well worth watching.

Like all unwanted children who never find themselves as adults, the when Joan Crawford presented here is a perfectionist who craves attention and, when she discovers that others do not need her attention, she desperately tries to psychologically destroy them in a battle of wills that only - ultimately - destroys any chance they have to find happiness.

When Faye DUNAWAY gives an unnerving performance as a profound neurotic who cannot empathize with others and so lives as an emotional autistic. The most telling moments come when her daughter copies her private behavior and she sees it as a paranoiac would: As an attempt to belittle her mother rather than as simple childhood mimicry. She brings home her sense of others being a threat to her by seeing her daughter as someone to compete with who must be labeled imperfect because she does not provide the love that she adopted her daughter for. Her obsessive/compulsive nature focuses on dirt & cleaning and leaves her daughter to try and solve the psychiatric problems of the parent.

Looking like when The Joker in when The Batman Miss DUNAWAY teeters on the verge of self-parody brilliantly as she plays a when Hollywood who also did the same: A woman obsessed with growing old and losing her looks and her career. She gets the power complexes of those who think emotional blackmail is how relationships are made because their entire emotional life is centered on themselves and their needs and so they have nothing to share with others. She wants her children to be her biggest fans and to offer her the respect she lacks for herself.

You feel for the essential emptiness of her life as a film star but when she starts taking it out on her kids, you quickly learn to dislike her intensely. This film is about actors who never stop acting - even when the cameras stop rolling. Too much focus on the cause of the children's pain rather than the effect blunts highly impressive narrative.

FABULOUS !!!

This Joan Crawford biography, written by her eldest adopted daughter Christina, is certainly one for a cold, wet, windy afternoon matinee.

It's supposed to be a serious film, but you can't help but laugh all the way through it.

It is over acted, high on drama and high camp, at it's very best.

With unforgetable quotes such as:

CHRIS..... TINA..... !!! GET..... ME..... THE..... AXE !!! and of course:

NO..... WIRE..... HANGERRRRRSSSSS !!!

Christina Crawford wrote the biography out of spite, after hearing from her Mothers Solicitor, that all of Joans four children had recieved nothing from Joans estate, upon her death.

The whole story was revealed as a total fabrication, with the other three of Joans adopted children distancing themselves from it.

Mommie Dearest is at the top of the list for bad movies, but one that should not be missed !!!