PRIVATE VICES; PUBLIC VIRTUES

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.