Mommie Dearest

Inscrutably powerful and brutally honest about diva worship as another form of male domination, Mommie Dearest is to camp what Medea was to Dr. Benjamin Spock. Read full review

There's something unnerving about the cult infamy of Mommie Dearest, a harrowing fact-based account of horrific child abuse that has developed a reputation as a camp giggle-fest of the so-bad-it's-good variety. Read full review

This adaptation of Christina Crawford's memoir about her driven, abusive mother is arguably too good to qualify as camp, even if it begins (and fitfully proceeds) like a horror film. Director Frank Perry, who collaborated with three others (including producer Frank Yablans) on the script, gives it all a certain crazed conviction. Read full review

Faye Dunaway's performance has its own Gothic energy and insight. She catches the behavioral details of Joan Crawford--the throaty voice, dropping its "g's" with tough-guy casualness, the Venus' flytrap seductiveness. In her nightly chin strap, her sweat suit as she works out like a fighter, in Irene Sharaff|s brilliant period gowns and rings-of-Saturn hats, Dunaway catches the star's driving ambition, her obsession with a perverse ideal of perfection that turns human feeling into cruelty. She makes Crawford a fearsome portrait of the pathology of stardom. [21 Sept 1981, p.97A]

The Face is her face, the mannerisms are her mannerisms and Miss Dunaway manages magnificently to depict a woman whose acting off- screen is no better than her acting on.This is theoretically a modern horror movie about mother love but it is actually one of the funniest movies about how not to make a movie ever made. [25 Sept 1981]

Miss Dunaway gives the uncanny, meticulous Crawford imitation that is at the heart of Mommie Dearest. The movie itself has nothing like the brilliance of the impression, which is why it remains an impression and can't altogether rise to the level of a performance. But on its own terms Miss Dunaway's work here amounts to a small miracle, as one movie queen transforms herself passionately and wholeheartedly into another. Read full review

It's rich, stimulating thought in spite of itself. Lots of elegant clothes and settings, weirdly linked to a shock rhythm of tension and release. It's a movie dream turned into a movie nightmare, a wonderful idea the film doesn't know it has. Read full review

The best that can be said about this jumbled scrapbook of Joan Crawford's life from her middle years to the end is that it doesn't seem to get in the way of its star, Faye Dunaway, who gives a startling, ferocious performance.

This is Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford and the results are, well, screen history. Dunaway does not chew scenery. Dunaway starts neatly at each corner of the set in every scene and swallows it whole, costars and all. Much has been written and said pro-and-con about Crawford since daughter Christina wrote the book on which this film is based. Whatever the truth, director Frank Perry’s portrait here is sorry indeed, 129 minutes with a very pathetic and unpleasant individual. Read full review

How else than as camp can you take Faye Dunaway's waxwork Joan Crawford screeching for an axe, or throwing a scenery-chewing fit over her daughter's use of wire coathangers in the wardrobe? Perry doesn't help, with his credit sequence tease withholding our first glimpse of the stellar visage, and his determination to pose 'Joan' in geometrical symmetry with the lines of her spotless deco domestic mausoleum. Really no dafter, perhaps, than some of Joanie's own Warner Bros melodramas; the trouble is, it thinks it's Art. Read full review

Joan Crawford (Dunaway, in a remarkable makeup job) comes off as a cartoon monster in this over-the-top biopic, which blithely mixes fact, legend, and--especially--elements of Crawford's unique screen persona. Read full review

Mommie Dearest, the film version of Christina Crawford's poison-pen memoir of her adoptive mother, Joan Crawford, looms as wretched excess. Considering the source, however, this ill-advised and disreputable movie could have been worse. Read full review

Mommie Dearest is a painful experience that drones on endlessly, as Joan Crawford's relationship with her daughter, Christina, disintegrates from cruelty through jealousy into pathos. It is unremittingly depressing, not to any purpose of drama or entertainment, but just to depress. It left me feeling creepy. Read full review