scottsteaux

I have always thought that Faye Dunaway was a lousy actress, and her over-the-top "performance" in MOMMIE DEAREST bears this out to the nth degree. There is not a shred of characterization to be found in Dunaway's work on this film; the woman on the screen is a cartoon character right out of the old horror comics. Dunaway, a woman who has the reputation of taking herself VERY seriously as an actress, makes a complete fool of herself in this movie, mugging for the camera in ridiculously overdone makeup while attempting to duplicate Crawford's throaty voice (she succeeds in sounding a bit like Crawford once or twice, but that's it). The rest of her "acting" consists mainly of screaming like a banshee and crossing her eyes.

The beauty part of this is that this movie is so dreadful that it's wonderful! I have seen it many times, and I literally HOWL with laughter each time I see it.

To be fair, Dunaway is not the only thing that makes this a REALLY REALLY bad movie. The script is so utterly ridiculous that one wonders if Mel Brooks had a hand in writing it. The director must take a great deal of the blame as well; he apparently thought he was making a work of art, but obviously he has no idea how to tell a serious story.

Dunaway has since said that MOMMIE DEAREST nearly ruined her career; see it and you will understand why.

But Dunaway is not the only actress in the film who suffers from the director's sheer incompetence. Diana Scarwid is a fine actress, but she has never quite been able to rid herself of her Southern accent. So here we go (in a VERY awkward transition) from Mara Hobel as the child Christina (whose accent is appropriately Southern California) to Miss Scarwid (who looks WAY older than 13) reading from Anhouil's ANTIGONE in a Southern accent so thick a knife couldn't cut it. And it get's worse when she gets mad; check out the way she delivers the line "Whah did yew adopt me?"

The movie plays fast and loose with the facts here as well. Greg Savitt is a composite character based on several men in Crawford's life (including two of her husbands). There was a Greg Bautzer with whom Crawford was involved, but unlike the depiction in the film, SHE dumped HIM. She also walked out on MGM and not the other way around.

But this is not a biopic; it is a campy black comedy whether it was meant to be or not.

This film is one of the worst screen adaptations of a novel I have ever seen. Kubrick seems to make the wrong decision at every turn, and the result is a terribly long and incoherent film that does a terrible injustice to Stephen King's terrific original story.

First of all, the story is about a man going SLOWLY insane; Nicholson seems more than halfway there at the start of the movie, robbing his character of any suspense.

In general, Kubrick has (as usual) ignored his actors shamelessly, with the result that none of them gives anything close to the right performance.

Another bad mistake: in the book, the relationship between the father and the son is an unusually close and loving one; this makes the resulting horror all the more tragic. In the film, the father and son seem to have no relationship at all. The mother, a strong and purposeful character in the book, is here something of a ninny.

Worst of all, perhaps, is that in the book the boy is the focus of the story; the movie shifts the focus to the father and therefore cuts the guts out of what was a pretty complex story.

Also, like most of Kubrick's movies, this one is simply WAY TOO LONG. There is absolutely no reason for this film to take so much time to say, in the end, so little.

I love to watch great acting; even a movie with a mediocre script or direction can still be wonderful if it is well-acted. Happily, ANASTASIA is brilliantly directed and well-written as well as containing some of the grandest acting I have ever seen on film.

Yul Brynner had quite a year in 1956. He won the Best Actor Oscar for his stagy but fascinating work in THE KING AND I, yet in ANASTASIA he delivers a brilliant, subtle, and completely captivating performance as the Russian general who engineers the plot to convince the world that the unknown woman he has encountered in Paris is in fact the Grand Duchess Anastasia. His is a complex character, scheming, dishonest, and unscrupulous, but it is impossible to dislike him. Quite an accomplishment.

As the woman, Ingrid Bergman won the Oscar for her thrilling, roller-coaster ride of a performance. She is astonishing; one minute she is laughing wildly, the next, sobbing heartbrokenly. She veers from coquettishness to desperation without so much as an eyeblink. You have to watch this film more than once to really see everything Bergman put into this role.

And then, there's Helen Hayes as the Dowager Empress. Oddly enough, she was cast by accident; the producers wanted a British actress named Helen Haye, but someone misread a telegram, and the rest is history. Hayes is magnificent as the elderly matriarch who has lost her entire family to the Russian Revolution. Again there is a duality in her performance; she is at once astonishingly stubborn yet unbelievably frail. It is a fascinating performance; and there is a scene between Hayes and Bergman that is unforgettable.

This is a film full of rich performances; the rest of the cast, right down to the smallest bit part, performs superbly. Kudos especially to Martita Hunt, who provides hilarious comic relief as the Empress's lady-in-waiting.