Synopsis
Renowned actress Joan Crawford, at the height of her career, adopts two orphans — Christina and Christopher — to fill the lonely gap in her personal life. However, as her professional and romantic relationships sour, Joan's already callous and abusive behavior towards Christina intensifies.
Your Movie Library
Cast
- Faye DunawayJoan Crawford
- Diana ScarwidChristina Crawford
- Steve ForrestGreg Savitt
- Howard Da SilvaL.B. Mayer
- Mara HobelChristina Crawford as a Child
- Rutanya AldaCarol Ann
- Harry GozAl Steele
- Michael EdwardsTed Gelber
- Jocelyn BrandoBarbara Bennett
- Priscilla PointerMrs. Chadwick
Recommendations
- 100
Slant Magazine
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. - 75
The A.V. Club
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. - 70
Chicago Reader
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. - 63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
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] - 60
The New York Times
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. - 60
Chicago Reader
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. - 50
Variety
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. - 50
Time Out London
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.
