Sunday, May 14 | 6 Films
Poet, essayist and feminist Adrienne Rich once wrote, “motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.” It is no wonder, then, that motherhood has a been a highly excavated site in cinema. And motherhood seems to have no generic bounds. Films from nearly every decade have been dedicated to the complex joy, humor, (melo)drama, self-sacrifice, romance, horror and trauma of mothering. This Mother’s Day, TCM screens six films that delve into the profound complexity of maternal care.
The special kicks off with Michael Curtiz’s masterful noir, Mildred Pierce (1945). Joan Crawford plays the titular character, who – after her husband Bert Pierce (Bruce Bennett) splits from his smarmy real estate business partner Wally Fay (Jack Carson) and moves in with his mistress Maggie Biederhof (Lee Patrick) – decides to work in a restaurant to raise her two young daughters by herself. While 10-year-old Kay (Jo Ann Marlowe), a tomboy, is saddened that her father has moved out, 16-year-old Veda (Ann Blyth), a social climber who longs for status, is more concerned with her mother not bringing in enough money for expensive dresses and elite singing classes. Veda is viciously ashamed of her single working mother. In order to please Veda and give her the lifestyle she so desires, Mildred starts to date Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott), a society playboy who owns the building Mildred hopes to purchase for a restaurant of her own. Eventually Wally helps Mildred acquire the property and, with the guidance of her friend and manager Ida (Eve Arden), she soon comes to own a chain of restaurants throughout Southern California. However, Veda remains frustratingly embarrassed of Mildred, doing everything she can to seduce a rich man of her own and distance herself from her mother who loves her despite everything. But when Monte is found brutally murdered, Mildred is forced to choose between her own freedom as a businesswoman and the complicated relationship she has with Veda.
Like the best noirs, Mildred Pierce spins an engrossing narrative web punctuated with pithy writing, dark themes and great acting. For bringing James Cain’s novel to life and spinning in the thrilling murder storyline, Ranald MacDougall was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay. Joan Crawford, Ann Blyth and Eve Arden (who has the film’s best wise-cracking one-liners: “Veda’s convinced me that alligators have the right idea; they eat their young”) gave such incredible performances that they were all nominated for Academy Awards. Crawford received the Oscar for Best Actress (her first and only win) despite the fact Curtiz had hoped that Barbara Stanwyck would play Mildred. (Stanwyck was busy filming My Reputation, 1946; Max Steiner did the swirling music for both films.) Curtiz had directed Casablanca (1942) only three years earlier and he brought to Mildred Pierce the hallmarks of a broody noir: meticulously placed smoke, rain, shadows and silhouettes.
However, the film’s implications for women, particularly single mothers, leaves much to be desired. Mildred Pierce squashes any hope that women might be able to both raise children and work outside of the home. No matter how devoted single mothers are to their children, the film suggests that it all falls apart without a male figure at the head of the household. Filmed during the last years of World War II, Mildred Pierce offers commentary on the millions of American women who had entered the workforce during the war while their husbands were away. The filmed tapped into sexist concerns about the damage being done to the patriarchal family structure: disobedient children, emasculated husbands, and hard or “loose” women. Fears over female empowerment translated into noir’s signature nihilism. The singled-mothered home became a symbolic image for domestic and social ruin. Indeed, in loaded dialogue, Veda derides the home she lives in “on Corvallis St. where all the houses look alike” and suggests that Mildred marry ever-flirty Wally for money and a housing upgrade:
Veda: I don’t like this house.
Mildred: Neither do I. But that’s no reason to marry a man I’m not in love with.
Veda: Why not?
Mildred: Veda, does a new house mean so much to you that you would trade me for it?
Somewhat ironically, Crawford has gone down in cinematic history as one of the most notorious real-life celebrity mothers. The cult classic film Mommie Dearest (1981) is based on Christina Crawford’s nightmarish childhood with her adoptive mother. (Along a similar vein, TCM screens the 1990 film about a celebrity mother-daughter duo, Postcards from the Edge, an adaptation of the semi-autobiographical novel by Carrie Fisher about a young actress overcoming a cocaine-Percodan addiction while negotiating her mother’s own stardom and alcoholism; Meryl Streep, Shirley MacLaine and Dennis Quaid star.)
Running parallel to Mildred Pierce in the 1940s was Curtis Bernhardt’s romantic drama film My Reputation (1946). Beyond having the lead actress that Curtiz wanted, My Reputation is yet another film that betrays the World War II anxiety about independent working women and single mothers. On the heels of Double Indemnity (1944) Barbara Stanwyck plays Jessica “Jess” Drummond, a grieving upper-class widow of two young boys who falls in love with army officer Major Scott Landis (George Brent) despite the snobbery of her rich friends and domineering mother. They criticize her for daring to have passion for life and romance as a widow and single mother. Thus, she is forced to balance their demands, general societal convention and her desire to live life as she sees it. With its gorgeous production and costumes designed by Edith Head, like Mildred Pierce, My Reputation makes the often-devastating choices that befall mothers look beautiful.
Though released in 1985, The Trip to Bountiful, based on Horton Foote’s1953 play of the same name, also sees the loss of home in the wake of World War II as a tragedy for American women. Geraldine Page won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance of Mrs. Carrie Watts, an elderly woman who wants to return to her home, the rural, agriculture-based town, Bountiful, near the Texas Gulf coast between Houston and Corpus Christi, where she grew up. However, her son and daughter-in-law both know that the town has long since disappeared, due to both World Wars. Robert Ebert observed that as a stubborn mother and mother-in-law: “Page inhabits the central role with authority and vinegar.” Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited The Trip to Bountiful as one of his favorite films.
Not all the films in the special are so melodramatically tragic, however. TCM screens John Waters’ Hairspray (1988) in which motherhood is campy, colorful and larger than life. Set in 1962 Baltimore, Maryland and featuring several actors in Waters’ troupe of Dreamlanders, the film revolves around self-proclaimed “pleasantly plump” teenager Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake) as she pursues stardom as a dancer on a local TV show and rallies against racial segregation. Hairspray is Waters’ satirical send-up of both overt racism and, seemingly more ethical, white neoliberalism. The so-called “Pope of Trash” – whose style celebrates fatness, queerness and color, caring little for political correctness – hilariously exploits the generational divide between white mothers and daughters. The former hold onto to segregation under the auspice that it “protects” their daughters from miscegenation. The latter, more progressive, but still clueless about the real horrors of racism, are eager to listen to black music and dance in a fully integrated Bandstand style event.
Tracy’s mother, Edna Turnblad, is played by Waters’ cross-dressing muse, Divine (for whom this is would be his last role). Edna, who is kind, fat, agoraphobic and slightly overbearing, helps Tracy advocate for racial integration. (In typical Divine fashion, he also plays an unctuous male character: Arvin Hodgepile, the rival TV station owner who is against racial integration for his studio.) Edna serves as a foil to Prudence “Prudy” Pingleton (Joann Havrilla), a skinny, overprotective, controlling mother to shy Penny (Leslie Ann Powers), who is dating a young black teenager named Seaweed (Clayton Prince). In one very famous scene, Prudy follows her daughter to a record store on ‘the other side of the tracks.’ As she walks through a predominantly black neighborhood, she hyperbolically clutches her purse. Waters lampoons her irrational fear by overlaying the sounds of an ominous jungle, as if Prudy is on a scary safari and not just strolling down the sidewalk. It’s all in her head as, per segregation laws, she (and her daughter) can easily and freely go into black communities, but black folks cannot go into hers.
TCM also screens Martin Scorsese’s first Hollywood studio production, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974). Written by Robert Getchell, it is a delicious comedy about widow Alice Hyatt (Ellen Burstyn) who leaves her home in Monterey, California, and travels with her preteen son across the Southwestern United States to pursue a singing career which she had abandoned when she married. The film is frequently cited as one of the first mainstream explorations of women’s rights and liberation. (The fact that Scorsese made this woman-centered story right after the highly male perspective in Mean Streets in 1973 proves just how versatile he really is.)
Burstyn was still in the midst of filming The Exorcist (1973) when Warner Bros. executives expressed interest in working with her on another project. Burstyn later recalled, “I was early in the women’s movement, and we were all just waking up and having a look at the pattern of our lives and wanting to be different…I wanted to make a different kind of film. A film from a women’s point of view, but a woman that I recognized, that I knew.” Then her agent approached her with the script for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and she knew she had to do it. She asked Francis Ford Coppola about bringing on a new fresh director and he suggested Scorsese. When asked about her collaboration with Scorsese, she said it was “one of the best experiences I ever had.” Roger Ebert described that film as “one of the most perceptive, funny, occasionally painful portraits of an American woman” he had “ever seen.” For her performance, Burstyn earned an Academy Award for Best Actress.
