Mothers in the Movies
May 1, 8, 15, 22 | 15 Movies
Motherhood has long been a symbol of unconditional love and sacrifice, the one thing a child can count on for refuge and safety, nurturing and normality. Mothers, in this view, will do anything necessary in the service of their children. For the most part, that has been the standard image in movies and popular culture; even the hideous creature of Aliens (1986) is shown to be a colony queen taking every brutal action to propagate and protect her offspring.
Several films released in the early years of the 2020s turned this familiar image on its head. Coming at the subject from different angles and to varying degrees, The Lost Daughter (2021), Parallel Mothers (2021) and Mother/Mazâ (2020) question whether every woman is cut out to be a mother and subvert the sentimentality usually attached to motherhood and provide a counterpoint to the popular notion that the mere fact of giving birth brings about a positive transformation to selfless devotion. In the highly praised The Power of the Dog (2021), the child is the one who must be strong and take the necessary and extreme steps to rescue a mother driven to despair and alcoholism.
For much of its history, Hollywood has come down on the side of absolute love and sacrifice, but as the selections on view in TCM’s tribute to Mothers in the Movies show, the variations are great, even within the confines of classic mainstream cinema. Many of these films depict highly fraught mother-child bonds and show that not every act of motherly love proves to be beneficial or without peril.
The series kicks off with a story that contains multiple conflicted relationships, centered on two women with widely divergent but no less problematic approaches to motherhood. In Douglas Sirk’s final feature, the high-gloss melodrama Imitation of Life (1959), one daughter suffers when her actress mother neglects her in favor of career ambitions while another, a Black girl passing for white, struggles to make a new life far from the excessive cossetting of her domestic servant mom. Not even a climactic over-the-top funeral presided over by no less than gospel legend Mahalia Jackson can put a happy button on Sirk’s bitter spectacle of shame, guilt and false appearances. The picture carried extra resonance (and publicity) from the high-profile trial, less than a year before its release, of star Lana Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, for the stabbing death of Turner’s gangster boyfriend Johnny Stompanato – a real-life tale of complicated mothering gone wrong.
The screenplay was adapted from a 1933 best-seller by Fannie Hurst, a highly popular author between the world wars. Hurst’s work was often concerned with social issues and displayed her support of feminism, liberal New Deal programs and civil rights and equality. More of these themes are evident in John M. Stahl’s original version of Imitation of Life (1934). Truer to the book than Sirk’s version, this one has Claudette Colbert as an independent but struggling single mother and co-star Louise Beavers (who wasn’t even featured on publicity posters) as the friend and employee whose secret family pancake recipe becomes the fuel for Colbert’s business ambitions. The multi-author screenplay for this unabashed tearjerker ends similarly to the 1959 version, keeping the focus on the women’s relationships with their two daughters without entirely skirting the issues of racism, sexism and capitalism touched on by Hurst.
Firmly in the camp of Noble Sacrifice, the first night of programming also features the ultimate in Mother Love, Stella Dallas (1937), another story that hints at gender and class inequities. Barbara Stanwyck (in the role of her career) plays the blowsy working-class single mother who raises her cherished daughter to adulthood only to give her up to her upper-crust ex-husband when it becomes apparent she is holding the girl back from having a respectable, advantaged life. The memorably weepy closing scene is rescued from utter mawkishness by the grace and honesty of Stanwyck’s performance and her final triumphant stride down a rainy New York street.
Stanwyck gets to shine in two other motherhood stories on subsequent dates of the series. The full Mother’s Day line-up presents No Man of Her Own (1950), the tense tale of an unwed pregnant woman posing as a deceased widow to give her baby the advantages of the woman’s wealthy in-laws. Blackmail, murder and a horrendous train wreck feature in one of the only ventures into film noir territory by stylish director Mitchell Leisen. In the second truncated version of Edna Ferber’s sprawling novel So Big (1932), Stanwyck plays a widow eking out a living for herself and her son as a Midwestern school teacher and farmer, only to have him prove to be a disappointment as an adult, not just to her but to his would-be girlfriend, a sophisticated artist played by Bette Davis in one of her earliest roles.
Davis takes three very different stabs at motherhood herself in three pictures. In the period melodrama The Old Maid (1939), she is forced to give up her illegitimate child to be raised by her spoiled cousin (Davis’ old nemesis Miriam Hopkins) while posing as the girl’s dowdy, interfering spinster aunt. In The Catered Affair (1956), adapted by Gore Vidal from a Paddy Chayefsky teleplay, Davis is a frumpy, disillusioned Bronx housewife (a role more fittingly played on the small screen by Thelma Ritter) who nearly destroys her family by insisting on a lavish wedding for her daughter (Debbie Reynolds). And in Pocketful of Miracles (1961), Frank Capra’s second version of the Damon Runyon story he filmed as Lady for a Day in 1933, Davis is working hard for her daughter again. This time it’s Ann-Margret (her film debut), who has been raised in a Spanish convent and is now engaged to a count. When the girl and her fiancé come to New York, her alcoholic street-vendor mother enlists the help of some very Runyonesque gangsters, led by Glenn Ford, to pose as the wealthy society woman her daughter believes her to be.
The latter part of the Mother’s Day marathon runs the gamut of heart-tugging mom tropes, from orphans to missing children to runaway mothers to plucky farm widows in a range of settings and time periods.
The operatic Jeanette MacDonald was dominant in the movie musical landscape of the 1930s, sharing the screen with the likes of Maurice Chevalier, Nelson Eddy, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. In her final film appearance, The Sun Comes Up (1949), she is co-starred with one of the most popular “actresses” of the time, Lassie, and child star Claude Jarman Jr. (The Yearling, 1946). MacDonald plays a woman in the rural South who has lost both her husband and son (how careless of her) and starts her life over with a young orphan and her late son’s beloved dog. Of course, being MacDonald, she gets to perform some musical numbers, including an aria from “Madama Butterfly,” as people in the north Georgia hills are wont to do.
Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965) takes us into darker territory as Carol Lynley searches for a lost daughter whose existence no one else will acknowledge in this psychological drama from director Otto Preminger. Laurence Olivier is the police superintendent who at first suspects then rescues her. Like that even darker mom flick, Psycho (1960), theaters restricted entrance after the movie started.
Lana Turner is back in Madame X (1966), taking on a role played previously played by Pauline Frederick, Ruth Chatterton, Gladys George, a number of non-American actors and later by Tuesday Weld on TV. It’s an old warhorse tale from a 1908 French play about a woman who marries up, gets caught in a scandal, fakes her own death, disappears, falls into degradation and must be defended by the grown son she was forced to abandon as a baby. This time it’s given the full glam treatment characteristic of producer Ross Hunter with gowns by Jean Louis and cinematography by Russell Metty, an Oscar winner for Spartacus (1960) and director of photography on most of Douglas Sirk’s films of the 1950s, including Turner’s earlier vehicle Imitation of Life.
The day closes on a decidedly sweeter note. Irene Dunne is the wise and loving matriarch of a Norwegian immigrant family in pre-World War I San Francisco in I Remember Mama (1948). Sally Field won her second Academy Award for Places in the Heart (1984) as a widow in Depression Era Texas struggling to raise her two children and save the family farm with the help of a blind boarder (John Malkovich) and an itinerant handyman (Danny Glover). The film won the original screenplay award for writer-director Robert Benton (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967; Kramer vs. Kramer, 1979).
Finally, what tribute to Mothers in the Movies would be complete without two of the most contentious mother-daughter relationships ever put on celluloid, short of the fatal pair in Carrie (1976)?
Joan Crawford won an Academy Award as much for her career resurrection feat as for her performance in Mildred Pierce (1945), Michael Curtiz’s noir-inflected reworking of James M. Cain’s Depression era novel. With those linebacker shoulders and hard-knocks quiver in her voice, Crawford plays a divorcee who turns her home pie-making business into a restaurant empire, all for the sake of her spoiled, ungrateful nightmare of a daughter (Ann Blyth). Highlight of their relationship: Blyth calling Crawford a “common frump” shortly before walloping her across the face.
In Gypsy (1962), it’s Mama who’s the monster, an aggressive, abrasive stage mother who will stop at nothing to promote first her younger daughter, a cutesy vaudeville act called Dainty June, and later her neglected daughter Louise, who becomes famous stripper Gypsy Rose Lee (played as an adult by Natalie Wood). The story is based on Lee’s memoirs, and in real life, the reportedly violent Mama Rose would make even this on-screen harridan blush. Arthur Laurents, who scripted West Side Story (1961) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), adapted his own 1959 Broadway hit that introduced a host of unforgettable songs composed by Jule Styne with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. Those songs will be forever identified with the play’s star Ethel Merman, who was furious at being passed over for the film version. As Mama Rose, Rosalind Russell recorded her own songs, but before the film was released, her singing was dubbed by Lisa Kirk.
