The director Frank Perry, working with his first wife, Eleanor Perry, and other screenwriters, is distinguished mainly by his skill at eliciting enticingly florid yet intimately vulnerable performances from actors. It's no surprise that he made one of the best films about a Hollywood star that the industry has yet produced: "Mommie Dearest," from 1981, which screens June 4 and June 6 in the Quad Cinema's retrospective of the Perrys' work.
It's the story of Joan Crawford's life and career, from 1939 to the time of her death, in 1977, seen from the perspective of her daughter Christina, whose memoir Frank Perry adapted, with three other screenwriters. Faye Dunaway stars as Crawford; the action is centered on Crawford's home life-in particular, on the troubled relationship that the actress had with Christina, whom she adopted in 1940. The film emphasizes the fierce, frightening intensity of Crawford's offscreen character, largely a product of her own hard childhood, and it brings out a simple and powerful idea: actors can't give onscreen what they don't already possess within themselves.
In the case of Crawford, the furies of her performances are matched by her domestic rages; she cleans her house ferociously and disciplines Christina with equal ferocity. She wants to give her daughter the advantages and the pleasures that she herself never had, but she also wants to teach Christina to "compete" as she did, and so subjects her to strict rules and harsh punishment. The most famous example of this is the notorious incident when Crawford beat her daughter with a wire hanger. The movie's version of the event continues with Crawford inflicting further cruelties in a state of theatrical, self-dramatizing possession-emphasized by her Kabuki-like mask of cold cream.