There is one especially memorable sequence, among many, in 1966’s Picture Mommy Dead. In an unbroken shot, a young woman played by Susan Gordon is running toward the camera with a hawk swooping down behind her. I imagine it was easy to act terrified for that scene, and I wondered if she was genuinely terrified. I bet there were some interesting conversations with her father later, as he was directing her in that scene.
This is a Bert I. Gordon film, a director, um…famed for such pictures as Attack of the Puppet People and The Beginning of the End. Many of his films have received the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and Rifftrax treatments. Some of those have been more justified in having jokes made at their expense than others (Beginning, which is about giant grasshoppers, is truly dreadful).
I think it would be all too easy to take potshots at Mommy. I know my wife and I did while watching it, though we honestly do that to all but a very few pictures. And yet, this was a far more enjoyable and interesting work than anything else I have seen in his oeuvre.
When we first see Gordon, she has been under the care of nuns in what I assume is a psychiatric hospital, especially given a character later snarkily calls the institution “the convent” in a way that he might as well have made finger quotes while doing so. Three years earlier, Gordon’s mother (Zsa Zsa Gabor) had died in a fire in her bedroom in their Beverly Hills mansion. Now, dad Don Ameche has arrived to take her home.
Martha Hyer, as his new wife, is also there to welcome her. One can imagine much of the backstory for her relationship with Ameche, as Hyer used to be Gordon’s governess. As the car pulls away, I couldn’t help but notice the expression on the face of the nun (Signe Hasso) who walked Gordon out—it is hard to tell if it is pity or relief the girl is going away.
Admittedly, something about Gordon feels off from the get-go. I just happened to see her in 1960’s Tormented a day or two before watching this for the first time, and it seems she was a better actress around that time, when she was only around ten or eleven years old, than she is here. She was good enough then that she even acted outside of her father’s work, being especially well-received in the Danny Kaye feature The Five Pennies.
Whether she was not a conventionally good actor, or there was a deliberate off-ness to this characterization, there is still something fascinating in her unusual performance here. And she is in good company, as every character is some sort of freak.
When the family arrives at the mansion, the person greeting them at the door is Maxwell Reed, who has severe scarring to half of his face. I laughed out loud at the complete lack of tact in the other’s horrified reaction to his appearance, but I think how they act is more realistic than how most movies would portray that. His burns were incurred in the fire that took Gabor’s life, as he was supposedly trying to extinguish the flames.
Or was he actually after the large diamond necklace Gabor was wearing? That object, where a great number of the gems are arranged in the form of a bird with its wings outspread, is the obsession of many of the characters. Hyer, as the duplicitous gold-digger, seems to want it more than anything. Reed, who is revealed to be just as cold-hearted, has also been looking for it in the house since it mysteriously disappeared following Gabor’s death.
Gordon is so obsessed with it that she imagines it glowing in a large portrait of her mother that seems to compel her. At one point, the girl scratches at the necklace in the painting hard enough that her fingers leave trails of blood on it, a development I found ridiculous. Also ludicrous is the revelation oil paintings illogically bleed tempura paint, or at least they do in her imagination. But the three streaks of blood from her fingers are really there, so it appears a painting can have craquelure severe enough to cut open skin. I wonder if that’s a new way such works can be authenticated.
Everybody seems to have it out for Gordon, who has inherited the family money in a trust fund she cannot access until she turns 25. Ameche has squandered what money he received following his wife’s death. He turns to Gordon, to get her approval to sell the contents of the house, and she agrees to that.
She first seeks the council of family lawyer Wendell Corey, here in a weird and funny cameo. He’s deeply belligerent, seemingly disliking anybody in the family and reveling in his repulsion. Well, I assume that’s how he feels, because his dialogue is delivered in long strings of poorly enunciated, Texan-accented syllables. I honestly wonder if this was the inspiration for Mike Judge to create the similarly-voiced character of Boomhauer on King of the Hill.
The already-unstable Gordon will lose her inheritance should she die, or be permanently committed to a mental facility. The money would then go to Ameche. Upon his demise, it would go to Reed. And Hyer will work whatever angles she can to ensure she ends up in the closest proximity to that money.
The house itself is pretty strange character. The real mansion used is a startling, if not random, combination of architectural and decorative styles. The hallways are largely painted a uniform, dusty teal. Altogether, the house is so awe-inspiringly ugly that is becomes a curious kind of beautiful. The quality of the video on the Kino Lorber blu-ray on which I watched this presents the surroundings in remarkable detail.
A great deal of intrigue happens in and around that space, some of it deeply ridiculous. In perhaps the most unusual spin on “Chekhov’s gun” I have seen to date is “Chekhov’s grappling hook”, through which a character will meet their end in a manner equally gruesome and improbable.
There aren’t any genuine scares here, so much as a general unease which I found intriguing. Especially good is a scene where the dolls and stuffed animals Gordon rediscovers are made menacing through the useful of increasingly faster edits, a technique the director could only accomplish with the larger budget he had to work with this time.
But the ending of Picture Mommy Dead is where it really shines. Gordon’s characterization, never fully believable until that point, becomes something transcendent at the conclusion. Whether it is bad acting or a deliberately odd performance, she is perfect in those final moments in a scene that will stick with me for some time. While I sat in stunned silence, the final cuts reverse the sequence of the shots that open the film, revealing Bert I. Gordon to be a better filmmaker than much of his earlier work would lead one to believe. Well played, Bert and Susan.
Dir: Bert I. Gordon
Starring Susan Gordon, Don Ameche, Martha Hyer
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray