Mummy issues: Hollywood’s overbearing obsession with motherhood movies

Motherhood has been explored in an unsparingly frank and sensitive fashion in magnificent films. These, though, aren’t the movies that anybody wants to watch on Mother’s Day, says Geoffrey Macnab

Faye Dunaway as the abusive mother and movie star Joan Crawford in ‘Mommy Dearest’ in 1981 (Paramount/Kobal/Shutterstock)

The furiously demented movie star Joan Crawford (Faye Dunaway) is tugging at her young daughter Christina’s hair. She found the little girl at her dressing table, imitating her and making a speech to “my wonderful fans who’ve made me a star”. She starts hitting her with a hairbrush and then cutting off her long blonde locks with a pair of scissors. It’s one of the most overwrought scenes in Mommie Dearest (1981), which ranks among the bitterest Hollywood films about motherhood.

It’s in stark contrast to one moment at the end of Stella Dallas (1937) in which the self-sacrificing, working-class mum played by Barbara Stanwyck is standing outside in the rain watching unnoticed as her daughter is getting married to a high society husband. A cop moves her along. Or the excruciating scene in both versions of Mildred Pierce, in which the devoted mother, played by Crawford (1945) and Kate Winslet (2011), realises that her daughter is in a relationship with her husband, who is the daughter’s stepfather.

These are just some of the hyper-charged moments in classic Hollywood mummy melodramas. Magnificent films have been made over the years by directors in which the maternal bond has been explored in an unsparingly frank and sensitive fashion. These, though, aren’t the movies that anybody wants to watch on Mother’s Day on Sunday.