You’ll Like My Mother (1972)

Eight months pregnant Francesca (Patty Duke) comes to a small town in Minnesota to visit the mother of her dead husband. They have never met before, and Francesca’s letters about her husband’s death and her pregnancy have gone unanswered.

The Kinsolving mansion is situated even further out of a rather out of the way town, which is less than ideal in the midst of a Minnesota winter, even if you’re not pregnant like our heroine. Once Francesca has managed to arrived there, she very quickly wishes she hadn’t, for her husband’s mother (Rosemary Murphy) treats her as coldly and horribly as possible, suggesting that Francesca could be any random pregnant woman out for money without exactly saying that. To be fair, she’s just as horrible to her own daughter, Kathleen (Sian Barbara Allen), a “feebleminded” (quoth her mother) young woman, she clearly emotionally abuses on a regular basis. Curiously, Francesca’s husband never mentioned having a sister to her. But then, he also suggested she’d like his mother.

Our heroine really doesn’t need this sort of crap in her life, and would leave at once and most probably never return, if not for the fact that a blizzard hits the place and will make the way back to the bus station completely impossible. As it turns out, for quite some days.

As if being thrown together with an old monster like Mrs Kinsolving wasn’t bad enough, there’s something wrong about the whole situation, perhaps even the house itself: Mrs Kinsolving, a certified nurse, she’ll have you know, is rather happily drugging Francesca whenever possible (for her own good, of course), and confining her to quarters. But there seems to be someone else stalking through the house, too, someone Mrs Kinsolving seems to want to hide and protect, but also to keep away from Francesca.

I know You’ll Like My Mother’s director Lamont Johnson mostly as a TV director, but this seems to be one of his projects that managed to make its way to a cinema premiere. Plot-wise, it is not a million miles away from the sort of thriller you’d have found on TV in this era (or in a Lifetime movie with added self-sabotaging irony and camp today), though some of the film’s more lurid suggestions would certainly have been sanded down for the small screen.

The film is very good at using its very traditional thriller tropes, first isolating Francesca from all help (like the very helpful and surprisingly friendly people in the surrounding area) efficiently and believably, and then slowly heightening the threats surrounding her from the sort of things to make one uneasy and uncomfortable to truly traumatic and threatening. There’s very effective use of our heroine’s initial emotional isolation. All of her expectations of familial and female solidarity are quickly undermined by the sheer shittiness of Mrs Kinsolving’s behaviour.

Interestingly, the film then begins to introduce an increasing, believable and genuine emotional bond between Francesca and Kathleen. Often – and rather surprisingly in a film of this vintage – it even stops treating Kathleen as a plot device and starts treating her as a full, complicated human being the same way it does its three other main characters. In fact, Kathleen turns out to be the most competent and effective character when actual danger for life and limb looms, becoming rather a lot more proactive than you’d expect of anyone with a psychological or mental problem in a film of this vintage. At the same time, Lamont is a capable enough director, and Jo Heims an insightful enough writer, for these more positive and humane elements not to rob the movie of its tension; they just give us all the more reason to root for Francesca and Kathleen.

The performances are fine throughout. Duke walks the line between fragility and resourcefulness very convincing indeed, Allen never slips into caricature, and Rosemary Murphy just happens to give one of the great evil middle-aged woman performances, while not lacking nuance.

That’s rather a lot for this kind of unassuming thriller, and You’ll Like My Mother uses all of it rather well throughout its running time.

In short: Grave Secrets: The Legacy of Hilltop Drive (1992)

Because it’s the 90s, this made-for-TV haunted house tale directed by John Patterson is supposedly based on a true story, though the damn Warrens were apparently – and fortunately – not involved. Some charming Southern family – Patty Duke as the matriarch and David Selby as the patriarch cursed with the somewhat eyebrow-raising first name of “Shag” – builds a new house in some charming Southern area where the land is surprisingly cheap. Alas, they are soon haunted by a truckload of supernatural phenomena, starting with the particular obsession of American TV movie ghosts, the ghostly flushing of toilets, but certainly moving into more interesting, gruesome, or weird directions, too. I turns out the piece of land they built on was once part of a graveyard for former slaves.

Alas, at about that point, the film starts losing steam quickly, developing an unfortunate interest in the pre-judicial proceedings between the family, their neighbours, and the (probably evil) real estate company that sold them the land. In fact, the film’s losing drive so quickly, even the ghost induced deadly heart attack of a daughter doesn’t get the dramatic emphasis it – as the actual climax of the story – should have. Grave Secrets suffers from what I can be now call “true ghost story syndrome”, so that is can’t really bring itself to end in a dramatically satisfying climax, because true ghost stories just never have that sort of thing. That it mostly wastes the opportunity to metaphorically examine white Southern guilt despite a set-up that basically screams for it is par for the course. But then, if a film can’t even milk ghost-induced cancer and heart attacks properly, asking for depth might be a bit much.


It is something of a shame, though, for some of the ghostly manifestations are genuinely creepy, strange, and even upsetting. There’s a pretty cool (and unpleasant) moment where the family’s birds are apparently killed by insects that works very well, later followed by a wonderfully strange bit where the (of course sceptical) Shag suddenly turns around and sees the bird cage and the birds looking alive and well at their old place, only to have them disappear again once he turns on the lights. I’m also fond of the moment where Patty Duke’s character witnesses their garage door first opening for a snake to slither through, and then politely closing behind the animal. Unfortunately, Grave Secrets seems more interested in the horror of ghosts costing families “their investment” than in the ghosts and what they might mean.

In short: She Waits (1972)

Warning: semi-twist spoiling follows.

When freshly married Laura Wilson (Patty Duke) accompanies her husband Mark (David McCallum) to finally meet his mother Sarah (Dorothy McGuire), things turn out rather more problematic than in your typical meet the parents situation. Mother, you see, has been on the edge of a breakdown ever since Mark's first wife Elaine died. She is convinced that Elaine's ghost is haunting the family villa, and that the coming of Laura will lead to terrible consequences if the couple should stay in the family mansion. Obviously, there's a terrible secret surrounding Elaine's death that, like all horrible secrets, must have repercussions sometime.

Mrs Wilson is absolutely right, too, for soon Laura begins to hear Elaine's favourite melody and even the dead woman's voice. It seems as if Elaine not just wants to tell her successor something, but as if she's trying to possess her. Or maybe the family doctor (Lew Ayres), that jerk, is right, and it's all a case of easily impressed wimmin being easily impressed. Be that as it may, the truth about Elaine's death will come out in the end.

Delbert Mann's She Waits is one of those pleasant early 70s US TV movies that take a classic horror movie/thriller set-up with underlying anxieties that are as applicable to the 1970s as they were to the 1940s, and makes a very serviceable, at times even pretty creepy, little movie out of them.

Mann (who should know his stuff, having once won an Oscar) turns out to be excellent at building up the a slightly gothically inclined - even though the film takes place in the 70s -  mood at the beginning of the film, and seems at his best in those scenes and moments where no dialogue is spoken, even though Morton Stevens's overtly melodramatic music does its best to sabotage his efforts.

Mann's greater success in the movie's more silent minutes may have something to do with the fact that Patty Duke is somewhat overtaxed with her role. She's all well and good as long as she's just Laura, but her Laura possessed by Elaine (or thinking to be possessed by Elaine) is not very convincing at all; one imagines there must be a reason why as many of those scenes as possible seem to be filmed with Duke's back to the camera.

The script has its moments whenever it is playing with its characters psychological troubles - Laura's insecurity about Mark's past, Mark's unwillingness to confront said past leading to shutting himself off emotionally - coming in contact with what might be supernatural agency, but falls down flat in some other aspects. The film's big secret is quite obvious from the start, and I can't say I found the slight twist surrounding it all that exciting: so David McCallum didn't kill his first wife, but a character only introduced right at the end is responsible? Whoa.

Then there's the problem with the film's attempts at keeping the supernatural agency ambiguous without being all that good at that whole ambiguity thing, leaving us with either a heroine who is so suggestible it's difficult to imagine how she can resist believing in every advert she sees, or a ghost who is so dumb she doesn't even know who killed her. Both versions are not exactly satisfying to me.

But here I go again talking about an early 70s TV movie as if it were not at all worth watching, even though it is. The problem, which certainly has reasons connected with the way TV movies were produced, is that everything that's good about She Waits is a product of solid, professional craftsmanship, and there's not much that can be said about solid and professional craftsmanship, besides it being solid and professional.

 

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