This film adapts one of those "family members at each others' throats" stage plays. One can compare it with "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" - but it doesn't have the tragic depth that "Woolf" has. But it's enjoyable on a sort of cathartic level. Most of us have, I think, had to stifle many unpleasant and devastating (so we imagine they would be) insults, verbal attacks, and nastier pranks and threats that we imagine hurling at our family members in response to their perceived offenses against us, which we cannot launch because we are too decent or too inhibited to do so. Well, none of these characters are; in particular, the matriarch, Mrs. Taggart, played by Bette Davis as sort of a cousin of the Snow Queen in Narnia, but with much more of a sense that she is enjoying herself immensely. Really I think Davis was consciously trying to set a benchmark against which all other narcissistic tyrant moms in the later history of the cinema must be compared.
Mrs. Taggart has not so much raised as trained her three now-adult sons to play the roles she wants them to play in her construction business and in the family. I use the word "trained" in the animal- training sense, or perhaps in the sense one uses to describe the way that ivy is induced to grow on a trellis, or bonsai trees are constrained to grow in a little twisted way. Today they come to the house, per annual ritual, in observance of the anniversary of her marriage to her long-deceased husband. But it is just another way of it being "her day". As if any of the other days of the year belonged anyone else in the family.
One has brought his wife, and another a new fiancée, who may be of help in plans or fantasies of escape or rebellion. The eldest son is unmarried, subject to "perversion" - this 1968 portrayal is far from what we would want written today, and yet the ways he chooses to enact his preferences are so risky and transgressive that they make me wonder if on some level he isn't trying to go to prison to get away from Mother.
The thing that makes this farce rather than tragedy, I think, is that the level of witty verbal bloodshed is so extreme that we are spared the duty of suspension of disbelief. We don't believe that this is a movie about real people with a history. It is more like a Punch and Judy show, or like some "Twilight Zone" episodes you can think of with twisted patriarchs. And that in turn puts us off from wondering how it is that after years of this nobody has actually left. Anyway, I don't think this movie actually leaves us with a lot of new wisdom about dysfunctional families, but not every movie has to be a classic in that sense. It does what it is trying to do very well.
Mrs. Taggart has not so much raised as trained her three now-adult sons to play the roles she wants them to play in her construction business and in the family. I use the word "trained" in the animal- training sense, or perhaps in the sense one uses to describe the way that ivy is induced to grow on a trellis, or bonsai trees are constrained to grow in a little twisted way. Today they come to the house, per annual ritual, in observance of the anniversary of her marriage to her long-deceased husband. But it is just another way of it being "her day". As if any of the other days of the year belonged anyone else in the family.
One has brought his wife, and another a new fiancée, who may be of help in plans or fantasies of escape or rebellion. The eldest son is unmarried, subject to "perversion" - this 1968 portrayal is far from what we would want written today, and yet the ways he chooses to enact his preferences are so risky and transgressive that they make me wonder if on some level he isn't trying to go to prison to get away from Mother.
The thing that makes this farce rather than tragedy, I think, is that the level of witty verbal bloodshed is so extreme that we are spared the duty of suspension of disbelief. We don't believe that this is a movie about real people with a history. It is more like a Punch and Judy show, or like some "Twilight Zone" episodes you can think of with twisted patriarchs. And that in turn puts us off from wondering how it is that after years of this nobody has actually left. Anyway, I don't think this movie actually leaves us with a lot of new wisdom about dysfunctional families, but not every movie has to be a classic in that sense. It does what it is trying to do very well.