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.

Scream, Pretty Peggy (1973)

College student Peggy (Sian Barbara Allen), owner of a chipper personality and a low-level nosiness the film seems to find endearing but that worked like chalk on a blackboard on me, finds the ideal student job: taking care of housekeeping in the out of town mansion of sculptor Jeffrey Elliot (Ted Bessell) and his alcoholic - and seemingly first name-less - mother (Bette Davis giving exactly the performance you'd expect from her in this kind of role, with some moments that suggest more emotional depth to her character than typical). Despite Mrs. Elliott's curious reluctance towards having her help, Peggy's happy as a clam with her new job, for she has certain hopes of becoming a sculptor too, and she clearly fancies Jeff for some inexplicable reason. Jeff is rather more friendly to Peggy than you'd expect, too, so maybe her interest might even be reciprocated. When Mother breaks her leg, Peggy decides the family could really use a live-in help for a while, so she moves in.

Apart from Peggy's rather creepy behaviour - that I don't think is supposed to be creepy - there is something curious (or even, as the audience knows from the pre-credit sequence in which Peggy's predecessor is stabbed by a shadowy blonde woman, something dangerous) going on around the house. Jeff is quite adamant nobody is allowed to enter the rooms above the mansion's huge garage. When Peggy sees the same woman who we know killed her predecessor in front of the garage one night, Jeff explains to her the woman is his sister Jennifer (Christiane Schmidtmer). Jennifer is hidden away there because she's "incurably insane", whatever that means, and Jeff just can't bring himself to let her suffer through the psychiatric system of 1973.

Which is all well and good, but - something Jeff kind of forgets to mention - Jennifer has the unfortunate habit to kill people who annoy her, or get too close to her brother, like a certain student house keeper.

Scream, Pretty Peggy is a neat little movie from the height of US TV movie making. It is co-written by Hammer mainstay Jimmy Sangster, and directed by former AIP director Gordon Hessler, so the whole affair is in hands experienced in making the best out of low or low-ish budgets and working on a tight schedule. Apart from Gothic horror, Sangster did write quite a few, often very fine, post-Psycho thrillers for Hammer, so he's experienced in the genre he's working in here, too.

For Scream, Sangster mines this thriller vein again, if in minor form with a less complicated plot and minus some depth. As a matter of fact, Sangster plays off of (some people would say rips off) a certain rather well-known genre movie, adding a handful of elements of gothic romance to it, and going for an overall mood of California gothic. While the film's main twist is quite obvious early on (at least if you're somewhat used to the conventions of its genre, and not named Peggy), but thankfully this is one of the cases where a film is still worth watching even if you know where it is going, mainly because the Scream's suspense building and mood are still doing what they're supposed to do.

Hessler's direction, while as simple as usual in this sort of production, still manages to create the Californian version of the gothic quite well by making judicious use of stormy weather, dark nights and a mansion that has the same effect as an old dark house despite - or perhaps because - being new and bright and shiny in a way I read as very specifically Californian. I'm a bit disappointed that there's no scene of Peggy wearing a nightgown and carrying a torch running away from the house, but then Peggy isn't really the nightgown and torch type.

All in all, Scream, Pretty Peggy is another fine example of 70s US TV filmmaking that is exactly as ambitious as it can afford to be and never less than entertaining.

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