Cinema moms buck stereotype

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This article was published 09/05/2020 (2334 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was a telling moment this past week when President Donald Trump referenced actress Donna Reed in a blustery attack on a female reporter — Paula Reid — who dared ask challenging questions.

“It wasn’t Donna Reed, I can tell you that,” he said.

Right. Donna Reed may be best known from the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, in which she plays Mary Bailey, wife to struggling banker George Bailey (James Stewart) and mother to their chaotic brood of kids. But Trump was almost certainly referencing the archetypal ’50s housewife she played on The Donna Reed Show (1958-1966), always smiling, always supportive — and prone to vacuuming her house while wearing pearls.

Such is the power of the medium that those archetypes survive long past their stale date, especially with a nostalgist like Trump who, you’ll remember, harboured similar resentment when the South Korean film Parasite won the best picture Oscar earlier this year.

In fact, movies of that era actually offer a much wider spectrum of maternal characters, deviating from the comforting, Eisenhower-era Madonnas on whom Trump clearly fixates.

Here are a few retro moms to consider this Mother’s Day:

Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life

Listen, Donna Reed wasn’t always Donna Reed. In From Here to Eternity, she played a club hostess (a prostitute in James Jones’ original novel) who shacks up with Montgomery Clift’s soldier hero and expresses a wish to ditch her sordid existence lead a “proper” Donna Reed-esque life: “I’ll meet the proper man with the proper position, to make a proper wife, and can run a proper home and raise proper children. And I’ll be happy, because when you’re proper, you’re safe.”

But even in Frank Capra’s 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life, in the role of Mary, Reed generates a kind of stealth sexuality, especially in the scene where George Bailey tries and fails to cut ties with her during a fateful shared phone call. He can’t resist her once he’s in her close proximity.

So yes, she’s patient, maternal and supportive, but also possessed of an undeniable sexual charge. That brood of kids didn’t happen by accident.

Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows

This high, wide and handsome 1955 melodrama by Douglas Sirk sees middle-aged widow Cary (Jane Wyman) enticed into a relationship with a younger man (Rock Hudson), much to the horror of her upper-crust friends, and also her own two adult children. (Her son buys her a television to distract her from Hudson’s attractive, free-thinking arborist.)

For cineastes, it’s a beautiful-looking film with a lot going on behind each stunning shot, each gesture. But at face value, it’s also a rather subversive portrait of a woman unwilling to bend to society’s dictate that a widow must relinquish sex for a life of respectable celibacy. It’s not a coincidence that Cary’s daughter, not her son, comes around to encouraging mom to hook up with the tree guy.

Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate

One of cinema’s most monstrous moms raised eyebrows back in 1962 in John Frankenheimer’s still topical political thriller/satire The Manchurian Candidate.

Lansbury is Eleanor Shaw Iselin, the domineering mother to Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), an army sergeant who came home from the Korean War secretly programmed by Russian/Chinese Communists to act as an assassin when activated.

At face value, Eleanor is a right-wing activist out to exploit Raymond’s hero status to benefit her useful-idiot husband Sen. John Iselin (James Gregory), a character clearly modelled after red-baiting senator Joe McCarthy. But we soon see the depths of Eleanor’s depravity, first when she icily snuffs Raymond’s chance for true love in the embrace of a rival senator’s daughter, and later when she seals Raymond’s fate with a decidedly un-maternal kiss.

Lansbury later sustained her career playing grandmotherly types in Disney movies and on the TV series Murder, She Wrote. But to see Lansbury commit so fully to her character’s wickedness (she was nominated for a supporting actress Oscar for the role) is to never forget, even in the face of Jessica Fletcher.

Side note: Lansbury was only three years older than Laurence Harvey.

Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce

Michael Curtiz’s 1945 murder-mystery melodrama, based on the novel by hardboiled specialist James M. Cain, inverts the Manchurian Candidate dynamic in that mom Mildred (Crawford won an Oscar for the role) tries to stay on the straight-and-narrow; her social-climbing daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) is evil personified.

Mildred does what she can to provide Veda the material she needs to climb out of poverty. Veda, an astonishingly ungrateful child, returns the favour by embroiling mom in a murder.

A devoted mom was an unusual character in what otherwise might be considered a noir thriller. On the other hand, noir fans should be grateful for a Mother’s Day movie they can call their own.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing