TCM celebrates Mother’s Day by offering up a selection of cinematic mothers who reinforce the ideals upheld by most of us when thinking of great mothers. Barbara Stanwyck’s Stella Dallas is a classless, gaudy, hoot of a mama who, once she discovers the embarrassment and distinct lack of social climbing she offers her daughter, voluntarily boots herself out of the picture so her daughter can know happiness and ease. Her sacrifice is practically ultimate: her daughter was her life and she gave that up to make her happy. But what about those moms that aren’t so great? Frankly, showing a few of them might actually make lots of real moms feel better because, no matter what their failings, they could point to these moms and say, “Well at least I’m not that bad!” To make it even more inclusive, I’m including moms that never even appear on the screen because how many times can we vote for Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate as the Worst Mother Ever?
But, okay, we can’t ignore how bad Angela Lansbury’s Eleanor Shaw is as a mother. I mean, she sets her own son up as an assassin, driving him down a path of madness that ends with her death and his suicide. So, she’s pretty bad but what about…
Mama Corleone? I mean, geez, what did she even do with those kids? It feels like Vito Corleone had full control over all parenting decisions and once you see how another mom, Kay Corleone, handles her husband, Michael, she seems particularly gutless. Kay risked everything to make sure her kids wouldn’t be gangsters working under the thumb of their father while Mama Corleone doesn’t even take the occasion of her husband being shot to say to all the kids, “This is why I think medical school might be a good idea.”
Or how about Cagney’s mom from White Heat? What a piece of work. Her husband ended up in the madhouse (gee, I wonder why) and she comforts her son with shots of whiskey and delusions of grandeur (and both of those probably started when he was a toddler). And when he gets sent up the river she’s right there telling him she’s going to take care of it by offing his enemy. Thanks, Ma, top of the world to you. Top of the world.
Now there are plenty of bad moms in the movies that we could all name (and I fully expect everyone to in the comments so don’t be shy) but sometimes I wonder about the moms of characters in movies where the mom doesn’t even show up. Like who in the hell raised those two kids in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Whoever she was, she raised not one but two awful showbiz kids with some pretty deplorable violent tendencies and bitter resentments. What’s that Blanche? You’re sending a letter to Daddy? Of course you are, mom was taken in by social services long ago.
Of course, maybe the mom had no control whatsoever. Maybe their kids were just rotten to the core and they couldn’t help it. Like the driver in Drive or Anton Chighur in No Country for Old Men. Do those guys even have moms or were they hatched from eggs on an alien planet? I mean, they’re both so completely devoid of remorse or empathy that one wonders if a nurturing parent could have done any good at all. Like Norman Bates’ mom. It’s not her fault Norman was so damned attached to her that he killed her and her lover. She’s always accused of being an overbearing mother but maybe it’s just because she was trying to keep Norman in check because she could see what a psycho he was.
Another unseen, unnamed mother I’ve always wondered about was Addison DeWitt’s, the critic from All About Eve. Talk about a mother that must have doted on him beyond belief. I imagine she told him how special he was ten or twelve times a day and that no one was smarter. I bet he was a little jerk to his teachers and classmates and mom was always right there to rescue him from their harsh reactions while assuring him they were jealous how smart and handsome he was. I assume that as a boy, he probably rivaled George Minafer from The Magnificent Ambersons. Speaking of which, if your spoiled brat of a son doesn’t think you should marry the person you truly love, Isabel, the proper response is, “It’s my life, not yours, but thanks for caring. Don’t let the door slam you in the butt on the way out.”
So many mothers, onscreen and off, so little time. If you want a list of every bad mother in the movies ever, simply google it and you’ll get plenty of results. Or you could be creative in the comments and talk about what the off-screen mothers of some famous movie characters were thinking, like the mother of Tommy Udo (Kiss of Death), a guy who has no problem killing someone else’s mom or some of the onscreen ones that never get mentioned in those lists, like Joe Buck’s mom from Midnight Cowboy, seen in flashback in all her glorious parental failure. These are the kind of moms that make us thankful for the great moms we have or had and a reminder that everybody has one, good or bad. Even Tommy Udo.