CineBad!!!

It’s not exactly a Mean Mother Movie, because it’s the Nanny, not the mother who is mean (the mother is just irritating.) But I think that Mean Caregivers are a nice subcategory of the Mean Mother genre. This is the tale of the torment of one caregiver’s psyche manifesting itself in her conscious. But we won’t find that out until later.

“Nanny” (Bette Davis) has devoted her life to caring for Virgie (Craig) and her sister Pen (Bennett). Now they’re all grown up, and have kids and problems of their own. For example, Virgie spends much of her time being on the brink of a nervous breakdown, and Pen has heart trouble that causes her to fan herself and make weird gagging noises before dramatically taking pills that miraculously cure her fits before she even swallows them down. Virgie is married to the archetypal Husband- he’s the strong, silent type who mildly disapproves of everything, believes in harsh discipline, and is away on business a lot.

Virgie and Husband have a 12-year old son named Joey. Joey has been in reform school for two years for allegedly killing his little sister Susy. In school, Joey enjoys such antics as pretending to hang himself in order to startle the matron who looks after him. From the school’s headmaster, we learn that little Joey has “developed an irrational hatred of middle aged women.” Why is this? Does it have anything to do with the fact that Joey is a real brat to Nanny? Or is it more to do with the fact that his lower lip is now permanently stuck out in an act of perpetual defiance?

As the family re-adjusts to having Joey home, Joey gets more and more bratty. He won’t eat, and won’t sleep. He’s convinced that Nanny killed Susy, and is out to get him as well. He doesn’t actually tell anyone that Nanny is a homicidal maniac, he just continues to act out in his distrust by giving everyone attitude. As this poster-family of dysfunction slowly gets more and more at each others’ throats, even the sweet and loving Nanny begins to lose composure. She tries to poison Virgie and frame Joey. She also won’t hand Pen her pills when she’s having a heart problem, causing her to dramatically die, nicely curled up in bed.

So what really happened to Susy? I won’t reveal that anticlimactic tidbit. It turns out that all of Nanny’s bad deeds were a direct result of a powerful guilt that her subconscious is harboring. You see, Nanny has an illegitimate daughter whom she abandoned. The daughter just bled to death from a botched abortion, the attempt to purge Nanny’s illegitimate grandchild. It was the guilt that made her attempt to smother with a pillow, and then drown Joey… I probably would have just tried to smother him because he was a brat, but that’s another story… In any case, this film is full of gratuitous overacting, plot details that make you go “hmmm?” and corny dialogue. If you like tales of psychology gone awry, this is the one for you!