You live in the most beautiful house in Brentwood and you don't care if your clothes are stretched out from wire hangers. Wire hangers, why? Why? Christina, get out of that bed. You've got any more? We're gonna see how many wire hangers you've got in your closet. We'll see how many you've got if they're hidden somewhere.

Three hundred dollar dress on a wire hanger.

I buy you beautiful dresses, and you treat them like they were some dishrag. What's wire hangers doing in this closet? Answer me. who cares as much about the beautiful dresses I give her. What's wire hangers doing in this closet when I told you: no wire hangers EVER? I work and work 'till I'm half-dead, and I hear people saying, 'She's getting old.' And what do I get? A daughter. And when, after the death of her Pepsico chairman husband, Crawford tells the board of directors, 'Don't f- with me, fellas!' one is very much inclined to heed her warning. Dunaway's Crawford torments and terrorizes her adopted children in myriad ways-making them give away their own birthday gifts and rousting them from their beds for frantic after-midnight bathroom-scrubbing attacks. Bates in Psycho, and Angela Lansbury's über-mom in The Manchurian Candidate. As depicted by Faye Dunaway (playing the hell out of the role as if she's determined to win another Oscar of her own, damn it!), her role as offscreen parent puts her in a league with big-time scary screen mommies such as Mrs. Joan Crawford won an Oscar for playing the role of the self-sacrificing mother, the woman who would do anything for her daughter, in Mildred Pierce. But it turned out to be something much, much weirder-a genuine Hollywood oddity that serves up a bizarre mixture of melodramatic trash and outrageous tragi-comedy. Based on the scathing and scandalous tell-all bestseller by Christina Crawford, the adopted daughter of histrionic Hollywood movie queen Joan Crawford, Mommie Dearest was billed in advance as a serious dramatic motion-picture biography. The movie that made 'No wire hangers!' a household phrase, Mommie Dearest is the very model of a modern 'camp classic,' so crazily outlandish that it's fascinating.

Mommy dearest 1981 the movie