For a full ten minutes every member of the Taggart family talks about Mother – how formidable she is, how eccentric, how diabolic.
On this, her 40th wedding anniversary (which she still celebrates although her husband has been dead for 10 years), presents are piled high. There is a huge bouquet of flowers.
Her three sons, a daughter-in-law and a prospective daughter-in-law are assembled in the hall of a Wimbledon mansion, champagne glasses in hand.
The eldest son puts on Mother’s favourite record. The camera starts on a slow and lonely pilgrimage. Forgetting all the other actors, it pans round the room. Tilting back, the lens climbs the baronial flight of stairs and then, having reached the top landing, waits respectfully.
It’s at this point that Bette Davis – the domineering matriarch who controls the family construction business, and by extension, her sons’ lives and finances – appears.
In a shocking pink dress, baroque-shaped eye patch in the same colour with scarlet talons and mouth slashed with lipstick, Miss Davis comes down swinging her bag and hips. She doesn’t so much deliver her entrance line as give what sounds like a war whoop of an American Indian.
Her whole outrageous performance as the one-eyed Gorgon is scaled to this extravagant scale.
Her portrait of a mother who devours her children or destroys her rivals is innocent of all light and shade.
The one basilisk eye rolls, flashes and dilates and is more eloquent than any two fluttered by a lesser star. In her 78th film Miss Davis wades through a sea of bile and venom.
As on the stage. Bill Macllwraith’s story is more than life-size. The Taggarts are monsters – one son, Henry (James Cossins), is a transvestite, the next, Terry (Jack Hedley), is a coward who accepts mother’s bribes to kill off his wife, Karen (Sheila Hancock), the third, Tom (Christian Roberts), whose idea of kicks is to seduce his pregnant fiancée, Shirley (Elaine Taylor) in his mother’s bed.
Perhaps for fear of being acted off the screen by Sheila Hancock, Ms Davis enters the arena like a gladiator on a Roman holiday, dominating every scene and every aspect of this Hammer production.
The original director, Alvin Rakoff, was replaced by Roy Ward Baker when Bette Davis demanded the change after six days of filming and refused to work with him.
“I am never wrong. It is a family tradition I invented myself.”
Mrs Taggart
Bette Davis Karen Taggart
Sheila Hancock Terry Taggart
Jack Hedley Henry Taggart
James Cossins Tom Taggart
Christian Roberts Shirley Blair
Elaine Taylor Mr Bird
Timothy Bateson Florist
Sally-Jane Spencer Head Waiter
Arnold Diamond Construction Workers
Albert Shepherd
Ralph Watson
Johnny Rossi
Fred Wood
Director
Roy Ward Baker
Video
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The eldest son puts on Mother’s favourite record. The camera starts on a slow and lonely pilgrimage. Forgetting all the other actors, it pans round the room. Tilting back, the lens climbs the baronial flight of stairs and then, having reached the top landing, waits respectfully.
Her whole outrageous performance as the one-eyed Gorgon is scaled to this extravagant scale.
Perhaps for fear of being acted off the screen by Sheila Hancock, Ms Davis enters the arena like a gladiator on a Roman holiday, dominating every scene and every aspect of this Hammer production.
