Crazy Mama (1975)

Cloris Leachman has specialized in playing grotesques and weird old ladies for so long, it’s easy to forget that she originally came to Hollywood as just another blond beauty queen. For those of us who knew her first as Young Frankenstein’s Frau Blücher, it’s hard to reconcile her as the same actress who just five years earlier played the cute hooker in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Which is what makes watching her in the flawed comedy Crazy Mama — her first starring feature — such a strange experience, since it finds her right at the crossroads of what she once was and what she would eventually become. Playing a ’50s-era evicted beauty salon owner who decides to fund her return to her Arkansas hometown by committing a series of robberies along the way, she plays the role far too shrill and eccentrically to ever earn our sympathies, but remains compelling enough to keep you watching nonetheless.

Most of the film’s problems with volume and tone can be blamed on a young Jonathan Demme, who at this point in his career hadn’t developed the sure hand at comedy he would later show with Handle with Care, Melvin and Howard and Married to the Mob. Crazy Mama often feels like an early prototype of those films — the one he had to fuck up in order to know what not to do in the future.

Still, there are some definite bright spots in this low-budget New World production. Linda Purl (Visiting Hours) is about as cute as human beings come in the role of Leachman’s pregnant daughter, and she has great chemistry with her co-star, Happy Days’ Donny Most. And, like all of Demme’s comedies, the film has a tragic undercurrent lingering beneath its laughs, which gives it enough resonance to make sitting through the weaker moments worth the effort. —Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.

2 thoughts on “Crazy Mama (1975)”

    1. You’re right Rod, I should have made those points myself, but I had to sacrifice them in the name of brevity. If I were you I would complain directly to the individual responsible for this blog’s editorial policies and the absurd length restrictions he foolishly imposes.

      I would also add:

      3. Despite Linda Purl’s nude scene and another moment featuring a tassel-twirling stripper, the movie is rated PG, proving–once again–that the 70s were the best time in the history of cinema.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *