You’ll Like My Mother (1972)

Eight months pregnant Francesca (Patty Duke) comes to a small town in Minnesota to visit the mother of her dead husband. They have never met before, and Francesca’s letters about her husband’s death and her pregnancy have gone unanswered.

The Kinsolving mansion is situated even further out of a rather out of the way town, which is less than ideal in the midst of a Minnesota winter, even if you’re not pregnant like our heroine. Once Francesca has managed to arrived there, she very quickly wishes she hadn’t, for her husband’s mother (Rosemary Murphy) treats her as coldly and horribly as possible, suggesting that Francesca could be any random pregnant woman out for money without exactly saying that. To be fair, she’s just as horrible to her own daughter, Kathleen (Sian Barbara Allen), a “feebleminded” (quoth her mother) young woman, she clearly emotionally abuses on a regular basis. Curiously, Francesca’s husband never mentioned having a sister to her. But then, he also suggested she’d like his mother.

Our heroine really doesn’t need this sort of crap in her life, and would leave at once and most probably never return, if not for the fact that a blizzard hits the place and will make the way back to the bus station completely impossible. As it turns out, for quite some days.

As if being thrown together with an old monster like Mrs Kinsolving wasn’t bad enough, there’s something wrong about the whole situation, perhaps even the house itself: Mrs Kinsolving, a certified nurse, she’ll have you know, is rather happily drugging Francesca whenever possible (for her own good, of course), and confining her to quarters. But there seems to be someone else stalking through the house, too, someone Mrs Kinsolving seems to want to hide and protect, but also to keep away from Francesca.

I know You’ll Like My Mother’s director Lamont Johnson mostly as a TV director, but this seems to be one of his projects that managed to make its way to a cinema premiere. Plot-wise, it is not a million miles away from the sort of thriller you’d have found on TV in this era (or in a Lifetime movie with added self-sabotaging irony and camp today), though some of the film’s more lurid suggestions would certainly have been sanded down for the small screen.

The film is very good at using its very traditional thriller tropes, first isolating Francesca from all help (like the very helpful and surprisingly friendly people in the surrounding area) efficiently and believably, and then slowly heightening the threats surrounding her from the sort of things to make one uneasy and uncomfortable to truly traumatic and threatening. There’s very effective use of our heroine’s initial emotional isolation. All of her expectations of familial and female solidarity are quickly undermined by the sheer shittiness of Mrs Kinsolving’s behaviour.

Interestingly, the film then begins to introduce an increasing, believable and genuine emotional bond between Francesca and Kathleen. Often – and rather surprisingly in a film of this vintage – it even stops treating Kathleen as a plot device and starts treating her as a full, complicated human being the same way it does its three other main characters. In fact, Kathleen turns out to be the most competent and effective character when actual danger for life and limb looms, becoming rather a lot more proactive than you’d expect of anyone with a psychological or mental problem in a film of this vintage. At the same time, Lamont is a capable enough director, and Jo Heims an insightful enough writer, for these more positive and humane elements not to rob the movie of its tension; they just give us all the more reason to root for Francesca and Kathleen.

The performances are fine throughout. Duke walks the line between fragility and resourcefulness very convincing indeed, Allen never slips into caricature, and Rosemary Murphy just happens to give one of the great evil middle-aged woman performances, while not lacking nuance.

That’s rather a lot for this kind of unassuming thriller, and You’ll Like My Mother uses all of it rather well throughout its running time.