Fine Drama for Mother’s Day

Los Angeles Times

Friday May 11, 1979

For Mother’s Day-A daughter goes home to a New England fishing village to her mother whom she has neither seen nor communicated with since she ran away 21 years before. She leaves the bus and walks through the streets of the village to the house where untended roses climb wild over the porch.

Standing there, suitcase in hand, she hesitates before ringing the bell. It’s answered by a ferocious little woman with close-cropped iron gray hair and a face to match, who stares stonily at her, brandishing a broom like a weapon. For a moment they star at each other, these two. They are “Stangers.”

Two of the finest actresses who walk this earth play these strangers- Bette Davis is the mother, Gena Rowlands is the daughter. They are virtually the entire cast of “Strangers,”

a devastating two-hour drama on CBS Sunday night at 9.

It gives Davis(as a bitter, contemptuous widow Lucy Mason) her best part in years and she makes the most of it, - a savage little old woman in tennis shoes, infuriated that this only child has come back to haunt her declining years-“ I don’t want you here; I don’t know why you came and I don’t care. I’m not going to let you hurt me again.”

Blue work shirt buttoned to the neck, she’s an angry recluse, her face a stony mask to neighbors, even to the fisherman who worked their boats beside her late husband’s (“For a Rhode Islander, he had quite a twang”) She’s haughtily disdainful of this daughter, angrily stamps at her hands when the daughter tries to weed the unkempt garden.

Davis meets her battle in Rowland. The blonde actress, who gave one of the year’s most memorable performances as the Lesbian mother in “Question Of Love,” gives another here as tight-lipped Abigail, desperately trying to please the old dragon of a mother. “Would you believe,” she asks, “that I just came home for a visit because I wanted to see you? “?No,” roars the mother.

With a toss of her blonde hair, she bushes aside the abuse and attacks; she’s helpful, gracious, loving. Her warmth permeates the dark little house like the sun she lets in.

Gradually, the spiteful old mother unbends. She’s even persuaded to attend the town’s Fourth of July picnic, even dances with a couple of the fisherman (Ford Rainey, Donald Moffat). She an Abby go on a fishing trip on one of the boats. Abby buys her a new dress, takes her to a fancy dinner, complete with birthday cake-“It’s not my birthday!”

But then the secret of why Abby came home emerges, and her mother blazes at her again:“You selfish bitch, you’re always taking, taking….”

It’s one of the season’s most extraordinary TV films, written by a young New Englander, Michael De Guzman, who had never written a film before. He wrote this as a short story, submitted it to the producing team of Robert W. Christensen and Rick Rosenberg (“The autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” “The Glass House,” “Queen of The Stardust Ballroom”) who took it to Bette Davis. Milton Katselas directed with a firm hand, keeping the action fluid with these two fiery women trapped in this small cottage, catching the New England flavor of the seaside village (actually, near Mendocino).