PICTURE MOMMY DEAD (1966)

Eighteen-year old Susan has just been released from a three-year stay at a convent/asylum after the trauma of finding her mother Jessica dead in a mysterious bedroom fire--she suffers from partial amnesia about that night. Her father Edward has brought her home where she must adjust to her former nanny Francene now being her stepmother. Jessica's will left everything to Susan--unless she dies or is found incompetent before her 25th birthday, in which case it goes to her father. Francene is hoping that Susan will not fully recover and wind up having to be re-committed, and in fact, Susan begins having hallucinations that her mother has returned. If nothing else, Francene is determined to find a missing, very valuable necklace that belonged to Jessica, which she thinks Susan pinched, and which Francene schemes to find with the help of her former lover Anthony, Jessica's brother and current caretaker of the house, whose face was badly scarred in an attempt to save Jessica from the fire. Soon, an Electra complex theme enters the picture when we realize that young Susan was jealous of her mother because she wanted to be Daddy's girl all by herself. Where's the necklace? Did Susan actually kill her mother? And how far will Francene go to get her hands on the family money?

In some ways, this feels like an attempt to make a "scream queens" movie with a male lead (Don Ameche as Edward) instead of Bette Davis (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane) or Talullah Bankhead (Die! Die! My Darling). With its brightly lit, modern mansion sets--some location shooting was done at the Doheny estate in Beverly Hills--this isn't as baroque or Gothic as those movies. But it's still a B-movie thriller dressed up with the presence of Ameche and Zsa Zsa Gabor (pictured above) as Jessica. B-director Bert I. Gordon cast his own daughter Susan as Susan; she was OK a few years before in Gordon's Tormented, but she was only 10 back then. At 17, it's clear that acting is not her strong suit, and because she's the lead and has more screen time than Ameche or Gabor, she drags the proceedings down fairly often. Ameche is fine in what is basically a supporting role; Martha Hyer is also fine as Francene. The movie verges on camp now and again, especially in a scene where Gordan tears at her mother's portrait so fiercely, her fingertips leave bloodstains. If you care to look, you can see some Hitchcock influences--The Birds, Vertigo, Psycho, Dial M for Murder, and even Rebecca in the mother/nanny/caretaker triangle. The ending throws a couple of surprises at us, and the last shot in particular is nicely creepy, and a shade ambiguous in terms of what the future holds for a couple of the characters. Not a gem but worth seeing. [TCM]