I can’t wear lipstick even?
If you want a lovely bout of creepiness, Die! Die! My Darling! (aka Fanatic 1965) is not a bad choice. Legendary actor Tallulah Bankhead is Mrs. Trefoile, the matriarch, the strait-laced, devout, bitch queen of a vanishingly small family in the British countryside, mourning her dead son, Steven. With her are a nephew (I think) and his wife, Harry and Anna, who function as servants, along with feeble-minded Joseph (an under-utilized Donald Sutherland).
Into their midsts comes Patricia, who was Steven’s fiancee before his death a couple of years ago, paying her respects to the woman who would have been her mother-in-law. It only seems the right thing to do.
Unfortunately, to Mrs. Trefoile, a betrothal is as good as an actual marriage, and an actual marriage is, well, forever. So God tells her, at least. Soon questions as personal as Pat’s virginity come up, and when she’s caught wearing a red blouse, well, it’s clear that she needs to have the error of her ways corrected before she can leave.
This delves into some conventionally creepy territory as we watch Mrs. Trefoile trod the paths of religious madness in her peculiar ways. But rather than your usual movie religious fanatic, we also get to see her moments of self-doubt, and her moments of madness. Is her devotion to reading the Bible a defense against the waves of insanity breaking in her mind? Why does Steven’s sexual purity matter?
And Patricia is not the stereotypical female victim. Stabbed, starved, beaten, even shot, she lays plan after plan for escape, showing admirable spirit in the face of a madness unresponsive to any sort of reason.
But between the sexual urges of Harry and the inexorable demands of her own religious compulsion, soon the old lady is faced with a bitter climax from which even she cannot find solace with Steven, for Pat, truth or lie, has told her a bitter thing. And over the edge she goes.
Quietly well acted, and with only the slightest touch of the British brittleness that has annoyed me in other movies of this era, it’s hard to find fault, from the performances to the technical aspects to the story. In particular, we liked how well the story hung together, with only one very small plot hole – and even that can be easily reasoned away. However, the underuse of Donald Sutherland was disappointing.
While a movie of this sort is not to everyone’s taste, if you like a good creepy movie, then this is Recommended.
And if you like a touch of irony in your movie, consider this: our religious fanatic is played by one of the most notorious libertines of Hollywood. Reputed to throw wild parties in which she’d show up completely nude, Bankhead’s credited with the quote, “I’ve tried several varieties of sex, all of which I hate. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic; the others give me a stiff neck and/or lockjaw.” I wonder if she giggled a lot while reading the script.
