The Anniversary (1968) - film review

Mrs Taggart runs her late husband’s house building business with an iron hand and an implacable ruthlessness, and she manages her three grown-up sons in much the same way.  But the worms are beginning to turn and a showdown is due - on the date on which the Taggart family comes together to celebrate the redoubtable matriarch’s wedding anniversary.  The youngest son, Tom, turns up with his fiancée, whom he is determined to marry despite his mother’s so far unbroken track record of wrecking his engagements.  The middle son, Terry, is planning to emigrate to Canada with his headstrong wife and their five children, although he will be lucky to get as far as Croydon.  At least Mrs Taggart can rely on her eldest son, Henry, not to abandon her.   He may be a closet transvestite who goes around swiping women’s underwear from clothes lines in the dead of night, but he at least respects a mother’s wishes.  Of course Mrs Taggart has no intention of letting Tom and Terry go.  She is confident that, by the time the evening is through, she will have crushed this little rebellion once and for all.  After all, a mother knows what’s best for her children...

In this, one of Hammer’s weirder offerings, Bette Davis goes into hyperdrive and turns in the most outrageous performance of her career as the one-eyed, fork-tongued mother from Hell.  Forget Dracula, the Mummy and Frankenstein’s monster.  Hammer’s scariest monster creation can only be the supremely evil Mrs Taggart, played with spine-tingling zeal by Davis at her most wondrously uninhibited.  Davis’s manic laugh alone is enough to give you recurring nightmares.

Based on Bill MacIlwraith’s popular play of the same name, The Anniversary was generally ill-received when it first came out but is now considered something of a comedy classic, mainly on the strength of Davis’s powerhouse bravura turn.  Where else can you expect to find a villainous matriarch who happily sports a colour-coordinated eye patch, spits metal-corroding venom at everything that crosses her path and exerts greater control over her offspring than Stalin ever had over Soviet Russian in his heyday?

This was not Bette Davis’s first Hammer outing.  She had previously starred in the classy psychological thriller The Nanny (1965), in which she gave a tour de force performance of an altogether different kind.  Although the actress is reputed to have enjoyed her occasional sallies into British cinema, making The Anniversary was not the happiest of experiences, for her or the production team.  

The fireworks began when Davis had a major falling out with director Alvin Rakoff, barely ten days into the shoot.  Davis being the star, Rakoff had to be dismissed and Roy Ward Baker, one of Hammer’s more experienced and competent directors, stepped in to take his place.  Rakoff’s sacking was ill-received by the rest of the cast, particularly Sheila Hancock, who resented the attention that was being lavished on Davis.  The vile that we see on screen is probably a fair reflection of the antagonism that was felt backstage during the making of this film.

Although The Anniversary had a troubled production, the end result is one of Hammer’s slickest and most entertaining films, vastly superior to the bulk of the comedies that the studio would make in the following decade.  The jokes come thick and fast, with some of the humour so dark that it can only be described as sick.  All of the principals appear to have great fun hurling vile and abuse at one another, and none more so than a delightfully ballsy Sheila Hancock.   But this is Bette Davis’s film and, no matter how great the supporting contributions, she was always going to triumph, like Boudicca reincarnated in a crimson eye patch.  Bette Davis played many villains in her time, but none are as deliciously cruel or overtly camp as her Mrs Taggart.  You have to see it to believe it, and then spend the next five years in therapy.

© Alex Sullivan 2010

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?