The Anniversary (1967/1968) *½

     So it looks like I accidentally shamed the B-Masters Cabal into a roundtable. A few months ago, I mentioned in one of my reviews that 2014 marked the Cabal’s fifteenth anniversary, and the next thing I knew, e-mails were shooting back and forth among my colleagues, saying in essence, “Oh, crap! We really ought to throw together something to commemorate that, shouldn’t we?” We quickly settled on films about anniversaries as the topic, and since I was in a Hammer mood anyway, what with all the Dracula flicks I’m reviewing this time out, I put in my bid for The Anniversary, the last of three batty old lady movies the studio made in the wake of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. It seemed like a good idea at the time…

     What I didn’t realize was that The Anniversary is less a Baby Jane cash-in than a Mulligan for The Old Dark House, a film I hated intensely, remade from one I hated even more intensely. Ostensibly a black comedy of manners, in practice it’s just 95 minutes of Bette Davis being extravagantly shitty to people who’ve done very little to deserve it, and coming out on top in the end. It’s like Thanksgiving Dinner with Your Brother’s In-Laws: The Movie.

     Davis (whom Hammer had used before in The Nanny) plays Mrs. Taggart, one-eyed widow of a respected construction baron, and heir to his business empire— the good name of which she’s spoiling just as fast as she can. Each of her three sons works as a department foreman on her building sites: Henry (James Cossins, from Privilege and Fear in the Night) as the overall boss, Terry (Jack Hedley, of Witchcraft and The New York Ripper) as master carpenter, and Tom (Twisted Nerve’s Christian Roberts) as master electrician. This despite the fact that— and indeed because— Mum knows they have no aptitude for the jobs. When we meet the Taggart boys, they’re shirking their hapless ways through putting up a townhouse development. It’s Friday afternoon, and the first buyers of the patently incomplete properties are due to move in tomorrow, but there’s no discernable urgency to the work. That’s because everyone on the staff always knew that the official completion date was wildly unrealistic, and because Mrs. Taggart really doesn’t give a shit whether her wares are fit for human habitation anyway. What she cares about is her annual anniversary party. It starts tonight and runs through the weekend, and her boys had better all be there regardless of whatever else they have going on in their lives.

     Actually, whatever else they have going on in their lives is apt to be rather a sticking point this year, because Terry and Tom each have big news for their mother. The conflict-averse Terry plainly dreads delivering his. He, his wife Karen (Sheila Hancock, from Night Must Fall), and their huge brood of terrible, porcine children are all pulling up stakes and moving to Canada. This will greatly inconvenience Mrs. Taggart, because it’s difficult to brow-beat someone on the other side of an ocean. Tom, meanwhile, is getting married to Shirley Blair (Elaine Taylor), which will also inconvenience Mrs. Taggart in the sense that she will no longer enjoy uncontested mastery over her youngest son. Not only has Tom not told Mum about that, but he also hasn’t told Shirley that Mum doesn’t know about her. Fireworks are pretty much guaranteed.

     The fireworks in question are almost literally the whole of the film from the moment Mrs. Taggart comes downstairs to greet her not exactly adoring family. She belittles her sons’ talents and accomplishments, insults Terry’s children (the only slightly deserving targets she draws down on, honestly), casts aspersions on the intelligence and chastity of Karen and Shirley. She interrogates Shirley about her background in the rudest possible manner, impugns Tom’s motives for dating her, and makes fun of her deformed ears. Most of all, she does everything in her power to thwart her sons’ escape plans, seeking to break up Tom and Shirley and to prevent Terry from ever setting foot in Canada. In extremely roundabout ways, she even tries to kill Shirley and Karen— or rather, to suborn their uteruses into acting as her assassins. But mostly, Mrs. Taggart talks and talks and talks, so that by 58:17 (I looked at the counter on my DVD player and made note of the time) there was nothing in all the world I wanted more than for Bette Davis to shut the fuck up.

     The only times when Mrs. Taggart isn’t running her yap have to do with Henry, who spends most of the movie off in a little subplot of his own. Henry is probably supposed to be gay (the taxonomy of gender nonconformity was less precise in 1967), and certainly suffers from a compulsion to wear women’s clothes, their underwear especially. This first comes out when Shirley storms upstairs in a huff, goes to the room where she’s supposed to be staying, and finds Henry trying on her bra, panties, and stockings. I don’t see how that’s possible, honestly, since James Cossins is twice Elaine Taylor’s size, and director Roy Ward Baker cuts away before we see what Shirley sees. It’s only her hollering from upstairs that lets us know what just happened. Anyway, the point is, the prospect of ratting Henry out to the police keeps being raised by one side or another as a gambit in Mrs. Taggart’s dick-measuring contest with her kids, until finally the reality of legal trouble rears its head when Henry is caught but not identified stealing a neighbor lady’s underclothes from a laundry line in the backyard. Savor that moment, because it’s one of the few times Baker ever lets you out of Mrs. Taggart’s living room.

     The Anniversary’s spatial confinement is the most obvious tell that this movie was adapted from a stage play. Like many such adaptations, The Anniversary does itself no favors at all by sticking so resolutely to one location, or by limiting its drama to that which can be carried aloft on 20,000 cubic meters of hot air. But this picture is even more grating than the typical Broadway or West End transplant, because it feels less like a stage play on film than a monologue on film. I’m repeating myself, but the point cannot be stressed too much: Bette Davis’s mouth is running almost constantly, for so long that I now find myself hating the sound of her voice. I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad if her incessant ranting were funny or witty or incisive or even just deservedly spiteful, but it isn’t. It’s just noise— and hateful noise, directed against vulnerable targets for no good reason. As I watched, I kept wondering why The Anniversary felt so loathsome even though my favorite episodes of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” are the ones that create excuses for bitch-offs between Garak, the disgraced Cardassian spy, and Gul Dukat, the equally disgraced Cardassian general. The difference, I think, is that Garak and Dukat both give as good as they get, and that each in his own way earned the other’s hatred and contempt fair and square. Mrs. Taggart, on the other hand, is an internet troll on the Material Plane, hurling random bits of invective (with a special emphasis on slut-shaming and veiled homophobia) in all directions without much caring what hits whom where, just so long as she hurts somebody’s feelings somehow. And the hell of it is, I think we’re supposed to like her, and to cheer when she finally puts down what was starting to look like a successful filial revolt. I guess there’s a bit of morbid fascination in seeing Bette Davis do a precognitive Daniel Tosh impression, but seriously— fuck this movie.

This review is my contribution to “B-Mentia 15,” the B-Masters Cabal’s 50th roundtable, and the one in which we celebrate our 15th anniversary with reviews of films about other people’s anniversaries. Obviously we hope that ours turns out less catastrophically than most of the ones we’ll be writing about. Click the link below to see what my colleagues brought to the party.

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