Ladies Night Part IV

Part IV (of four): Mother’s Day

Much like Memorial Day, the American version of Mother’s Day had its origins in the wake of the Civil War, as groups of women whose sons had fought and died on both sides of the conflict got together in local celebrations that stretched into the 1880s. Ann Jarvis (above), a Virginia-born social activist, made efforts to establish a "Mother’s Friendship Day" to reunite families divided by the Civil War. She died in 1905, before her vision for an annual memorial could be realized.

Julia Ward Howe (above), an abolitionist who had written the words for "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," led an anti-war "Mother’s Day" observance in New York City on June 2, 1872, accompanied by an impassioned Mother’s Day Proclamation. The annual celebration continued in Boston under Howe’s sponsorship before dying out a decade later. Frank E. Hering, President of the Fraternal Order of Eagles, is credited with making the first known public request for a "national day to honor our mothers" in 1904.

Mother’s Day, as we know it today, was established by Anna Marie Jarvis, daughter of the abovementioned Ann Jarvis (above). A small service was held on May 12, 1907, in the West Virginia Methodist Episcopal Church where Anna’s mother had been a Sunday school teacher. Anna Jarvis campaigned to establish Mother’s Day as a national holiday, and later as an international holiday.

West Virginia officially declared Mother’s Day a holiday in 1910, followed soon by the rest of the nation. On May 8, 1914, the U.S. Congress passed the law designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day, and on May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation, declaring the first national Mother’s Day as a day for Americans to display the flag in honor of mothers whose sons had died in war. In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved a postage stamp honoring the holiday.

The unyielding bond between mother and child has been honored numerous times in literature and film, but our screenings in the moviehouse focus on the extremes of maternal protectiveness.

Think grizzly bears. First and foremost, the grizzly is regarded - respected would be a better word - as the most aggressive of North American bears. Sows defending their cubs are most apt to attack and are responsible for 70% of fatal injuries to humans. This intensified aggressiveness increases the chances for the survival of their young to reproductive age.

"Prophecy" (1979) was an ecological cautionary tale about a monstrous grizzly, mutated by industrial pollution, hell-bent on retrieving her mutated cubs from the custody of environmentalists. Director John Frankenheimer had once been considered Holllywood’s boy wonder. Cutting his teeth in live television in the 1950s, he seemingly could do no wrong on the big screen in the ‘60s, directing powerful dramas the likes of "The Manchurian Candidate," "Birdman of Alcatraz," "Seven Days in May" (below) and "Grand Prix," all before his 40th birthday.

After less than enthusiastic receptions for the crime thrillers "French Connection II" (1975) and "Black Sunday" (1976), Frankenheimer developed a self-admitted drinking problem. In film critic Charles Champlin’s 1995 biography of the director, Frankenheimer said that booze drove him to take jobs below his own standards, most notably "Prophecy."

Mercury pollutants from a paper mill in southern Maine have created several anomalies in the local flora and fauna, including bullfrog-sized tadpoles, salmon that prey on ducks, and crazed raccoons, not to mention still births, mental illness and birth defects among the human locals, but it is the grotesque mama grizzly, dreaded by the indigenous people as "Katahdin," the vengeful spirit of the forest, that looms as the biggest anomaly (perhaps because there are, in fact, no grizzly bears in Maine!). Derisively dubbed by moviegoers "Pizza Bear," the monster was portrayed by the late Kevin Peter Hall, noted for his work as the amiable Bigfoot in "Harry and the Hendersons" and as the titular "Predator."

John Frankenheimer made a comeback in the 1990s, returning to the medium that launched his career, winning Emmy awards as the director of the made-for-TV movies "Against the Wall," "The Burning Season," "Andersonville" and "George Wallace." His later big screen pictures included "Ronin," starring Robert De Niro, and "Reindeeer Games" (2000), with Ben Affleck. Frankenheimer was ready to direct the prequel to "The Exorcist" before he died from a stroke due to complications following spinal surgery in 2002.

The theme of the overprotective, havoc-wreaking mom was given a unique twist in the 1961 British production "Gorgo." Treasure hunters off the coast of Ireland capture a 65-feet tall dinosaur-like reptile and sell it to a local circus owner, who exhibits the creature in London’s Battersea Park. It turns out that Gorgo is not an adult, and his 250-feet tall mother shows up to reclaim her kid, sinking a Royal Navy destroyer and demolishing Big Ben and Tower Bridge in the process.

Starring Bill Travers, probably most familiar to American filmgoers as the star of "Born Free" (1966), and William Sylvester, best known as Dr. Heywood Floyd in "2001: A Space Odyssey," the film’s impressive special effects were executed, not unlike its obvious inspiration, "Godzilla," via man-in-a-rubber-monster-suit and miniaturization, enhanced by expensive slow-motion cameras. Interestingly, director Eugene Lourie was responsible for (below) "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (1953)...

and (below) "The Giant Behemoth" (1959), two benchmark creature features about dinosaurs resurrected in the 20th century that boasted the stop-motion animation artistry of Ray Harryhausen ("Jason and the Argonauts," the original "Clash of the Titans") and Willis O’Brien ("King Kong").

"Gorgo" has received retrospective admiration for its atypical environmentally moralistic ending in which creatures that were victimized by human exploitation return to their natural surroundings.

Speaking of screen rarities, "Aliens" (1986), co-written and directed by "Avatar" auteur James Cameron, proved that a sequel could be as entertaining, if not more so, than its predecessor. To recap the storyline for the uninitiated few, Sigourney Weaver’s character Ripley, the sole survivor of the original encounter with the deadly extraterrestrial, is reawakened after 57 years of hyper-slumber and accompanies a unit of "bug-hunting" Marines back to the hostile planet, where they come upon the lone remnant of a human colony, a young, traumatized girl who calls herself Newt (nine-year-old Carrie Henn, in her only screen role).

James Cameron has said the screenplay was inspired, in part, by America’s involvement in the quagmire of the Vietnam War. "Their training and technology are inappropriate for the specifics," he said of the Marines in "Aliens," "and that can be seen as analogous to the inability of superior American firepower to conquer the unseen enemy in Vietnam: a lot of firepower and very little wisdom, and it didn’t work."

Arguably, a stronger analogy in the film has to do with the emergence of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley as a powerful embodiment of the mother figure, especially in her tender relationship with the orphaned Newt, as well as her subtly realized protectiveness for the wounded squadron leader Hicks (Michael Biehn). Time magazine critic Richard Schickel, who proclaimed the movie was "a sequel that exceeds its predecessor in the reach of its appeal," noted that it gave Weaver "new emotional dimensions to explore."

The antithesis for Ripley’s earthly maternal instinct comes in the awesome presence of the gigantic Alien queen. After rescuing Newt from a hive of cocooned human prey, Ripley finds the queen in her cavernous egg chamber. Ripley’s torching of the eggs enrages the queen to the extreme that she tears herself free of her ovipositor (below) and pursues the ragtag pod of survivors for a one-on-one showdown, madre-a-madre, with Ripley.

In the war of all mothers, Ripley faces off against the queen in a monster truck-sized cargo-loading exosuit, protecting Newt with the show-stopping declaration, "Get away from her, you bitch!"

Happy Mother’s Day!