The Caretakers

The Caretaker aka Della

I first ran into this movie on eBay under the name Della. It was described as a shocking precursor to Mommie Dearest, with Joan at her mow-'em-all-down best. Being, of course, a Joan fanatic, and never having heard of the film before, I flew to my video guides and could find no mention of it. None of my Joan books mentioned it either, and I was delirious, thinking that I had discovered the rarest treasure of them all -- a "lost" Joan movie. I watched the auction for a week; as the bids mounted, so did my excitement. $35, $55, and $75 all flew by, and the sweet smell of success was in my nostrils as the final minutes ticked by. As the price settled at $85, I knew just how long to wait before the end of the auction to slip in at the last second with a bid of $200, just to ensure my victory. My bidding screens were set, and as the clock hit 35 seconds -- the last moment to bid -- the computer screen blinked and went black. I gaped at the screen in shock. I couldn't believe what had just occurred, and I clicked the mouse over and over, desperately trying to submit a bid. But Joan was gone. I wanted to die. The next time I saw the movie for sale, months later, I grimly bookmarked it and promptly forgot all about it. Over the course of a year, I never saw it again. Finally, it appeared a third time, called The Caretakers. I researched that title and found it listed everywhere, resoundingly described as an abysmal movie. I knew I had to see it then. On a whim, I checked on Amazon.com, and lo and behold, there it was: $16.95, ships in 24 hours. Duh. I think I'll buy some from Amazon and sell them on eBay for $85. Even for a die-hard Joan fan, this movie is pretty dreadful, and Joan's not even in it all that much. As a matter of fact, she seems to disappear from the end of the movie without any explanation. She plays the old-guard director of an insane asylum (when they still used to call them that), who butts heads with a young doctor, played by Robert Stack, who has all these newfangled ideas about treating mental illness. Well ol' Joan, as you know, won't brook no newfangled ideas in any of her movies, so this young doctor presents some problems for Joan's regime. With the formidable and excellent Ford (who played the wicked Helen Jorgenson in A Summer Place) as her lieutenant, Joan issues commands such as "You know what kind of discipline I expect. Go out there and enforce it." Enforcing it means getting a grip on Bergen's character, who has been committed after a complete breakdown following her involvement in the accidental death of a child. She wails, sobs, smears her eye make-up a lot, and generally has a field day with this role, supposedly gaining our sympathy for her travails. Della proved to be bad moviemaking at its most mediocre.