Pauline Kael

“Faye Dunaway gives a startling, ferocious performance in Mommie Dearest. It's deeper than an impersonation; she turns herself into Joan Crawford, all right, but she's more Faye Duanway than ever. She digs into herself and gets inside "Joan Crawford" in a way that only another torn, driven actress could. (She may have created a new form of folie a deux.) With her icy features, her nervous affectations, her honeyed emotionalism, Dunaway has been a vivdly neurotic star; she has always seemed to be racing--breathless and flustered--right on the edge of collapse. In Mommie Dearest, she slows herself down in order to incarnate the bulldozer styles in neurosis of an earlier movie era; her Joan Crawford is more deliberate and calculating--and much stronger--than other Dunaway characters. As Joan the martinet, a fanatical believer in discipline, cleanliness, order, Dunaway lets loose with a fury that she may not have known was in her. She goes over the top, discovers higher peaks waiting, and shoots over them, too. Has any movie queen ever gone this far before? Alone and self-mesmerized, she plays the entire film on emotion. Her performance is extravagant--it's operatic and full of primal anger; she's grabbing the world by the short hairs....

".... Dunaway brings off [the] camp horror scenes--howling "No wire hangers!" and weeping while inflecting "Tina, bring me the axe" with the beyond-the-crypt chest tones of a basso profundo--but she also invests the part with so much power and suffering that these scenes transcend camp . . . Dunaway takes this star-machine Joan Crawford and shows you that she isn't evil or inhuman--she's frighteningly human....

"....Dunaway sees a grandeur in Joan Crawford, and by the size and severity of the torments she acts out she makes Crawford seem tragic. After Michael Redgrave played the insane ventriloquist in Dead of Night, bits of the character's paranoia kept turning up in his other performances; it could be hair-raising if Faye Dunaway were to have trouble shaking off the gorgon Joan.”
Pauline Kael
New Yorker, October 12, 1981
Taking It All In, p.