Maybe not the weirdest long movie title ever derived from a Broadway play (that honor probably belongs to 1972′s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds). Thank goodness the film version of Arthur Kopit’s Broadway play didn’t use the full title (Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad: A Pseudoclassical Tragifarce in a Bastard French Tradition); no doubt because theater owners would have objected to words like bastard or pseudoclassical. Because the overbearing mom she played in Gypsy wasn’t unflattering enough, Rosalind Russell starred in the film as the mother who travels to a Caribbean resort with her shy son (Robert Morse), a sexy babysitter (Barbara Harris, who originated the role in the Off-Broadway version), and her husband’s corpse. “This motion picture will probably do as much for mothers as Moby Dick did for whales,” boasted the poster. Ha, if only the film had been that memorable.
