Scream, Pretty Peggy Ripped Off Psycho in Style (and Gave Bette Davis a Job)
From 1969 to 1975, ABC put out weekly films. They functioned as TV pilots, testing grounds for up-and-coming filmmakers, and places for new and old stars to shine. Every month, Chloe Walker revisits one of these movies. This is Movie of the Week (of the Month).
Made-for-TV movies didn’t even exist until four years after the release of Psycho in 1960, and yet the Hitchcock masterpiece left a long, creepy shadow over the MOTW landscape. Those claustrophobic, grimy, intimate thrills, and the way they were executed on such a tight budget, became the North Star for legions of budding small-screen schlockmeisters.
Norman Bates himself, Anthony Perkins, dipped a toe in the ABC MOTW waters with 1970’s How Awful About Alan. He played the title character, recently released from a mental institution and suffering from psychosomatic blindness, convinced upon his return home that a mysterious figure is trying to kill him. And Joe Stefano, Psycho’s screenwriter, later penned a movie about another disturbed family in another trauma-haunted house: 1972 Christmas slasher, Home for the Holidays.
Though often the influence was just apparent stylistically or thematically, there were movies that cribbed from Psycho more directly. Perhaps the best example of this was 1973’s Scream, Pretty Peggy.
Peggy (Sian Barbara Allen), an art student at a Los Angeles college, leaps at the chance to do housecleaning work for Jeffrey (Ted Bessell), a famous sculptor, and her idol. The more time she spends with him, however, the more she suspects there’s something deeply wrong at the house—the strange behaviour of his alcoholic mother (Bette Davis) only raises her suspicions further. What happened to the girl who had the job before Peggy? And to Jeffrey’s missing sister? And why isn’t she allowed to enter the mysterious room above the garage?
Jimmy Sangster, who wrote Scream, Pretty Peggy with Arthur Hoffe, had a history of playing in Psycho’s sandbox. A frequent writer for Hammer during the 1960s, he made a number of thriller and horror films that wore their influences (besides Psycho, Sangster often cribbed from Les Diaboliques, by “the French Hitchcock” Henri-Georges Clouzot) very much on their sleeve. All released during the first half of the decade, Scream of Fear, Hysteria, The Maniac and Paranoiac were all undeniably derivative, but still stylish and entertaining.
The same could be said for Scream, Pretty Peggy. If you don’t know what’s going to happen within 10 minutes of the opening credits, frankly, you need to watch more movies (still if you really haven’t guessed from this lead-up, I won’t ruin it for you). But while Sangster may have not been the most original of writers, he was also skilled at making the journey fun for those who were well aware of the destination. The characters have enough dimension that you can at least believe that they don’t know what’s going to happen next—Peggy’s so preoccupied with her crush on Jeffrey, for much of the runtime, it seems like she’s never going to discover the truth! The ride remains so engaging that we don’t feel in a rush to get to the end we know is coming, and along the way, sculptors Peggy and Jeffrey have conversations about the nature of art and ambition that are quite surprising in their profundity.
Sian Barbara Allen just had a few TV bit parts to her name before her role in 1972’s psychological thriller You’ll Like My Mother netted her a Golden Globe nomination for Most Promising Newcomer (Diana Ross was the winner that year, for Lady Sings the Blues). In Scream, Pretty Peggy, Allen is a strange combination of oblivious and obnoxious; she’s incapable of keeping any of her feelings hidden, which does put a damper on her attempts at detective work. In real life, it’s unquestionable that the character would be unbearable to know, and yet in Allen’s capable hands, her bulldozer guilelessness is surprisingly endearing. If this film had had an alternate title, it would surely have been, “Oh, Peggy!”
And Allen has a genuine, warm chemistry with Ted Bessell, probably best known for his role as Marlo Thomas’ love interest in five seasons of the popular ‘60s sitcom That Girl. He was an amiable figure, handsome in a schlubby kind of a way, and as the MOTW’s Norman Bates surrogate, he’s cast very much against type. The film uses that fact deftly—it’s not too hard to see why Peggy would adore him enough to ignore those warning signs. Bessell is excellent at flitting between being charming, suspicious and downright sinister. Whenever Peggy gets close to finding answers, her inability to read the utter panic on Jeffrey’s face becomes increasingly funny.
Then there’s the great Bette Davis, as Jeffrey’s sardonic drunken mother, and the sole living keeper of his dark secret. She was many years from her heyday, and a solid decade into her “hagsploitation” era by the time the ABC MOTW aired in the autumn of 1973 (it was her second, following the previous year’s dubious Madame Sin). Nevertheless, she continued to bring a stubborn hauteur to parts that, on paper, were downright demeaning. She did not enjoy the experience of making Scream, Pretty Peggy (riled at perfectionist director Gordon Hessler one day, she snapped, “If I didn’t have a son in college and other responsibilities, I wouldn’t be appearing in this crap!”), but despite her Baby Jane-esque make-up and the unflattering role, she’s still recognizably the same indomitable force who strode atop Hollywood for three decades.
As we start this second season of the Movie of the Week (of the Month), Scream, Pretty Peggy serves as a giddy reminder of how the best TV movies could spin derivative plotlines and the reluctant participation of past-their-prime legends like Davis into 70-ish minutes of zesty, engagingly silly fun. It’s good to be back.
Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.