Happy Mother's Day, Love George (1973)

I wasn't all that interested in watching Run Stranger, Run -AKA- Happy Mother's Day, Love George at 1st.Knowing Ron Howard was in it, kinda had my curiosity but after seeing Darren McGavin was the director, I definitely had to watch it now.I was really expecting to at least like the movie but after watching it, I don't know what to think.The movie was weird.It starts out (kinda) normal, Ron Howard comes to town, looking for his birth mother in hopes of finding out who his father is.The cast of characters are weird.Everybody has something about them.The movie's vibe is weird & it gets weirder.Towards the end, it turns into a horror flick.Run Stranger, Run -AKA- Happy Mother's Day, Love George was a big, weird mess.I wouldn't recommend anybody watch it anytime soon.It's a movie that if you watch it, you watch it but if you don't then you don't.You're not missing anything at all.Damn, Darren McGavin I was hoping for something way better

Three Oscar winners-Patricia Neal, Cloris Leachman and Ron Howard are stuck in this strange mishmash of a movie. What starts out as a drama about a young man searching for his roots takes an extreme wrong turn about 3/4 of the way through and becomes a slasher flick for no discernible reason. Up until then it's not a bad little film but that severe shift in tone scuttles the movie completely. How did this ever attach a cast like this to such a messy enterprise? Perhaps old trouper Darren McGavin in the director chair was able to convince his actor friends to join the project but it does none of them any favors.

This is an interesting film in that it's one of the first cinematic efforts of a TV actor who would go on to become one of Hollywood's most famous directors (Ron Howard) and the sole directorial effort by another (at the time even more famous) TV actor, Darren "The Nightstalker" McGavin.The interesting cast also includes singer Bobby Darin and McGavin's "Nightstalker" co-star Simon Oakland. But perhaps the two real heavyweights here are Patricia Neal and Cloris Leachman as two feuding sisters living in a small New England town. Howard plays the teenage son of Leachman, who she gave up when he was a baby due to a scandal which might have had something to do with the mysterious death of her sister's husband (the "George" of the title). The small town is also plagued more recently by the disappearances of a number of middle-age men (including later in "Jaws 2"). Howard's character quickly becomes a suspect when he returns to the town after many years, but there's also the two sisters, the mother's jealous boyfriend (Darin), and the aunt/sister's sexually precocious teenage daughter (Tessa Dahl), who speaks in an English accent for no real reason and immediately tries to seduce her own first cousin (who may be even MORE than a cousin).Interestingly, despite its predominantly American cast, this movie very much resembles another early 70's Patricia Neal movie, the British film "The Night Digger". Tessa Dahl,who gets an "introducing" credit here, is Neal's real-life daughter and her father is Brit poet/writer Raould Dahl (which would explain the English accent,I guess). Raould Dahl had written the screenplay for "The Night Digger"; according to the credits he had nothing to do with this film, but the two films are strangely similar nevertheless. This film is brilliantly acted, suitably atmospheric, and well-scripted until the very end, which is very abrupt and pretty much non-sensical. The ending is definitely flawed, but this is still an interesting movie. I'd like to know more of the story behind it.

Typically strong performances from Cloris Leachman and Patricia Neal are the spotlight attraction of this mostly-forgotten slasher genre prototype/mystery about adolescent Ron Howard shaking a rural American town full of secrets to it's roots when he arrives to search for his biological parents. Meanwhile, citizens of the town are turning up dead. Coincidence? Probably not. No really big surprises to be had here, as the plot takes many highly predictable twists. Regardless, HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY, LOVE GEORGE is a passable time-waster with some mildly effective low-key atmosphere, and credible performances by a cast of well-established players offer the story much needed validation.Neither here nor there...you can certainly live without seeing it.5.5/10