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Back in 1963, when incest was only hinted at, not openly expressed on the screen, Dean Martin played a ne’er-do-well son who returns from Illinois with a new wife to New Orleans to meet his two spinster sisters, Wendy Hiller as Anna Berniers and Geraldine Page as Carrie Berniers. Carrie, who has always had an incestuous love for her baby brother to the point where Anna used to sit up nights to prevent her from molesting him, does her best to break up his marriage with disastrous results for all. Written for the stage by Lillian Hellman, it’s one of the best films on that subject and has a stellar cast directed by George Roy Hill with a great score by George Duning.
The best incestuous character ever, however, is the mother from hell in the 1962 original film, The Manchurian Candidate, with Angela Lansbury as the manipulative mother and communist agent who uses her own son as both an assassin and a love toy while he’s in hypnotic trances.
Lansbury was only 3 years older than Laurence Harvey when she played his mother in that movie. She was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress, and in 2007 Newsweek selected her character as one of the 10 greatest villains in cinema history.