The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (Hollywood Pictures, Interscope Communications, Nomura Babcock & Brown, Warner Bros., Buena Vista, 1992)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday afternoon I checked the Lifetime Web page and found they had scheduled a movie I had never seen, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, which wasn’t made for Lifetime –it was a theatrical feature from 1992 (though it took me a while to realize it was that old – as old as Citizen Kane and Casablanca were when I first saw them in the early 1970’s) starring people I’d actually heard of outside the Lifetime context, Annabella Sciorra and Rebecca De Mornay, and with a major director, Curtis Hanson, whose marvelous use of music in the films L.A. Confidential (1997) and Wonder Boys (2000) made me rush out to buy their soundtrack albums as soon as I saw the film (though I kvetched when the Wonder Boys album didn’t contain Duke Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” used so powerfully in the actual film). I suspect Lifetime was showing The Hand That Rocks the Cradle because, like the Julia Roberts battered-wife vehicle Sleeping with the Enemy, it’s launched a thousand knock-offs on Lifetime; Christine Conradt’s first script for them, The Perfect Nanny, was made in 2000, only eight years after The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. The title comes from the phrase, “The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world,” in a poem of that title by William Ross Wallace (1819-1881) that is essentially an ode to the power of motherhood (http://www.potw.org/archive/potw391.html). It’s used ironically here, of course.

Written by Amanda Silver, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle has a powerful opening sequence that sets the stage for the rest and gives us a much more coherent and believable explanation for the Psycho Nanny’s motives than we’ve got in most of the Lifetime variations on this theme since. Claire Bartel (Annabella Sciorra) and her husband Michael (Matt McCoy) are about to have their second child, a son – they already have a four-year-old daughter, Emma (Madeline Zima) – when the pediatrician who took care of her during Emma’s birth abruptly retires. He recommends Dr. Mott (John de Lancie) as his replacement, but on her first visit to him Dr. Mott insists on giving Claire a full breast and pelvic exam. We’re already suspicious of him when he fondles Claire’s breasts far longer and more lovingly than would be required professionally, and we know what he’s up to in a marvelous insert in which just before he sticks his hand in her vagina he takes off his medical gloves – proof that what he’s doing is not professional but sexual. Claire realizes what’s going on, not in time to stop it but in time to ignore the nurse who, as she bolts from the exam room, asks her to make another appointment. Of course she’s shaken by having essentially been raped on a doctor’s exam table, and she and Michael argue over whether she should file a complaint with the police. Eventually she does, word of the complaint reaches the media and four other women come forward to say Dr. Mott did the same thing to them – a quite contemporary #MeToo-ish plot twist that briefly made The Hand That Rocks the Cradle seem a more recent movie than it is. Faced with not only losing his medical license but the threat of going to prison, Dr. Mott commits suicide – and his widow (Rebecca De Mornay) is shocked to learn that because he killed himself, she won’t receive a payout on his life insurance policy and she’ll lose her affluent lifestyle and the custom-built home in the Seattle area (a big white modernist structure that practically becomes a character in and of itself).

Also, Mrs. Mott was herself pregnant when her husband was exposed as a serial rapist and shot himself, and due (at least we’re supposed to believe) to the shock of it all she suffers a miscarriage and her doctors have to give her an emergency hysterectomy to save her life – so even if she found another man she could never have a child of her own. She blames Claire for all this, and she hatches a revenge plot: she will get herself hired as Claire’s nanny – Claire is involved in quite a few home-improvement projects, including building a greenhouse on her property and replacing the chicken-wire fence with a picket fence, for which she’s hired a learning-disabled (or whatever the currently P.C. term is) Black man named Solomon (Ernie Hudson) who becomes a red herring. At first he rides his bike onto Claire’s and Michael’s property and scares the shit out of them and Emma, but then they find out who he is and why he’s there and he becomes almost a member of the family. Calling herself “Peyton Flanders,” Mrs. Mott moves into the home of Claire and Michael and almost immediately begins her plot, which includes ingratiating herself into the lives of Emma and newborn son Joe (a performance credited to three apparent siblings, Eric, Ashley and Jennifer Melander – it’s a common dodge in the movie business to cast a baby or a very young child with identical twins to avoid breaking the law on how many hours a day a child can work, but it’s rare that a baby’s role is so long the filmmakers needed three real babies to play him). She goes so far as to nurse Joe herself – she used a breast pump to keep herself lactating even after her own pregnancy met its gruesome end – to get him to bond with her instead of his biological mother Claire.

She also sets her sights on Michael, intending to seduce him away from Cialre and end up with a husband and two kids she can raise as her own, and when he turns her down, saying that Claire is the only woman he’ll ever love, Peyton booby-traps the greenhouse so the glass ceiling will fall on the next person who enters it and kill them. Only the person who’s caught in the trap isn’t Claire but her best friend Marlene Craven (Julianne Moore), who’s just discovered who “Peyton” really is because she’s a realtor who has just received a listing on the Motts’ big custom-built home – and she’s recognized “Peyton” as Mrs. Mott in a photo of the place that included the couple. Marlene tries to call Claire with the news (on a landline-style radio phone in her car since The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was made just before cell phones were introduced – it was also made before the Internet, which is why Marlene finds the photo that “outs” Peyton as Mrs. Mott on microfiche cards she’s viewing instead of on line) but she gets caught in the booby-trapped greenhouse and dies before she can tell Claire Peyton’s secret. (The gimmick of the best friend who discovers the villainess’s plot but gets killed before she can warn the heroine has become one of Lifetime’s most common and most annoying tropes – though in this film the best friend is white and usually in subsequent Lifetime films she’s been Black). Along the way she also picks Michael’s pocket at a restaurant and tears up an envelope containing a grant proposal he was about to send in – a plot twist that seemed anachronistic not only because a real grant proposal would be a considerably longer and heftier document, but even though this film was made before cell phones and the Internet, Michael is shown with a computer monitor on his desk and therefore he’d presumably have had his proposal saved on his hard drive and would be able to print out another copy.

Peyton also somehow drains the medication from all the asthma inhalers Claire uses (it’s established early on that Claire is chronically asthmatic, though Annabella Sciorra did the inhalers wrong; when she was supposed to be using them she just took a quick puff instead of the long drag required for the things to work), and of course Amanda Silver uses Claire’s asthma the way Chekhov used his pistol: the fact that thanks to Peyton, she no longer has a working inhaler prevents her from being coherent when she’s trying to call 911 after Peyton breaks into their home and starts threatening her and trying to take the kids. And after the Black handyman Solomon discovers Peyton nursing Joe from her own breast, she gets rid of him by stealing a pair of Emma’s panties, putting them in Solomon’s dresser drawers and thereby framing him for trying to molest Emma. Though The Hand That Rocks the Cradle has plenty of situations Lifetime has done to death since, its origins as a theatrical movie are obvious in the greater sophistication of Hanson’s direction – he and his cinematographer, Robert Elswit, use far more moving-camera shots than Lifetime’s budgets could afford, so we discover the action instead of baldly being cut into it – and also Hanson’s trademark use of music.

Michael is a big fan of Gilbert and Sullivan – early on in the film there’s a scene in which he and Emma are singing the patter songs together – and Hanson uses “O Dry the Glistening Tear” from The Pirates of Penzance as a personal theme for Peyton (she has her alarm clock programmed to play it and it’s worked into Graeme Revell’s musical score), and as an imdb.com “trivia” poster pointed out, both Gilbert and Sullivan operettas heard in the film, H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance, are about incompetent (though at least not corrupt or psycho) nannies who switch babies shortly after their births, with complications that come back to haunt them once they grow up. Also, when Michael and Marlene secretly go to a restaurant together (they’re planning a surprise party for Claire but Claire, egged on by Peyton’s Iago-style hints, thinks Michael and Marlene are having an affair), some jazz is heard as background music – and instead of a stock-music clip from an anonymous band it’s the John Coltrane Quartet playing the Jimmy McHugh-Frank Loesser song “Say It (Over and Over Again)” from Coltrane’s 1962 Ballads album. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is a quite impressive movie and it’s not hard to see why future Lifetime writers and directors raided it so extensively for material which they soon hardened into clichés!